Hendrick Hamel's journal and the description of the Kingdom of Korea in the 17th century

Below you find an index to the complete manuscript of Hamel's journal with reference to it's original page numbers, as well as the transcription of the manuscript and the translation into English.

If you have suggestions or criticism, please do not hesitate to contact me and valuable attributions will be mentioned in footnotes, with the name of the sender (I love to receive emails)

Some important guidelines for studying these pages

In order to understand the text and his handwriting better I transcribed it to paper, then I typed it into the computer. The = equals an abbreviation Hamel uses, knowing Dutch, it's very easy to replace them with the full word, Hamel uses co: for con(n)inck, I have put [] if the word was not written, but if I thought the addition would make the text clearer. Later for readability I omitted the square brackets. Hamel uses also some letters (scribbles) which stand for something short, I replaced those with the full meaning. Hamel writes consequently a bow over the "u" which makes them easier to identify, on the "i" and the "j" however, he sometimes writes a dot and sometimes he doesn't which makes it more difficult to identify, the i and the j are used without any distinction. The "e' behind the u, could be considered an umlaut like in German to indicate a "u" pronounced like in the French you:"tu". For the Dutch text that was not too important since they were easy to recognize, but for the names of the Korean cities and villages that was much more difficult. For the pronunciation of those I refer to the discussion part of this site where I have a discussion with Korean scholars. Instead of the y I used ij, which originally was the combination for the present y with dots on top of them. The "h" behind a "g" is often a useless addition as well as the "t" behind the "d". For extensions like "zoon" (son) he also used a kind of bow over the "z" followed by a colon. He also uses three different letters "s". One of them resembles, very often, much the "h", which again, for the Dutch words, didn't pose any problem, but for the Korean words they were ambiguous. His spelling was very inconsistent as you will see. Since Hamel wrote his paper on both sides, the pages are numbered every other page, and since the papers are in a bundle of papers from the VOC, they start with 1155 and end with 1179. I mentioned the numbers as well and added an a for the ones without a number. The Manuscript is basically one long sentence, separated by comma's which appear inconsistently as well, completely not related to the syntax. For the word to word translation I used several dictionaries; an etymological dictionary (van Dale, 1989), the 11th revised print of the van Dale Dutch dictionary (1984), Hendriks' handbook of Dutch Synonyms (D. Mijs, Tiel, 1898) (date is NOT a mistake), Van Dale electronic dictionary MTX-Dutch-English-Dutch, and last but not least my knowledge of several Dutch dialects and Frisian, where old expressions better survived than in modern Dutch.