Brush conversation between maritime officials and foreign seafarers in drifting records in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century East Asia

The adjacent polities China, Japan and Korea have long coastlines. Their coastal regions are vulnerable to stormy weathers and ferocious typhoons especially in summer. Plenty of shipwreck incidents were recorded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Written by local maritime officials in Sinitic, such records often contain verbatim transcripts of brush conversation with distressed seafarers with whom no shared spoken language could be found. That notwithstanding, transcultural communication was made possible by the use of writing-mediated Sinitic brushtalk 漢文筆談, giving specific answers to wh-questions like who, what, why and how (many/much). For serious shipwreck incidents, detailed and formal reports plus proposed action were required and addressed to a senior scholar-official or even the Emperor (in Qing China) for approval. By contrast, reports meant for local archiving purpose would be less formal and loosely structured. In terms of lexico-grammatical resources, ‘drifting brushtalk’ 漂流筆談 records were typically characterized by an admixture of written and vernacular elements. This chapter exemplifies some of these published records in Japan and Korea. Content analysis shows that, where interpreting service was unavailable, the seafarers’ stories and perspectives depended heavily on the literacy level of the seafarer(s) engaged in brush(-assisted) conversation.