On the morning of 13 June 1867, two American warships anchored half a mile off the southeastern coast of Taiwan and began putting men ashore. There were 181 of them — officers, sailors, and Marines — dressed in heavy wool uniforms designed for the cold North Atlantic, not a tropical jungle in summer. Their orders were to march to a Paiwan village, defeat its defenders, and capture it. They had no reliable maps. The Paiwan, who had lived in these hills for generations, were watching from the trees.
Three months earlier, on 12 March 1867, the American merchant vessel Rover was sailing off Cape Eluanbi — the southernmost point of Taiwan — when it struck an uncharted reef and foundered. The crew made it to shore. There, Paiwan warriors killed fourteen of them — including the captain, Joseph Hunt, and his wife, Mercy.
The Paiwan held sovereignty over the southeastern tip of Taiwan — territory the Qing Dynasty administered in name only, having little practical reach into the mountainous interior. When Commander John C. Febiger arrived to investigate, Qing officials told him as much: the attack had been carried out by a village that did not recognize Qing authority. This was not evasion; it was an accurate description of the political geography.
American consul Charles Le Gendre spent April attempting to negotiate with the Paiwan. They remained hostile. Diplomatic pressure failed. After three months — and what Le Gendre described as "a good deal of red tapeism in Washington" — a punitive expedition was authorized. Rear Admiral Henry H. Bell departed Shanghai in June with two warships.
The landing party split into two columns commanded by George E. Belknap and Alexander Slidell MacKenzie. Twenty Marines fanned out as skirmishers at the front. Their objective was the Paiwan village; their route lay through dense subtropical jungle in midsummer heat.
After nearly an hour of marching, the Paiwan struck from concealed positions on a hillside above the American columns. Later accounts by American soldiers noted that the Paiwan warriors wore colorful face paint and were armed with both spears and muskets — a combination of traditional and acquired weaponry that reflected decades of contact with traders and missionaries along the coast. MacKenzie's column charged the ambush position, but the Paiwan retreated before the Americans reached the top of the hill. The same pattern repeated several times: the Americans charged, the Paiwan withdrew, then attacked again from a new position. No American died in these exchanges.
The final volley was different. The Paiwan fired together, and a musket ball struck Lieutenant Commander MacKenzie, mortally wounding him. After that volley, the Paiwan retreated once more into the jungle. By then, six hours into the march, several American soldiers had collapsed from heat exhaustion or delirium. The expedition turned back.
When the landing party reached the shore and reboarded, they had failed on every measure they had set for themselves. They had not captured the village. They had not defeated the Paiwan decisively. They had lost their second-in-command. Paiwan casualties, if any, were invisible: the Americans found no bodies.
The Paiwan's strategy had been effective because it was calibrated to the terrain and the opponent. They did not stand and fight at a disadvantage. They used the jungle, the heat, and the hills — and they understood that time and exhaustion were working in their favor against men in wool uniforms who had spent the previous weeks aboard ship.
Rear Admiral Bell wrote in his report that the only lasting solution would be to remove the Paiwan from the region entirely and place it under the control of a stronger authority. This was, even by the standards of the era, a remarkable admission: the expedition had not been stopped by inferior opponents but by people who simply refused to lose on someone else's terms.
The aftermath of the expedition stretched across years. Charles Le Gendre eventually negotiated a Memorandum of Understanding with Paiwan chief Tok-a-Tok, who agreed to guarantee safe passage for shipwrecked sailors across Paiwan territory — a recognition, however informal, of the Paiwan as a sovereign party to an agreement.
That agreement did not hold indefinitely. In 1871, fifty-four shipwrecked Ryukyuan sailors were killed at the southeastern tip of Taiwan. The incident drew the Japanese Empire into the picture, and the Taiwan Expedition of 1874 saw Japanese forces fight a sustained campaign against the Paiwan, achieving militarily what the American expedition of 1867 had failed to do. The Qing government, watching this unfold, finally invested seriously in fortifying and governing the Hengchun Peninsula — the walls at Hengchun township were built between 1875 and 1879 as a direct consequence.
The Paiwan remain in the region today, with communities across the Hengchun Peninsula and southeastern Taiwan. The events of 1867 are a chapter in a longer history of a people who held their ground against successive waves of pressure — and who, on one June morning, simply waited in the trees while men in heavy uniforms marched toward them through the heat.
The landing site of the 1867 Formosa Expedition was on the southeastern coast of Taiwan near Cape Eluanbi, at approximately 22.07°N, 120.82°E — the very tip of the Hengchun Peninsula. From altitude, Cape Eluanbi is one of the most recognizable features of Taiwan: the narrow point where the island's Central Mountain Range descends to meet the Pacific Ocean and the Bashi Channel. The lighthouse at Cape Eluanbi is visible from lower altitudes. Nearest major airport is RCKH (Kaohsiung International), approximately 70 kilometers north. Descend toward 2,000 feet over the cape to appreciate how the terrain that hemmed in the American expedition — dense hillside jungle with no clear sightlines — still shapes the landscape.