Hall, Captain Basil

Basil Hall (1788-1844) was a British naval officer. He served aboard many vessels involved in exploration and scientific and diplomatic missions. As a part of a diplomatic mission to China under Lord Amherst in 1816 undertook surveys of the west coast of Korea and the outlying Ryukyu Islands of Japan. This resulted in his book Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West Coast of Corea and the Great Loo-Choo Island in the Japan Sea (1818), which was one of the first descriptions of Korea by a European and which included a number of maps of the Korean peninsula, Okinawa, and the Bohai Sea.