Shogun’s Confidant

To be the first to do any particular thing holds a peculiar fascination, even though that first may be of a most trivial nature. Such would seem to be the honor of having been the first Englishman to arrive in Japan. Yet, because of the extraordinary skill and character of the man involved, the event was very important, indeed. William Adams, a pilot from Gillingham, Kent, not only reached Japan before any of his countrymen, but also stayed to achieve an important position of influence in Japanese foreign affairs and opened the way to a successful, if short-lived, commerce between his homeland and the isolated island.

Adams was a prime example of those Elizabethan renaissance men whose versatility seems almost endless. Literate, though like all writers of his time a casual speller, and learned in the exacting craft of the master mariner, he was able to learn to read, speak, and even write the difficult Japanese language, and he was equally adept in the Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese that his earlier travels had taught him. He was a pilot, or skilled navigator, too, which meant that he understood the secret of finding latitude by the heavenly bodies; his mysterious talent made him a leader among his fellow sailors (even the ships’ masters of the time seldom bothered to learn navigation) and a curiosity to the Japanese, to whom he became known as Anjin, “the pilot.”

Any chance English sailor might have washed up on the shores of the archipelago then known as Cipangu and left scarcely a ripple on the tide of oriental history, but William Adams was no ordinary man. The exotic circumstances of Adams’s career in Japan have spawned at least two novels, the most recent of which, James Clavell’s Shogun, also became a television miniseries. But Adams’s tale has fascinated scholars and romantics for more than three centuries.

The voyage of the Dutch explorer Jan Huygen van Linschoten to the Spice Islands and his subsequent writings prompted Cornelius Houtman to take a squadron of Dutch ships there by way of Africa in 1595. Although the surviving vessels barely straggled home, the great value of their cargo promoted similar schemes, and one Melchior van Santvoort, a Dutch purser, convinced two merchants of Amsterdam, Peter van der Hay and Hans van der Wyck, to outfit a cruise to the Orient using the Straits of Magellan.' Chance conversation involved Timothy Shotten, an English mariner, and through him, Will Adams, a merchant captain trading in the Worshipful Company of Barbary Merchants.²

The expedition, consisting of five ships—the Hoop (“Hope”), flagship of Admiral Jacques Mahu and with Will Adams as Pilot-Major of the merchant squadron; the Liefde (“Charity”), with Vice Admiral Simon de Cordes; the Geloof (“Truth”), the Trouw (“Fidelity”); and the Blijde Boodschap (“Good Tidings”)—set sail on 27 June 1598.’ The five sailing vessels, with a combined tonnage totaling only 735 measurement tonnes, were crowded with 491 men.⁴ The Liefde, in which Adams finally reached Japan, began the voyage with 110 men crammed into her 160- tonne hull,⁵ attesting either to the foresight of the backers in providing sufficient crewmen to replace those felled by disease or accident, or to the excessive manning requirements of the awkwardly handling ships of the day. Only one man in the fleet, Dirk Geritzoon Pomp, had reached Japan before, on board the Portuguese Santa Cruz from Macao in 1585, being the first Dutchman to do so; he had been on board the Blijde Goodschap when she was captured at Valparaiso.⁶

Adams himself was a master mariner and a man of great experience at sea. Behind his description of himself as having been “apprentice twelue yeares to Master Nicholas Dig- gines [an important London shipwright of the Elizabethan period]; and myselfe haue serued for Master and Pilott in her Maiesties ships; and about eleuen or twelue yeares haue serued the Worshipful Companie of the Barbarie merchants,”⁷ lay knowledge and experience in all phases of nautical life. He was born in Gillingham, in 1554, “one mile from Chatham, where the king’s ships doe lye,”⁸ and became apprenticed to Diggines in 1566. In 1578, he went from shipbuilding to shiphandling, becoming master and pilot of the Richard Duffield, a pinnace of 120 tonnes, in which he carried supplies for Sir Francis Drake during the Spanish Armada campaign ten years later.⁹ Next followed experience in North Africa and then the opportunity for adventure and possible profit in the mysterious East.

Sailing in June, the squadron found “it was too late ere we came to the line [equator], to passe it without contrarie windes,”¹⁰ and it was the middle of September before they came to the coast of “Gumney,” where many of the men took ill and died. After stopping for two months at Ilha da Nabon in the Cape Verde group, where they captured a Portuguese settlement of 80 houses, the Dutch squadron crossed the South Atlantic for the coast of Brazil, setting sail from the island on 12 or 13 November. The trip down the South American coast took “about a fiue moneths,” and they came to the mouth of the dangerous Straits of Magellan on 6 April 1599." It was winter there, and, with resting and making necessary repairs, the squadron delayed passage until 24 September, many more men having in the meantime died of cold and hunger. The Geloof turned back to Holland, her crew discouraged by the adverse winds,¹² but the rest of the small fleet passed through, the Troue losing her consorts and sailing over the entire South Pacific to arrive eventually in India, where she was captured by the Portuguese; six of her survivors escaped and made their way back to Holland.¹³

After encountering severe storms, the scattered remaining three ships of the squadron worked their way up the coast of Chile. The natives were at first friendly, “but, by reason of the Spaniards. ... in the end the people went up from their houses in the countrey, and came no more to us;”¹⁴ eventually, the natives became openly hostile. On 9 November, the captain of the Liefde, in which Adams sailed, was killed along with 23 of his crew while they were trying to obtain supplies near Concepcion.¹⁵ The Hoop, in a similar incident, lost 27 men, including Adams’s younger brother (the loss of whom Adams did not mention in his personal account). The Blijde Boodschap, unsuccessful in obtaining supplies, surrendered to the Spanish authorities at Valparaiso, and most of her crew were put to death by the Inquisition.¹⁶ The remaining vessels, the Liefde and the Hoop, found each other soon after and continued north along the Chilean coast until rumors of approaching Spanish ships led the two Dutch ships’ captains (Timothy Shotten was commanding the Hoop after a mutiny had deposed her rightful captain¹⁷) to decide that the only hope of survival was to push off for Japan. Accordingly, on 27 November 1599, they set out from the vicinity of Santa Maria Island in Chile and were 28° north of the equator by 23 February 1600, when they encountered “[such] a wonderous storme of winde as euer I was in;¹⁸ the Hoop went down with all hands.

The incredibly long passage across the Pacific was accomplished in “foure monethes and twentie-two daies,” apparently beyond sight of land during the entire voyage. Adams, in his first letter to reach England, was careful to note latitudes. Of course, he had no way of determining longitude.¹⁹ He did take time to point out with considerable annoyance that Japan was improperly charted, for “it lieth faulsce in all cardes, and maps, and globes.”²⁰ The extra distance to the north, as well as the underestimated westward distance, the error of which he could not determine, nearly proved the end for Adams and the rest of the crew of the Liefde. When, on 19 April 1600, the coast of Japan came into sight,only six men, including Adams, could stand of the 24 left alive on board; six men died soon after the landing.²¹ Of the surviving adventurers—among them Melchior van Santvoort, the instigator of the voyage, and Jacob van Quaeckernaeck, the Liefde’s Dutch captain—Adams, who had brought them across thousands of miles of nearly unknown waters, was the only Englishman; this was not to be his only distinction.

Japan had been largely unknown to European eyes. A few Portuguese and Spanish ships paid occasional visits, the Portuguese having introduced European firearms (the Tane- gashima rifles, named for the place where they were first imported), and Jesuit missionaries had brought Christianity to an ever-increasing number of Japanese peasants who saw the teachings of Jesus as just another form of the Buddhism then flourishing in 100 different sects. The country was nearing the end of a long period of civil war begun by the warlord Nobunaga in an attempt to subjugate the various semi-independent feudal kings, or daimyos. His work was continued by Hideoshi, and on his death by Ieyasu Toku- gawa, whose character may be ascertained from the then-current epigram: Of Nobunaga, it was said, “When the cuckoo sings not, I wring its neck;” of Hideoshi, “When the cuckoo sings not, I cause it to sing;” but of Ieyasu, “When the cuckoo sings not, I wait—and the cuckoo sings.”²²

At the time of the Liefde’s arrival in Japanese waters, Ieyasu was completing the task of subduing the followers of Hideori, the young son of Hideoshi, to whom Ieyasu had been chief counselor. Ieyasu, as Shogun, would become the real ruler of Japan, supplanting the emperors, who lived in religious retirement at Kyoto until the Meiji Restoration of 1867. The Shogun headed a tightly controlled feudal system of daimyo kings and their samurai warrior-retainers, who lived under a rigorous code of honor and conduct called bushido. It was this strict and structured formality of conduct that made the Japanese seem so strange to the European traders who came shortly after Adams’s arrival.

Ieyasu, who made his capital at Yedo—the “Eastern Capital”—kept control of his turbulent dominions through an intricate system of spies and hostages. But when Adams came in 1600, several of the most important military battles of the consolidation process had yet to be fought. In the Liefde’s hold were 500 matchlock rifles, 5,000 cannon balls, 500 chain shot, 5,000 pounds of gunpowder, and 350 fire-arrows,²³ and through the ports in her stout sides protruded 18 cannon.²⁴ These, Ieyasu could use. But no one in Japan had any use for the cargo of heavy European broadcloth that the merchant adventurers had brought more than half-way around the globe to trade.

The Liefde’s immediate reception at Oita, on the northeast coast of Kyushu, was far from encouraging; swarms of smiling Japanese poured on board, streaming past the haggard survivors and taking nearly everything movable on her decks and in her cabins. Even Adams’s pocket compass was stolen. Soon, a local warlord stopped the looting, and the starving crewmen were brought ashore and fed.

A message was sent to Ieyasu to determine what should be done with the Dutchmen. At the same time, a Portuguese Jesuit priest arrived to ascertain the foreigners’ origins. The Jesuits were naturally wary of allowing any Protestant influence to gain a foothold in Japan. On finding military stores in the ship’s hold, the priest denounced the emaciated crew as no traders, but pirates bent on plunder. Two of the Liefde’s crew treacherously agreed to corroborate the denunciation in return for their lives and a share of the ship’s arms and cargo.

Japanese authorities were cautious, however, and Ieyasu, who was no great admirer of the Portuguese, called for a representative of the crew to be brought before him. Captain Quaeckemaeck was still too ill to face the long journey to Osaka, where Ieyasu was staying, and Adams, as second in command and a speaker of Portuguese—the only European language that the Japanese had mastered—went instead, in company with van Santvoort.²⁶

The pair arrived by row-galley in Osaka on 12 May 1600, and soon afterward Adams was brought before the wily and subtle Ieyasu. Adams described the visit: “Comming before the king, he viewed me well, and seemed to be wonderful fauorable. He made manye signes to me, some of which I vnderstood, and some I did not. . . . The king demanded of me [i.e., by interpreter], of what land I was, and what mooued vs to come to his land, beeing so farre off.”²⁷ The Japanese leader demanded the reason for their journey, and Adams explained that they had come to trade. Ieyasu then asked if England fought wars, with obvious reference to the munitions on board the Liefde. Adams responded, “Yea, with the Spaniards and Portugals, beeing in peace with all other nations.”²⁸ The talk then moved on to religion, about which Adams apparently pleased a man weary of Jesuit dogma. He showed a chart of the trading fleet’s voyage, and Ieyasu was polite but skeptical. The pilot asked for trading privileges, but Ieyasu waved him off, as the hour was late. At that point, his Japanese attendants began to treat Adams with greater respect, however, because it was evident that he was in great favor with the Shogun.²⁹

Two days later, Adams was again brought before Ieyasu, and the leader came swiftly to the point, asking specifically about the arms on the Dutch ship. Adams answered honestly that the arsenal had been intended for self-defense during what had been expected to be a dangerous journey. Again, Ieyasu seemed well pleased. But once more, the attendants returned Adams to confinement, where he waited six weeks to learn the fate of his comrades, even while being treated well himself. While he was in comfortable seclusion, the Liefde was towed up the Kyushu coast and into the Inland Sea to Osaka. From there, with Adams rejoining, the European crew sailed her to Yedo (modern Tokyo) by Ieyasu’s orders. A sum of Spanish money was recovered from the Japanese looters, who had originally plundered the ship, and those funds and a pension from Ieyasu were divided among the surviving crew, most of whom then disappeared into obscurity.³⁰ The Liefde’s guns and munitions went into Yedo’s defenses.³¹

The forthright character of Adams, however, had made a strong impression on Ieyasu, who showed great favor to the Englishman. Learning from the pilot that he was a shipwright as well as a mariner, Ieyasu had Adams direct the construction of a small ship of about 80 tonnes, on the European model. The ship was a success, and later Adams built another vessel—120 tonnes—that Ieyasu presented to Don Rodrego Vivero y Velasco, the Governor of Manila. The ship was sailed eastward across the Pacific to Acapulco in New Spain and was sold for a considerable profit by her aristocratic owner.³²

At the same time, Adams was becoming a friend and close advisor on European affairs to the Shogun, acting as intermediary between the Japanese and the foreigners, and replacing the Jesuit, Rodriguez Tjuzzu, who had formerly been the official interpreter.³³

In reward for his services to Ieyasu, the Shogun made Adams a hatamoto, or his direct retainer, with a country estate at Hemi, near Yokosuka, of 80 or 90 farmers and a house in Yedo (the street on which the latter was located is now commemorated as Anjin-cho, “Pilot Street”). In addition, Adams was granted the extreme privilege of audience with Ieyasu at any time, “even when kings and princes are kept out.”³⁴

On first coming to Yedo, Adams had been lodged at the home of a low-ranking nobleman named Magome Kegayu, and that somewhat crafty gentleman soon became the Englishman’s father-in-law. Ieyasu had forbidden the Englishman to leave Japan, and so he took a Japanese wife in addition to the one he had at home in faraway Gillingham. By his Japanese wife, Kegayu’s daughter, he had two children, Susanna and Joseph. Later, he had another child by a woman in Hi- rado, near Nagasaki.³⁵

Adams was confined to Japan, but in 1605 he got permission for van Santvoort and Quaekernaeck to leave the country for further trading and to convey greetings to the Netherlands from Ieyasu. Quaeckemaeck died in a sea fight against the Portuguese in 1609, but van Santvoort got the message from the Shogun through to the Dutch trading post at Patani in Siam and returned to Japan.’⁶

A round trip to Europe in those days took a great deal of time, so not until July 1609 did a small Dutch merchant squadron inspired by Adams’s letter and led by Captain Jacques Specx in the Brach arrive at Hirado, a small island off the southwest corner of Kyushu. Adams obtained a license for the Dutch merchants to trade at any Japanese port, and Specx stayed to set up a small trading post while the two merchant vessels went to the Dutch trading factory in Siam for more supplies. No ships came during the following year, and Specx journeyed to Siam in a Japanese junk to ascertain the cause. In 1612, Specx returned to Japan with Captain Henrik Brouwer and inaugurated the continuing Dutch trade that lasted through many adversities until the “opening” of Japan 250 years later. Adams acted as special protector for the Dutch interests and kept down Spanish machinations against them during his lifetime.³⁷

Brouwer had brought with him from the Netherlands a letter to Ieyasu from Prince Maurice of Nassau, pointing out the evils of the Jesuit “padres” and asking permission for the Dutch to trade with Korea. The letter attacked the Catholics and played on Ieyasu’s fears of insurrection by announcing their intention “to convert all Japan to their faith by degrees, as they hate all other religions . . . there is sure to be ... a great disturbance in the country.”³⁸ Ieyasu certainly desired a spread of trade, but just as certainly he did not want a Spanish- and Portuguese-inspired rebellion. He dismissed all his Christian officers. When Adams told him that a Spanish request to survey the coast of Japan would be considered a warlike act in Europe, Ieyasu forbade all nobles and samurai to profess Christianity, sent several prominent Japanese Christians abroad in exile, and deported the 63 Jesuit missionaries then in Japan. The Spanish and Portuguese did not help their cause by fomenting against each other.³⁹

Meanwhile, Adams’s fondest hopes had come true, and the English East India Company had at last replied to his letters by sending a ship, the Clove, under Sir John Saris. When she arrived at Hirado on 12 June 1613, Adams was far to the east in Yedo, but he hurried and arrived at Hirado on 29 July. Unfortunately, the personalities of the two Englishmen clashed almost immediately, neither one being able to comprehend the motivations of the other. To Sir John, Adams looked “a naturalized Japanner” in his oriental clothing, and he soon conceived a distrust for Adams that he never lost, preferring to regard his fellow countryman as a mere sailor and even leaving instructions that Adams was not to be allowed to handle East India Company money.⁴⁰ Adams, for his part, saw a stubborn, imperious man who would never comprehend the subtle ways of Japanese life.

Nonetheless, Adams undertook to further his countrymen’s cause with Ieyasu, and on 8 October 1613, the Shogun made out a generous patent for the English friends of his trusted advisor. Both Adams and Ieyasu wanted the East India Company to establish its factory at Yedo, but Saris preferred to stay with his fellow Europeans at isolated Hirado and to establish only a small trading post at the eastern capital. The company’s agent and interceder with the Shogun hired Adams at 100 pounds a year, although Saris always suspected Adams of using his position at court for personal gain at the company’s expense. His suspicion had no basis, however, and indeed, Adams sacrificed many of his own business activities to trudge the long and difficult route between Hirado and Yedo.⁴'

After 1613, the Shogun permitted Adams to pilot several trips to Siam and Macao on his own behalf and for the East India Company. In December 1614 Adams left on board the junk Sea Adventure for Siam. He was forced to put into port at Naha in the Ryukyu Islands and to cancel the remainder of the voyage because of delay and damage to the junk. When Adams returned to Japan, he brought with him some sweet potatoes for the English factor, Richard Cocks, at Yedo. Hence, to Adams goes the credit for introducing the now common edible into the Japanese diet.⁴²

In summer 1614, the death of Ieyasu Tokugawa began the downgrading of Will Adams and the East India Company in Japan. Ieyasu’s son, Hidetada, had been the figurehead ruler of Japan since 1609, and his father’s death freed him to act in his own right. Hidetada considered all Europeans, their trade, and their religious disputes to be equal in menace to his supremacy in Japan. Almost immediately, he restricted European trade to Hirado and began to root out native Christianity with ruthless dedication. Adams had no influence on the son of his former protector, and only with difficulty was he able to retain his own permit to trade. Hidetada even restricted foreign trade by Japanese captains in Japanese ships, beginning the policy of isolation that virtually cut off the island nation from outside contact for two-and-a-half centuries.

In March 1619, Adams made his last trading voyage, in a junk to Cochin-China. He died shortly after his return to Hirado on 16 May 1620. His will showed him to have been a rich man, with movable goods valued at 500 pounds and a house and properties at Hemi and elsewhere.⁴⁵ Adams had, however, always been a restless spirit and doubtless had had little time to enjoy his gains. Nor did he stop to reminisce on the days of his dangerous passage to Japan and on the days of glory when he was perhaps the only man called “friend” by Japan’s great ruler.

The epilogue to the story of Will Adams is brief. In 1619, the English and Dutch made a treaty of defense that amounted to mere piracy to attack all Portuguese and Spanish ships and all junks engaged in the Manila trade. Soon, the Dutch were taking English hulls as well, and the English gave up the unequal contest and closed their trading factory at Hirado, leaving behind them only a few bad debts.⁴⁴ In 1623, the Dutch massacred the English garrison at Amboyna, and the English withdrew entirely from the Far East. The Dutch remained in humiliating circumstances at Deshima, in Nagasaki harbor, their trade little envied and unchallenged until Commodore Matthew Perry sailed up Tokyo Bay to open Japan’s long-closed eyes and usher in the modern world.