A sculpture on the waterfront of the Japanese city of Ito, depicting ‘San Bueno Ventura’, the ship William Adams built for Tokugawa Ieyasu and which in 1610 embarked on a historic voyage to Acapulco in New Spain (Mexico). The occasion was the shipwreck of 317 Spanish mariners on the Japanese coast; Ieyasu lent them the ship, a considerable sum of money, and a crew that included twenty-two Japanese, believed to be the first to set foot in America. On her arrival, the Spanish authorities promptly impounded the ship in order to hobble Japan’s new maritime economy — but with Will Adams in Edo, it was too late for that.
Part 1 of 2
IN June 1598, Gillingham-born William Adams, a thirty-four-year-old veteran of victory over the Spanish Armada,* and an experienced mariner with Queen Elizabeth I’s Barbary Company, set out in a flotilla of five Dutch merchantmen for the Pacific coast of South America.
The journey was nightmarish: five ships left Holland, but after disease, storms and Spanish galleons, and angry natives in Ecuador, just two remained; they fled east, but only one reached Japan, landing at Usuki on April 19th, 1600. Barely seven crew were still standing.* Will’s brother Thomas was dead. And no sooner had they landed than the Portuguese in Edo called on Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japan’s effective ruler, to crucify Adams as a pirate.*
Ieyasu, fortunately, insisted on speaking to him first. Adams’s credentials and his knowledge of shipbuilding and navigation impressed, and far from having Will executed he commissioned him to build at Ito Japan’s first European-style ships, and establish trade with the Dutch East Indies to break the Portuguese monopoly.
See The Spanish Armada. Adams was master of a supply ship, ‘Richarde Dyffylde’. On Elizabeth, the Dutch and the Catholic powers of Europe, see Asylum Christi.
Adams’s own phrase was ‘at which time there were no more than six besides my self, that could stand upon their feet,’ though in a separate letter to his wife in Kent he told her that ‘there were no more but five men of us able to go.’
Edo was the name for what is now Tokyo. The Tokugawa Shoguns (military dictators) ruled from 1603 to 1868, the Emperor having nominal authority but no more than a ceremonial function in practice. At this point, they had not yet instituted the policy of isolation (‘sakoku’, literally ‘closed country’) that from 1635 made the country all but vanish from the map, for over two centuries. It was a Scotsman who help break the ban: see Japan’s First Railway.
Précis
In 1598 English shipwright Will Adams left Holland in one of five ships bound for the Pacific coast of South America. Almost two years later, one battered ship limped into Japan, where Adams was immediately accused of piracy by the Portuguese. However, when the Emperor discovered Adams could design ships, he dismissed the charges and employed him instead. (57 / 60 words)
Part Two
A map from 1707, showing Japan and (in the bottom right corner) commemorating his meeting with Tokugawa Ieyasu. Adams was asked why he had come so far. ‘I answered, We were a People that sought all friendship with all nations, and to have trade of merchandise in all countries, bringing such merchandises as our country had, and buying such merchandises in strange countries, as our country desired; through which our countries on both sides were enriched.’
THE Englishman soon became Ieyasu’s trusted confidant, and a tutor to his officials.* He was created a Samurai, named Miura Anjin, and granted an estate ‘like (he wrote) unto a Lordship in England.’ But to his lasting grief Will was forbidden to return home to his wife and two children. Ieyasu married him off instead to Oyuki, a well-to-do Japanese girl; they had two children, Joseph and Susanna.
In 1613, on Adams’s initiative, the British East India Company in Indonesia established a factory next to the Dutch on Hirado Island near Nagasaki. Both location and wares were ill-chosen, but the Company ignored Adams’s warnings; only his own trading ventures, to Siam and Cochinchina,* kept the struggling factory alive, and it folded three years after he died on May 16th, 1620, aged fifty-five. But Japan remembers Adams fondly; every August at the Miura Anjin Festival in Ito, fireworks crackle and taiko drummers play as glowing lanterns sail down the Matsukawa River to sea in his honour.
Adams became fluent in Japanese, and after the British established their factory on Hirado Island he did not seek out their society. On the other hand, he was able to use his influence at court to reconcile Ieyasu to the Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits in Japan, whose missionary activities had caused offence, thus (he remarks) ‘recompensing their evil unto me with good.’
That is, Thailand and southern Vietnam.
Précis
Adams built several ships, teaching Japanese shipwrights European techniques, and the grateful Emperor created him a samurai named Miura Anjin, binding him to live in Japan and take a wife. Some sneered that he had gone native (England’s first trading post there failed after his advice was scorned) but at Ito Adams is still honoured every year with a festival. (60 / 60 words)
