Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/270

 262 the world beside. The Tai-koon, no doubt, was not sorry to see the prospect of European aid, thus held out, to rid himself of the threatening military preponderance of those two great powers. If others dare beard the Don, why might not he? And the Japanese monarch must have marked the contempt of the Hollander and Englishman for the military prowess of those two nations of southern Europe that had hitherto carried all before them in the East. The Portuguese and Jesuits used all their arts and influence to have the wretched crew of The Erasmus executed as pirates. They failed signally; and, although The Erasmus was confiscated, and her people desired to consider themselves to all intents and purposes Japanese, the kindness they experienced in other respects was very great. Will Adams became in time the European adviser to the emperor, and for years afterwards we constantly meet the name of our honest pilot as the transactor of business between the court of Yedo and the subjects of foreign powers. Mindful of his friends the Dutchmen, he secured to them, in 1601, a place of trade at a place called Firando, an island off the west coast of Kiu-siu, not very distant from Nangasaki. Indeed, in his own quaint way, he tells us as much in a letter bearing date January 12th, 1613. “The Hollanders being now settled,” says Adams, “I have got them such privileges as the Spaniards and Portuguese could never get, and last year those nations tried to employ me to obtain them like advantages; but, upon consideration of further inconvenience, I have not sought it for them.” There is little doubt, from the rapid decadence of Portuguese commerce and influence after the arrival of The Erasmus and William Adams, that Englishmen and Dutchmen contributed in no small degree to enlighten the Japanese as to the best mode of getting rid of those their first European friends. Year by year, fresh restrictions, fresh annoyances, rendered the position of the Portuguese more and more intolerable, and at last they may almost be said to have voluntarily withdrawn, leaving the field clear to their more energetic opponents, the heretics of Europe. The Portuguese went not away empty-handed, and either through their system of commerce, or system of plunder, they drew off a quantity of gold from the country which, for those times, seems almost fabulous—so much so, indeed, that it became a common saying amongst the Portuguese of Macao, “that if they could have preserved the Japanese trade to themselves for a few years more, that the streets of that colony would have been paved with gold kobangs;” a boast only on a par with the offer of the Spanish citizens of Lima, who tried to induce the emperor to visit that city by offering to lay down silver ingots for him to travel upon from Callao to the city gates, a distance of eight miles. According to one writer the sum of gold and silver carried off by the Portuguese during three years amounted to the enormous figure of 2,713,795l. sterling; but the Hollanders subsequently exceeded this considerably, for, by an estimate made by Mr. Rendall in his curious compilation of Japanese information, they exported, in some thirty years or so, nigh upon twenty-nine and three-quarter millions’ worth of the precious metals from the two ports of Firando and Nangasaki.

Whilst, on the one hand, the emperor thus liberally entertained the newly-arrived Dutchmen and especially our countryman (indeed, he raised him to the high offices of imperial tutor, and charged him with the responsibility of constructing vessels upon the model of The Erasmus), the Roman Catholic Christians in Kiu-siu were perseveringly persecuted; and when they, in despair, flew to arms, they were ultimately exterminated, and, sad to say, in that final extinction of the faith implanted by the brethren of Xavier, the Dutch took a lamentable part. We need say no more, than that they subsequently suffered the deepest humiliation, and although, as the poet observes—

the Hollanders, in their wretched prison of Nangasaki, had, for centuries, to regret that they should have allowed themselves to be tempted by Asiatics to take a part in exterminating men who, whatever were their faults, were nevertheless fellow Christians. The success of the Tai-koon against the representatives of those two great powers whose colonies and forces had hitherto awed the kings and nobles of all Eastern nations, rendered him perfectly at his ease in the treatment of the Dutch and English. At first they were granted most liberal concessions. The treaty arranged by Captain Saris, in August, 1613, between the Emperor of Japan and King James was a great deal more liberal than any which ambassadors of to-day have been able to negotiate, and the freedom with which the Dutch and English passed and repassed from one part of the country to the other, and the insight they obtained into the manners and customs of this singular people was very great. That commercial and personal liberty was, however, very short-lived. The English factory was voluntarily abolished at Firando about 1620, a year after the death of Will Adams, and the Dutch were ordered to occupy the vacated prison of Desima, in the harbour of Nangasaki,—an imprisonment from which they may be said to have been only released by the perseverance and pertinaciousness of the Americans in our day, who have almost insisted upon Japan being again opened to the intercourse of foreign nations.

Between those distant years 1600 and 1650, the opportunities of studying the Japanese people were very great, and we cannot accuse our friends the Dutch or our own countryman of having failed to take advantage of them. The information they gleaned, however, is spread over such a vast area of print, and often given in such unpalatable forms, that the wheat is in most cases buried under a mountain of chaff, and it is only now that we are in a position to separate one from the other. There is hardly a prospect of our countrymen being able, for many years to come, to pass and repass as our forefathers did in the interior of Japan. It may never arrive, perhaps, that another Englishman shall be taken into royal favour, and be granted estates and rank like unto a lordship in England, with eighty