SOME OTHER ENGLISHMEN IN
JAPAN
By
ANTHONY FARRINGTON
The present paper arises from my current work on a new edition of documents relating to the English Factory in Japan between 1613 and 1623. Leaving aside the Diary of Richard Cocks,
which has just been re-issued in a transcript plus Japanese translation by the University of Tokyo Historiographical Institute." I
have traced and included 436 items, 366 of which are in the India
Office Records. There has, of course, been a great deal of earlier
interest in publishing the original documents, but my justification
for a new edition, apart from the sheer convenience of having
all the material together, is that 97 have never before .been published in any form, 76 are known only in abbreviated or extract
form, and many others have appeared only in drastically modernised versions. The 97 completely new items include several important discoveries; especially noteworthy is the factory account
book kept by John Osterwick for the seventeen months from
September 1615 to January 1617. 2
My talk this evening consists of gleanings from the documents
relating to some of the people involved in the English factory.
I have unearthed (and read) nine books or articles about William
Adams, published between 1861 and 1956, with the phrase "the
first Englishman in Japan" somewhere in the title, 3 and Michael
Presented at the Society's joint meeting with the Japan-British Society on 24 January 1983.
1 Diary Kept by the Head of the English Factory in Japan: Diary of Richard Cocks}
1615-1622, 6 vols., 1978-1981.
2 British Library, Department of Mss: Cotton Vesp.F.XVII.
3 William Dalton, Will Adams) the First Englishman inJapan: A Romantic Biography, London, 1861; Demetrius Charles Boulger, "The First Englishman in Japan", in Asiatic Quarterly
Review, 4, London, 1887; William Foster, "The First Englishman in Japan", in Imperial
& Colonial Magazine & Review, 1, London, 1900; William George Hutchinson, "The First
2
Cooper has recently treated the Society to a paper on Richard
Cocks titled' 'The Second Englishman in Japan". I will not continue with the third, fourth, fifth and so on, but will ignore Adams
and Cocks and begin with the six other men who were left in
Japan in December 1613 as founder members of the new factory.
Their names were Tempest Peacock, Walter Carwarden, Richard
Wickham, William Eaton, William Nealson, and Edmund Sayers.
However, before continuing I must, in deference to the British
element, make it clear that the Celts to the west and north of
England were also represented in Japan. The second English ship
to reach Hirado, the Hosiander at the end of August 1615, carried
a purser called Rowland Thomas and a surgeon called Morris
Jones, who must surely have been Welsh. The crew list also included "Robin, a Scot" and "Jockey, a Scot". We know nothing
else about these two, but there are other Scots to whom I will
refer later.
The first two of the six other founder members in addition
to Adams and Cocks can quickly and quite literally be disposed
of. Tempest Peacock and Walter Carwarden sailed as merchants
on the Japan factory's first overseas venture. Acting upon instructions left by John Saris4 they departed from Hirado in a
chartered Japanese junk called the Rokan on 14 March 1614, touched at Nagasaki, and then embarked for Cochin China, meaning
Annam, the central part of modern Vietnam. It was thought that
they could acquire in mainland South-East Asia silk and other
Chinese commodities suitable for the Japanese market.
Englishman in Japan", in Macmillan's Magazine, 90/535, London, 1904; Edward Maunde
Thompson, "The First Englishman in Japan", in Cornhill Magazine, NS 27, London,
1904; Charles William Hillary, England's Earliest Intercourse with Japan: The First Englishman
in Japan 1600-1620, London/Felling-on-Tyne, 1905; Arthur Di6sy, "In Memory of Will
Adams, the First Englishman in Japan", in Transactions of the Japan Society, 6, London,
1906; Philip George Rogers, "Will Adams, the First Englishman in Japan", in History,
33, London, 1948; and Philip George Rogers, The First Englishman in Japan: the Story
of Will Adams, London, 1956.
4 India Office Records [lOR]: E/3/1 no. 125, Saris's remembrance of 5 December
1613.
Some Other Englishmen in Japan
Peacock lost his life there and various stories about the events
were reported back to Japan over the next four years:
(1) He went up to the capital, Hue, by river in company
with some Dutch merchants. On the return trip their boat was
accidentally upset and Peacock drowned through the weight of
money in his pockets.
(2) The boat was deliberately upset and the Europeans were
harpooned like fishes in the water as an act of revenge for a Dutch
attack on an Annamese village some years before. It was simply
Peacock's misfortune that he was with the Dutch.
(3) It was an attack intended for Peacock and arranged by
his Japanese host Mangosa, who later fled to China, where he
and his crew had their throats cut.
Whatever the truth, Peacock may have been partly to blame.
In 1617 William Adams, having made a voyage to Cochin China
in his own junk Gift of God, was told that "at first the king used
[Peacock] kindly and gave him large privileges to trade in his
dominions, but being in drink Peacock tore the privileges and
cast the pieces under his feet, which did much estrange the people's hearts.Y'' Arrogant, proud and drunken are adjectives which
can be applied to quite a few of our predecessors in Asia, although
the English soon discovered that courtesy was the rule in Japan.
It was generally agreed that the companion, Walter Carwarden,
escaped in the junk only to be shipwrecked. Certainly he was
never heard of again. Within a few months the Japan factory
had lost two of its staff and also the money and goods they carried with them, valued at nearly £750 or 13 percent of the opening stock left at Hirado in December 1613.
Of the remaining four, I will continue with Richard Wickham.
Weare fortunate to have his Letter Book in which he entered
his own copies of 68 letters he wrote between April 1614 and
June 161 7. 6 The volume has been largely neglected until now,
5
6
lOR: E/3/5 no. 615, Cocks to the Company, 15 February 1618.
lOR: G/12/15. The section which follows is based on my article, "The Japan Let-
4
possibly because of his absolutely foul handwriting. Like many
of these early servants of the East India Company little is known
about his family background, although he may have come from
Wiltshire; in 1615 he refers to his mother as a poor widow living
in Devizes. He was first employed by the Company in their Fourth
Voyage of 1608. The ships touched the East African coast near
Mombasa and Wickham, who was sounding in a longboat, was
captured by the Portuguese of Zanzibar. His subsequent adventures took him to prison in Goa and then to Lisbon in a great
Portuguese carrack. He escaped from Lisbon and was back in
England in time to join the Eighth Voyage under John Saris and
so to reach Japan.
In February 1614 he was given the task of opening sales at
Edo. In the winter of 1614/15 he sent out as merchant on the
factory's junk Sea Adventure for Thailand, a voyage which got no
further than Okinawa; in the autumn of 1615 he journeyed up
to the shogun's court with the captain of the Hosiander, and he
spent 1616 pursuing sales at Osaka and Kyoto. Dissatisfied with
his salary he left Japan for Bantam, J ava, in February 1617, and
died there in the autumn of 1618.
My own feeling is that Wickham was the most competent
businessman among the factory's staff. For instance, his salary
in Japan was a mere £20 a year, augmented by Cocks in 1616,
to keep him quiet, by a further £35 a year, and yet when he
died at Bantam the inventory which was then taken showed him
7
to be holding personal possessions valued at £1,400. The Company were almost certainly right to suspect that while working
for them he had been working even harder for himself. The long
inventory makes fascinating reading, listing such items as:
One great Japan chest containing
4 basins and ewers
ter Book of Richard Wickham, 1614-1617", in India Office Library & Records Report for
the Year 1979, London, 1980.
7 lOR: G/40/23, ff. 4-7, Inventory, November 1618.
Some Other Englishmen in Japan
2 tankards
1 great cup
2 plaster boxes and salvatories
1 great case for papers
Two Japan lances
A cattan, covered with broadcloth
1 Japan bow and arrows
1 varnished case for arrows
More amazingly he also had 58 books, "great and small", which
must have been the largest English travelling library in East Asia.
Naturally, most of his letters relate to business, but there are
the occasional passages giving a glimpse of the man. He liked
to introduce the odd Latin tag, and there are references to the
works of Suetonius and Cicero, no doubt hangovers from an
Elizabethan grammar school education. He referred to one young
Japanese woman in the English circle as "the little vixen" and
sent presents of tabi to others. He also liked a good scandal, writing
with delight from Osaka in April 1616 about a "soldier of good
account who stole a kabuki from Kyoto, and being found out,
attempted to cut her throat (with her consent)." Thinking that
he had succeeded, the samurai then committed seppuku, leaving
the woman alive. But, as a dutiful son, the last but one letter
in his copy book is addressed, on 10 June 1617, to his "most
deare and loving mother" in England.
Next comes William Eaton. In 1614, while Wickham was at
Edo, Eaton was made responsible for sales at Osaka, Sakai, and
Kyoto, spending most of his time in the area until April 1616.
After returing to Hirado in May 1616 he was involved in a potentially serious quarrel with a group of Japanese. On a visit to
the Omura fief to purchase timber, Eaton's Japanese servant John
took a piece of straw rope belonging to some sailors from Higo,
a fight broke out between them and the crew of Eaton's boat,
he rushed in with a stick, was attacked and hit twice by a club,
and in retaliating with his dagger and a wakizashi he killed one
of the Rigo men. Eaton was imprisoned at Akuno-ura, across
6
the bay from Nagasaki, where he was kept for twenty days in
what he describes as "a vile and extreme manner" . 8 The daimyo
of Higo eventually informed his counterpart of Omura that the
death of the man was of no account and Eaton was released-but
the unfortunate John was executed for theft.
Between August and December of the same year Eaton went
up to Edo with Cocks and Adams to pay respects to Hidetada
after Ieyasu' s death, a journey during which they learned that
all Europeans were to be restricted to Hirado and Nagasaki only.
Just over a fortnight after his return he sailed as merchant on
the Sea Adventure's voyage to Thailand, 21 December 1616 to 7
September 1617. He went in her for Thailand again on 2 January
1618, returning to Hirado in a chartered junk on 8 August 1619,
the Sea Adventure having been abandoned as beyond repair. After
the factory was closed, Eaton left Bantam with Cocks on the ship
Ann Royal, but unlike his chief he eventually reached England.
The Court of Directors in London interviewed him several times
about' 'what he knew of the carriage and condition of Mr Cocks";
he made only "cold and uncertaine answers", either from loyalty
or a desire not to implicate himself. 9 He was never again employed
by the Company, but more than forty years later a committee
called to consider the re-opening of the Japan trade was informed
on 21 October 1668, "Mr Eaton, who was Second at Japan,
is living, and dwelleth at Highgate, and may be able to give full
satisfaction as to the trade there and of the civility of the people. ,,10 If he ever did, no trace survives in the Company's archives.
Eaton had a son, William, at Hirado by a woman called
Kamezo. When the English left Japan he took this child with
him and the boy turns up in 1640 as a student at Trinity College,
Cambridge.!! He also had a daughter at Sakai, called Helena,
8 lOR: E/3/4 no. 362, Eaton to Nealson, 22 May 1616.
9 lOR: Bill, Court Minutes, 2 December 1626.
10 lOR: B/29, Court Minutes, 21 October 1668.
11 Public Record Office: SP 38/18, Denization certificate, 5 February 1639; SP 16/474,
Some Other Englishmen in . Japan
7
by another girl called Oman, who is confusingly referred to ill
the documents as "Woman". Early in 1616 he rather ungallantly
sold Oman to Richard Wickham (the price is not recorded) and
then found himself in trouble with his former mother-in-law, if
we can apply the term. He wrote to Wickham, "Woman's mother
takes on for her daughter and says I have sold away her daughter
to one that will carry her out of the land of Japan, in regard
whereof she is minded to have me before Ingadono'< about her.
I wish that you nor I had never meddled with her!" 13
This business of women was something close to the heart of
my next factory member, William Nealson. Apart from a visit
to assist Eaton during his spell in prison at Akuno-ura and a
journey to Edo with Cocks and Adams between August 1618 and
January 1619 in order to lay a complaint against the Dutch,
Nealson spent all his time in the day-to-day running of the factory at Hirado. He acted as steward of the house and assistant
with the book-keeping, being described as a "practicioner in the
mathematics". He was frequently in poor health and even more
frequently in drunken quarrelsome moods, provoking much strife
with his colleagues. Indeed, he appears to have known enough
kitchen Japanese to have been able to quarrel in that language
as well as English. He was also the author of several ironical
or satirical letters, which could also be described as acid and
spiteful. One of them, written to Wickham at Edo in February
1614, 14 is a rather juvenile celebration of the fact that the merchants had managed to procure female company at Hirado. For
instance, "of late I caught a great cold for want of bedstaves,
but I have taken order against falling into the like inconveniences."
f. 38, Petition to Charles I for a scholar's place, 1640/41. I am indebted to Dr Derek
Massarella of Chua University for these references.
12 Itakura Katsushige, shoshidai at Kyoto with the title Iga-no-kami. He was usually
referred to by the English as the "Chief Justice of Japan".
13 lOR: E/3/3, no. 340, Eaton to Wickham, 20 February 1616.
14 lOR: E/3/1, no. 155A.
8
It continues, in a jibe against Cocks and his woman Matinga,
with a piece of doggerel verse:
I am now grown poeticall.
He that hath a high horse may get a great
And he that hath a deaf boy, liud may he
And he that hath a fair wife, sore may he
That he get other folks' brats to foster and
fall,
call,
dread
to feed.
Wasted away with consumption, Nealson died at Hirado in March
1620, two months before William Adams.
Edmund Sayers, the last of the group left behind in December
1613, may have been a distant relative of John Saris. Early in
1614 he was sent to Tsushima in a Japanese junk to explore sales
of pepper and the possibility of trade into Korea, but the results
were negative. He then spent the next few years employed as
a merchant in the factory's junk voyages to mainland South-East
Asia- Thailand (only reached Okinawa) 1614-1615, Thailand
1615-1616, Cochin China 1617, and Cochin China (only reached Oshima) 1618. His adventures on one of these voyages suggest
that he may not have been over-intelligent. On the 1617 voyage
to Cochin China he fell in with a Chinese confidence trickster.
A deal was negotiated whereby Sayers would purchase a quantity
of raw silk at an advantageous price, provided he kept it secret
from the headman of the local expatriate Chinese community.
Accompanied by his interpreter and the junk master and clutching his bag of money containing 656 taels of silver (£164), Sayers
was shown into the vendor's house and asked to wait.
To continue in his own words:
So, many merchants coming in, the interpreter said, lay your money
down by you, hard by the wall, for fear they see it and tell Fango
I have sold my silk to you. So we sitting there, not thinking any
deceit, our interpreter goes into his house, being but a wall of reeds
between his and the China's, and so cunningly stole the bag of
money into his own house and presently embarked, he and the
China, wife and children. And we sitting there an hour, we said,
these men stays very long, let us go and see what they do. So
I5
we stooped down to take up the money, but it was stolen.
Some Other Englishmen in Japan
9
Sayers left Japan with the others in December 1623, abandoning his children Maria and Juan. He sailed from Java on the
Ann Royal with Richard Cocks in February 1624 and stayed on
the ship as a factor for Surat and the Persian Gulf. His death
was reported in 1626.
Two later additions to the factory staff were John Osterwick
and Richard Hudson. Both remained behind fr..o m the Hosiander,
the second English ship to reach Japan, which was at Hirado
from 31 August 1615 to 26 February 1616.
Osterwick, whose father was Dutch (hardly a recommendation
to Cocks), was first employed by the Company in 1614 as a purser.
He reached Bantam in February 1615, where he transferred to
the Hosiander and subsequently agreed to stay on in Japan as bookkeeper, at £20 a year salary. His marvellous accounts open up
a new light on the factory's deficit problems. They run from 1
September 1615 to 31 January 1617 and have not been used until
now. The accounts were hidden in the British Library's Department of Manuscripts as the rear portion of a manuscript beginning with a totally unconnected "Diary of Public Events in Europe
from 1509 to 1521", where they were catalogued simply as "Merchant's Accounts", without further detail. 16 Cocks described Osterwick as a "proud surly young man and one that scorns all men
in respect of himself. " Apart from a few references to illness-for
instance, in June 1618 he was "sick on a sudden, with much
pain in head and bones" -little is recorded about him. He seems
to have kept out of trouble and when the factory was closed he
stayed on in Java in an attempt to straighten out the Japan
finances. He died there some time during 1626.
Richard Hudson has the distinction of being the younger son
of Henry Hudson, the Arctic explorer who gave his name to Hudson's Bay. In April 1614, at the petition of his widowed mother
Katherine, the Company resolved that he should be placed in
15 lOR: L/MAR/A/XXVI, Sayers's journal to Cochin China 1617-1618, entry for
26 June 1617.
16 British Library, Department of Mss: Cotton Vesp.F.XVII.
10
the care of John Hunt, one of their master's mates, and £5 should
be spent on fitting him out-"They were obliged in charity to
give assistance in regard that his father perished in the service
of the commonwealth." 17 Hunt sailed for Bantam and then went
on to Japan in the Hosiander, taking Hudson with him. When
the ship left, Hudson remained as the most junior member of
the Japan factory's staff, still a teenager. Cocks sent him to Kyoto
where he was to learn the Japanese language, both reading and
writing as well as conversation, but he can only have had a few
months of lessons. After Hidetada's order of 1616 restricting direct
trading activities to Hirado and Nagasaki, Cocks wrote in
September, "Poor Dick Hudson is like to be turned out of doors
by the decemvirs 18 of the street where he liveth in Miyako." In
November 1622 Hudson journeyed to Edo with presents and in
the following August he carried the factory's final leaving presents
to the Bakufu Council at Kyoto. His movements after the factory
closure are not recorded until September 1628, when he turns
up at Masulipatam on the east coast of India. Back in England
in 1630, he was re-engaged as a factor for the Coromandel Coast
on 27 October and seems to have spent the rest of his career
there. A visit to Bengal is mentioned in 1647, and he died in India
some time between then and 1649.
Having disposed of the mercantile staff, let me now turn to
some of the others who drift in and out of the surviving documents.
The first of my putative Welshmen, Rowland Thomas, the purser
of the Hosiander, has left a previously unused journal covering
his stay in Japan between August 1615 and March 1616. 19 He
seems to have had a religious bent; certainly his journal goes
further than the formal incantations to Almighty God that are
customary at this period. For instance, when the ship reached
Japan his entry reads, "The great God of heaven make us thankful
17
18
19
lOR: B/5, Court Minutes, 9 April 1614.
The Japanese goningumi system of household group responsibility for good order.
British Library, Department of Mss: Egerton Ms 2121.
Some Other Englishmen in
Japan
11
for all His blessings. There was never men so miraculously preserved in so short a course as we have been in this voyage. I give
God praise upon bended knees of my humble heart for this and
all the rest, for I acknowledge that His blessings are numberless
toward me, both in directing and preserving me," which is quite
a mouthful. Presumably because he needed them for his pursering affairs, he also took the trouble to write down his romanisations of the Japanese numbers from 1 to 14, in the kun pronunciation. "One" is given as jituts (the remainder more or less as
today), an interesting example of the ii sound of Kyushu which
produced "Firando" for Hirado.
Rowland's colleague and presumed fellow countryman Morris
Jones, the surgeon of the Hosiander, acted as doctor to the English
House during the ship's stay, for which he received £3 wages
plus a present of a piece of red damask and a silver real of eight
(6s 3rI). He also received a dagger wound on the hand in February
1616 during a drunken quarrel with William Nealson, and so
had an opportunity to exercise his skills upon himself.
The two Scots on the Hosiander, Robin and Jockey, are known
only by name. There is a little more information on a Scot who
turned up three years later, called John Porteous or Portis. As
a young man he was sent to Spain to learn the language at the
beginning of James I's reign, so clearly he .must have been a
Roman Catholic. From Spain he went to Mexico and eventually
ended up in the Philippines. In July 1618 he reached Tsushima
in a small boat from Manila, in which he had intended to raid
Chinese junk traffic in the South China Sea, but which was driven
north by bad weather and lost most of its crew. Porteous arrived
at Hirado on 13 July 1618 en route to Nagasaki to raise a fresh
crew, but instead he took service with the English. He later served against Manila in the two voyages of the Fleet of Defence
and left Japan with its ships at the end of 1622. He died sometime
before August 1624, at which date his sister Margaret petitioned
the Company in London for his estate.
Reference to the Fleet of Defence leads on to Richard Cocks's
12
busiest years. The short-lived Anglo-Dutch alliance against Spain
and Portugal operated a joint fleet, based on Hirado, which
blockaded Manila for two seasons in 1621 and 1622, and plundered
Chinese junk traffic to the Philippines. Cocks and his staff had
to cope with the problems and needs of four or five English ships
at a time. To give an idea of the scale of the operations, the
fleet of four English and five Dutch ships for the 1621 season
totalled 5,340 tons, carried 306 guns, and must have had crews
of at least 600 men between them. Despite all the problems, the
plunder brought back to Hirado from the two expeditions meant
that Cocks saw at last a temporary fulfilment of his dream of
Chinese silk for the Japanese market when he was able to sell
such goods as 213 t peculs of raw silk and 2,210 pieces of taffeta. The English half-share of the total loot was reckoned at
£40,000 or ten times the sum which Cocks was supposed to have
wasted when the factory was closed.
Before saying a little about the brutish and licentious seamen,
we may mention two gentlemen of the cloth who served with
the Fleet, the Rev. Patrick Copland and the Rev. Arthur Hatch.
Copland was another Scot, a native of Aberdeen who was educated
at the local grammar school and Marischal College before
emigrating south. He was employed as chaplain ·on the ship Dragon
in the Company's Tenth Voyage of 1612 and returned home with
enough money to present £110 to his old college for the
maintenance of a Professor of Divinity. Sailing again in 1617
he did not return to England until 1621, visiting Japan on the
ship James Royal in the Fleet of Defence. Back in England he
preached a sermon before the Virginia Company in the spring
of 1622, in the course of which he described bad weather on the
way to Japan: "This storm was as if Jonah had been flying unto
Tharshish. The air was beclouded, the heavens were obscured
and made an Egyptian night of five or six days perpetual horror.
But God, that heard Jonah crying out of the belly of hell, He
pitied the distresses of his servants, He hushed the tempest, and
brought us safely to Hirado.' ,20 Copland eventually ended up
in Bermuda, where he died in the 1650s.
Some Other Englishmen in Japan
13
The other clerical gentleman, Arthur Hatch, was engaged as
preacher on the Palsgrave in November 1618 at £50 a year, and
also acted as chaplain to the English House when the Fleet of
Defence was in harbour at Hirado. Back in England in 1623 he
wrote a splendid letter to Samuel Purchas, giving his observa21
tions on]apan. Dated at Wingham in Kent 25 November 1623,
it contains the kind of descriptions and comment otherwise
associated only with Cocks. A few extracts will convey the flavour:
At Hakata there is a wood of pine trees near about three mile
square, which is all the summer time swept and kept so cleane
that you shall hardly see any small twig, bough or leaf under the
trees. . . . Everyone may change his name three times, when he
is a child, when he is a young man, and when he is old . . . .
For writing and printing they have seven sorts of letters, each single
letter serving for a word, and many of them, in their placing, serve
for six or seven. And each alphabet hath eight and forty letters,
and yet with all these letters they are not able to write our Christian names.
The Fleet of Defence brought hundreds of sailors to ] apan,
and sailors were synonymous with drink. The factory staff were
hardly temperate, but the seamen went so far that one of their
pursers described Hirado as "this sinful Sodorn of]apan "'. Cocks
complained as early as February 1616 about sailors who were
left behind as sick when their ship sailed and then seemed to
recover rather rapidly, spending their subsequent time idling about
the factory or roaming from place to place. In attempting to impose any kind of discipline there was always the danger that sailors
might desert to the Portuguese at nearby Nagasaki. For instance,
six men ran away from the ship Advice in 1616, taking along with
them a bag of money for their expenses. Others in the same ship
were described as "extreme drunkards who give occasion to other
youngsters to do worse", that isvwho set a bad example.
20 Virginia's God be thanked. . . , London, 1622.
21 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his prilgrimes. . . , London, 1625, II, Book 10, pp.
1700-02.
14
In March 1619 Cocks tried to get rid of some of them. This
was at a time when the English Factory was completely isolated
by open warfare between the English and Dutch Companies in
Indonesia, which turned into an immediate alliance when news
of peace came out from Europe early in 1620. Cocks bought a
junk, named it the Godspeed, and sent if off, with Edmund Sayers
as captain, to try to contact the English in Java. It also carried
the Scot John Porteous and eleven English sailors, some of whom
had only recently escaped from English ships which had been
brought into Hirado as prizes by the Dutch. Unfortunately the
junk was forced back by adverse weather and Cocks had them
all on his hands again until the Fleet of Defence arrived in the
summer of 1620. The Fleet certainly exacerbated the problem.
Robert Turberville, purser of the ship Elizabeth, described his
fellows: "Our shipmasters and sea commanders are not worthy
of the name of governors, which causes the common sailors to
rebel and to raile and speak and do what they like, to strike,
maim, and murder one another, and they may well be termed
sea-devils. ,,22 Another vivid description is of a man "being, as
the old proverb is, as drunk as an ape". Drastic measures were
called for and in October 1621 Edward Harris, a boatswain, and
five sailors, apprehended in the act of desertion to Nagasaki, were
sentenced to death by a Council consisting of the factory staff
and the ship commanders. Two were reprieved and the other
four were hanged at the yardarms of their ships in the harbour
at Hirado. The record adds, "hoping the example of justice will
breed a terror and fear in the hearts of all others.' ,23
My own favourite among the common men, however, is a
drunkard and thief called John Hawtrey, one of the' 'left-behinds" .
He caused Cocks many headaches with his constant misbehaviour,
and yet he must have been profoundly impressed by the strange
new world in which he found himself. So impressed, indeed, that
22
23
lOR: G/40/1, p. 71, Turberville to the Company, 4 December 1620.
lOR: £/3/8, no. 1001, Fleet of Defence consultation, 9 October 1621.
Some Other Englishmen in Japan
15
in September 1616 Cocks records that John "cut his hair after
the pagan fashion and thought to turn pagan, which he could
not do here although he would, yet there wanted not good will
in him.' ,24 He must have been one of the first in a long line
of Europeans whose love affair with Japan extended to a desire
for total identification. But perhaps then, as now, the Japanese
preferred their Englishmen to be English.
Rather than end on a note of drunken misbehaviour, I will
finish with a few words of tenderness. A Dutch ship that left
Hirado a month or so after the English had finally departed, carried a number of letters in Japanese from the female companions
and Japanese friends of Cocks and the others. The letters eventually reached London and were carefully preserved as important
state papers, obviously because no one could read them. Oto,
who is mentioned as a maidservant in the English House, wrote
to Cocks: "I am expecting your return to Japan when you have
worked hard. I always remember, every night and morning, that
you showed me kindness while you were in Japan, and I wish
to see you once again.,,25 Sayers was told that "Juan dono and
little Maria are both quite well here and you need not worry
yourself. . . after you left we talked about you day after day, ,,26
and Kamezo , William Eaton's woman, asked Cocks to take par27
ticular care of "little William", the half-Japanese child.
Apart from the visit of the Company's ship Return, which was
turned away from Nagasaki in 1673, there was no further contact
between England and Japan until the nineteenth century.
24
25
26
27
Cocks's Diary, entry for 20 September 1616.
British Library, Department of Mss: Cart. Cotton III.13.XXVI. 28, ff. 49-50.
Ibid., f. 63.
Ibid., ff. 47-48.