Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan (24 page)

Read Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan Online

Authors: Giles Milton

Cocks called an immediate halt to the frugal diet that Saris had inflicted upon his crew. Food was abundant in Hirado, and the men soon found that rarely a day passed without gifts of fresh meat and fruit being delivered by members of King Foyne’s courtly retinue. Cocks’s diary is filled with references to his men being presented with platters of viands, fruits, and freshly caught fish. There were gifts of “chestnuttes and powndgranetes; peares, grapes and walnuts; marmalades and sweetmeates.” The game birds were especially delicious—the men dined on “duck roasted,” “wood pigions,” or “hennes”—and delicately flavored “codd-fish” was plentiful in Hirado harbor. They even munched their way through “seaweede” brought to them by local townsmen.
Cocks began to pride himself on preparing sumptuous feasts, especially when dignitaries came to dine. Adams had told him of the importance of ingratiating himself with Japan’s feudal lords. Cocks followed this advice to the letter and went out of his way to prove his culinary skills to King Foyne, who was a connoisseur of fine cuisine. When Cocks learned that his lordship was planning a fishing expedition in Hirado Bay, he summoned his men to the scullery and “made ready two pigs, two ducks, two hens and a loin [of] pork.” The meats were roasted over an open fire and accompanied by a “banquet [of] sweetmeates.” The only drawback was the fact that the king and his retinue were enjoying the fishing so much that they were reluctant to come ashore. Cocks was undeterred; he “carried it aboard the kinge’s boat, where they did eat what they pleased.” Such generosity and thoughtfulness made a deep impression on the Japanese; Adams’s knowledge of local customs won Cocks many friends in the Hirado community.
from Arnoldus Montanus’s Atlas Japannensis, 1670
.
Hirado was home to many fishermen. Richard Cocks and his men often dined on “codd-fish” caught in the harbor. They were delighted to discover that food was plentiful in Japan, and hired cooks to prepare their feasts.
The men surprised themselves in the speed with which they grew accustomed to the comforts of their new home. At first, they had been delighted with their rich and varied diet, but they soon became choosy about the quality of the food, demanding new flavorings and different spices. Cocks had hired a cook shortly after Saris’s departure, but the men complained that he did not satisfy their tastes, so he was ignominiously sacked. “We put Yoske the cook away,” wrote Cocks, “having over-many lazy fellows in [the] house, and he one that could do littell or nothing.” Other servants proved rather more useful. In addition to the factory’s interpreters, Tome and Miguel, Cocks hired a small army of Japanese helpers to run the household. A butler, called Eurque,
served the men their sake, and a scullion nicknamed Hatchman performed the role of caretaker. There was a cook and several general domestics, as well as a number of low-paid laborers. The men thought nothing of treating these servants harshly, particularly if they proved disobedient, clumsy, or dishonest. One was flogged “by all the servantes in the howse … [each] giving him ten lashes with a double rope over the naked body and buttockes.” He was whipped “till all the skin was beaten off, and after washed … in brine.” Cocks wrote in his diary: “I wish it may be a warning to the fool, for so I esteem him.”
Each of the men was also given a boy-servant to undertake menial tasks. These unfortunate children were rented for next to nothing from their parents, who surrendered all rights to their offspring for the duration of their hire. They were treated roughly by some of the men, especially Nealson when he was in one of his “fumes.” His boy, Larrance, soon ran away “because he did beate him … overmuch.” Larrance’s parents might have been expected to support their son when he returned to them in tears. Instead, they sent him straight back to the English factory. Cocks noted that Larrance was “the best boy in the howse”—small consolation to the bruised and battered lad.
The men’s greatest gratification was the fact that they soon found themselves sharing their beds with the local women. When they first landed in Hirado, they had been reluctantly celibate for more than two years. The few that had risked the fleshpots of Bantam had been disgusted by the grubby and pox-ridden whores. Hirado’s strumpets offered a rather more pleasurable route to sexual satisfaction and the men quickly formed dalliances with the town’s womenfolk—something the London merchants had been keen to prevent. The puritanical Sir Thomas Smythe had been horrified by sordid stories filtering back from the East Indies and urged captains to stop their crews from visiting brothels. He vainly hoped that his men in Japan would live in a “frugall and sparing” manner, leading chaste and spotless lives to “their best
endeavours.” But this was asking too much from men who were desperate for the company of women. Cocks frequently hired “dancing bears” to enliven their evening drinking sessions, while his men spent their paltry salaries on whores and long-term concubines. They were quite open about this in their diaries and letters, although they sometimes concealed their boasts of sexual conquest by writing in code.
The ease with which Japanese women could be hired for sex had already drawn critical comment from the Jesuits, the Franciscans, and even some merchants. “It often happens that a girl’s own father, mother or brothers … will, without hesitation, sell her as a prostitute before she is married, for a few pence, under the pressure of poverty.” So wrote the Florentine adventurer Francesco Carletti, who had arrived in Japan just three years before Adams. He had landed at nearby Nagasaki and had been shocked at the extent of prostitution. Girls were available for either long-term or short-term hire and were often extremely cheap. “It often happens that they [the foreign traders] will get hold of a pretty girl of fourteen or fifteen years of age, for three or four
scudi
… with no other responsibility beyond that of sending her back home when done.” Carletti was scandalized and concluded his account by claiming that Japan offered the “means of gratifying the passion for sexual indulgence, just as it abounds in every other sort of vice.”
Adams makes no mention of visiting Hirado’s fleshpots. Indeed, the disdain he showed toward the
Clove
’s crew was almost certainly in response to their licentious and rowdy behavior. Cocks and his men were less choosy than Adams in their quest for physical pleasure and were delighted to enter into liaisons with the local wenches. They soon made arrangements with Hirado’s “brokers” and looked forward to nights of passion with their new and exotic concubines.
Cocks, whose history of success with English women had been woeful, took a shine to a girl called Matinga, who became
his mistress. He quickly realized that she was no submissive house drudge. She came from good stock and expected constant gifts of clothes and trinkets. Cocks found to his dismay that a large percentage of his salary was disappearing on the maintenance of Matinga, who demanded her own lodgings and a retinue of servants and slaves. He bought her five gold rings and spent substantial sums on silk kimonos, finely stitched girdles, and costly jewelry boxes, yet Matinga was rarely happy with her presents and was even less impressed with Cocks’s sexual prowess. She had a hankering for more virile men and it was not long before she was looking for those who could provide more physical stimulation. Rumors of her infidelity rapidly spread through Hirado, and “there were rhymes cast abrode and sung up and downe towne against Matinga.” Cocks was upset by the lewd songs and ordered that “handes should be laid upon such as were heard to sing it hereafter, and punishment inflicted upon the offenders.” Only later would he discover that she was being unfaithful and that her dalliances were taking place very close to home.
Cocks was not alone in finding himself a female consort. Wickham was consumed with passion for a local girl called Femage, while Eaton hitched himself to a young lady called O-man (who was given the nickname Woman). Both men showered their concubines with gifts of silks and satins but, for Eaton at least, the spark of passion was quickly extinguished. He tired of O-man and sold her to Wickham, a transaction that infuriated the girl’s mother, who complained that Eaton “[had] sold away her daughter to one that will carry her out of the land of Japan.”
Although Adams helped Cocks and his men to establish themselves in Hirado, he had little time to join them in their merrymaking. He was preoccupied with an exhilarating project that Ieyasu had personally assigned to him. The shogun had long been fascinated by Adams’s knowledge of geography and astronomy and was surprised to discover that even the Jesuits were impressed by his knowledge of the science of navigation. Padre Carvalho went
so far as to describe him as “a great engineer and mathematician.” Ieyasu decided to put Adams’s talents to good use, giving him informal employment as cartographer to the court. Adams responded by making a terrestrial globe, in order that the shogun might better understand the relative positions of realms and kingdoms. He also wished to demonstrate to Ieyasu his belief in the existence of a sea passage to England along Russia’s northern coastline—the route that Captains Pet and Jackman had attempted more than thirty years earlier. All subsequent attempts had also met with failure, and no vessel had successfully penetrated the icy Kara Sea.
Adams’s idea was to tackle the voyage from the other end—from the east. The enthusiastic shogun quizzed him at great length about the reputed route “[and] asked me if our countrimen could not find the norwest passadg.” Adams told him: “We doubted not but there is a way [across the top of Russia] … and called for a map of the wholle world, and so [he] sawe that it was very neer.”
Ieyasu was fascinated and gave Adams the task of planning and leading a voyage of discovery. “He told me [that] if I would go, he would give me his letter of friendship to the land of Yedzoo [Hokkaido], where his subjects have frindship.” Adams warned that it would require a great deal of expertise and wrote to the East India Company directors in order to inform them of the project and ask them to send “good marriners to saill with.” He told them to dispatch only experienced explorers, since “the peopell of this land are verry stoutt seamen.” He also informed them that he had a desperate need for “compasses, rounning-glasses, a pair of globes … and some cardes or maps, one containing the wholl world.” Such equipment would enable him to explain the hazards and logistics of the voyage to Ieyasu, as well as the route he intended to follow.
Adams was realist enough to know that any expedition was likely to be several years in the planning. He also knew that any such discovery would be “one of the most famous that ever hath
been,” and this thought spurred him on in his endeavors. He spent much of his time studying in his lodgings at the house of his merchant friend, Yasuemon, while his compatriots indulged in a raucous cycle of drinking and partying.
Cocks and his men knew that they would soon have to call a halt to their pleasure pursuits and start trading with the Japanese, but claimed there was little they could do until the factory and its warehouses were repaired and made waterproof. Adams was content to let them behave as they pleased. It was Cocks, not he, who was head of the English factory, and Cocks who would have to answer for any failings. Yet Cocks himself seemed remarkably untroubled by the burden of responsibility and spent long hours indulging his passion for gardening, tending his vegetable patch and newly planted orchard. The Japanese were bemused by his hobby and sought to humor him by bringing gifts of trees. On one occasion, a friendly Buddhist priest arrived at the factory with fifteen orange, lemon, and chestnut trees. Four days later, another three were unexpectedly delivered. Cocks himself traveled to Nagasaki to buy “two fig trees, an orenge tree and a peach tree.” When he arrived back at the factory, he discovered that an anonymous donor had left him a quince tree and a pear tree. It was not long before Cocks’s orchard was in blossom and promising a heavy crop of figs, grapes, oranges, and lemons.
There was the occasional setback. On one wet June afternoon the upper slopes of the orchard “did shrink with the extreme rain, and three panels of our orchard wall fell downe and spoiled divers fruit trees.” Cocks rushed out to save what he could but noted that “all the rest of the wall [was] much shaken and like to fall, the ground giving way.”
Cocks also developed a passion for goldfish, which he collected with an avidity that surprised even the Japanese. His enthusiasm had been sparked by Li Tan’s brother, who presented him with “a littell fishpond (or jarr) with live fish in it.” Cocks soon started a collection, buying so many prize fish that they became
the talk of Hirado. His aquarium attracted the envy of the local nobility, who tried to get their hands on some of the finer specimens. Often, they were extremely blunt in expressing their desire for one or other of Cocks’s golden friends. On one occasion, King Foyne’s brother learned that Cocks had a particularly fine fish “and sent desire to have it.” Cocks was reluctant to part with it, but knew that he would cause great offense by refusing, “so I gave it him.” Nobutoki was delighted and showed his gratitude by sending back “a great black dogg.”

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