The account of Adams’s shipbuilding can be found in his own letters; the colorful story of Friar Juan de Madrid is retold by Cocks in a letter to Sir Thomas Wilson dated November 10, 1614. Tracing the activities of the
Liefde
’s other survivors is not easy. There are references in Dutch accounts, and their names appear occasionally in the letters of Cocks and his men.
The description of Nagasaki is drawn, in part, from Japanese
byobu,
or picture screens. The tale of the
Nossa Senhora de Graça
(also known as the
Madre de Deus)
is covered in great detail by C. R. Boxer in his “The Affair of the Madre de Deus,” in
Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society
, 26, 1929. There is a good description of the sea battle in Leon Pages’s
Histoire de la Religion Chrétienne au Japon, 1598–1651
, published by Charles Douniol in Paris, 1867–70. For more information about the arrival of Jacques Specx and company, see W Z. Mulder’s
Hollanders in Hirado,
published by Fibula van Dishoeck in 1985; Derek Massarella’s
A World Elsewhere
; and Anthony Farrington’s
The English Factory in
Japan. See also C. R. Boxer’s
Jan Compagnie in Japan
, published by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1936.
The account of Specx at the shogun’s court is contained in Volume of the ten-volume 1725 edition of Constantine de Renneville’s
Recueil des Voyages.
The mission of Sebastian Vizciano is published in Michael Cooper’s
They Came to Japan.
Vizciano was preceded by the Spanish governor of the Philippines, Rodrigo de Velasco y Vivero, whose account is published in the same volume. See also E. M. Satow’s “The Origin of Spanish and Portuguese Rivalry in Japan,” in
Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan,
18, Tokyo, 1890.
Chapter 6
The best general history of the East India Company is John Keay’s excellent
The Honourable Company
, HarperCollins, 1991. Other good (although somewhat dated) histories include
The East India Company
by Marguerite Wilbur, Stanford University Press, 1945, and
Ledger and Sword,
by Beckles Willson (two volumes), Longmans, 1903.
My account of Bantam is drawn largely from the journal of Edmund Scott, which is published in
The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton to the Moluccas, 1604–1606,
Hakluyt Society, 1943, as well as from the ships’ logs of other Jacobean captains, all of whom complained about “this stinking stew.”
The journal of the
Globe’s
voyage can be found in
Peter Floris: His Voyage in
the Globe
, published by the Hakluyt Society, 1934. For more information about the English factory in Siam, see John Anderson’s
English Intercourse with Siam in the 17th Century
, Kegan Paul, 1890. An excellent sixteenth-century account of the East Indies and Indo-China can be found in John Huyghen van Lindschoten’s
Voyage to the East
Indies,
Hakluyt Society, 1885. The letters of Antheunis and his men are published in
Letters Received by
the East India Company, various editors (six volumes), 1896–1902.
For a more detailed account of King James I’s correspondence with the shogun, see Derek Massarella’s “James I and Japan,”
Monumenta Nipponica,
38, Tokyo, 1983.
The journal of Captain Saris’s voyage to Japan,
Voyage to Japan, 1613,
was published in 1900 by the Hakluyt Society. The appendices include letters as well as Saris’s report on Eastern trade goods. This edition covers only the voyage from Bantam to Hirado and Saris’s months in Japan. For the earlier stages, see Takanobu Otusuka’s
The First Voyage of the English to Japan by John Saris
(two volumes), Tokyo, 1941. See also
Letters Received
for details of onboard wrangling.
Chapter 7
The chief sources for the
Clove’s
arrival in Japan are John Saris’s
Voyage to Japan
and Richard Cocks’s diary (see notes to Chapter 8).
There are numerous European accounts that testify to the casual violence of the Japanese. Padre João Rodrigues’s observations, published in translation in Michael Cooper’s
They Came to Japan,
were originally in his
Historia da Igreja do Japão.
Li Tan is mentioned frequently in the English letters. The most informative analysis of his business activities is “Li Tan, Chief of the Chinese Residents at Hirado,” by Seiichi Iwao, published in
Tokyo Bunko Memoirs
, 17, Tokyo, 1958.
Hirado is today a modern, if provincial, backwater; there is no trace of the ten-year English presence. There are plans afoot to build several mock-Jacobean houses in the town center.
Chapter 8
Captain Saris’s “remembrance” is published in Anthony Farrington’s
The English Factory in Japan.
Cocks has been the subject of several articles in recent years. The best of these are Derek Massarella, “The Early Career of Richard Cocks,” in
Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan,
3rd series, 20, Tokyo, 1985; and Michael Cooper’s “The Second Englishman in Japan,” in
Transactions
of the Asiatic Society of
Japan,
3rd series, 17, Tokyo, 1982. See also Anthony Farrington’s “Some Other Englishmen in Japan,” in
Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan,
3rd series, 19, Tokyo, 1984.
For many years, the only readily available edition of Cocks’s diary was the Hakluyt Society’s two-volume edition published in 1883. This omits many interesting observations and is now supplanted by the excellent Shiryo Hensan-jo,
Diary kept by the head of the English factory in Japan
—
Diary of Richard Cocks, 1615–1622
(three volumes), Historiographical Institute, Tokyo, 1978–81. Unfortunately very few copies were printed.
Cocks’s erratic accounts are published in Anthony Farrington’s
The English Factory in Japan,
but see also Peter Pratt’s
History of Japan Compiled from the Records of the English East India Company
. This was edited by M. Paske-Smith and published in two volumes by J. L. Thompson in Kobe in 1931. A good, if brief, account of the English factory can be found in L. Riess’s “History of the English Factory at Hirado, 1613–22,” in
Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan,
26, Tokyo, 1898. See also M. Paske-Smith’s
A Glympse of the English House and English Life at Hirado, 1613–1623
, Kobe, 1927. There have been several recent articles in the
Study of Hirado City History
, published by the Hirado Historiography Committee. The third issue (November 1997) includes a ground plan of the English factory. The most detailed account of the factory’s establishment is in Derek Massarella’s
A World Elsewhere.
Francesco Carletti’s account of Nagasaki’s prostitution is included in Michael Cooper’s
They Came to Japan.
Other fascinating details about Japanese cleanliness, cooking, architecture, and art can be found in Padre João Rodrigues’s
This Island of Japon
. Rodrigues includes a lengthy account of the tea ceremony.
The description of acupuncture was written by Padre Lourenço Mexia and is published in Michael Cooper’s
They Came to Japan.
See also the third volume of Engelbert Kaempfer’s
History of Japan
(p. 263 ff.), republished in Glasgow in 1906.
Chapter 9
The description of Saris’s return to England is drawn from the introduction to his
Voyage to Japan, 1613,
and from various notices in the
Calendar of State Papers
, Colonial Series, Volumes 2–4, 1862–78.
There are two printed editions of Adams’s voyage to Ryukyu: “The Log Book of William Adams, 1614–19,” in
Transactions and Proceedings of
the Japan Society
, 13, Part 2, 1915; and Anthony Farrington’s
The English Factory in Japan.
The original manuscript is held in the Bodleian Library.
The account of the Jesuit mission and of Ieyasu’s 1614 edict against Christianity
is drawn primarily from C. R. Boxer’s Christian Century
in Japan.
See also Michael Cooper’s Southern Barbarians and L. Sadler’s
The Life of Tokugawa Ieyasu.
The siege of Osaka is covered in derail in James Murdoch and Isoh Yamagata’s History
of Japan.
A more lively and graphic account, drawn from original letters, can be found in Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix’s
Histoire et description
générale du Japon
(two volumes), Paris, 1736.
Rowland Thomas’s journal of the
Hosiander’s
voyage can be found in Anthony Farrington’s The English Factory
in Japan,
Volume 2, pp. 1030–44.
Chapter 10
News took many years to reach London from the East. The most comprehensive collection of documents can be found in Letters Received, as well as in the
Calendar
of State Papers
. Very little correspondence was catalogued at the time; an account from 1682 describes the various letters and diaries as being “in a confused manner, laid up in the garret of the [East India] house.”
The journal of William Keeling’s 1607 expedition was published in Samuel Purchas’s
Purchas His Pilgrims
, Volume 2. Keeling’s 1615 journal was published and annotated by Michael Strachan and Boies Penrose in their
The East India Company Journals of
Captain William Keeling
and
Master Thomas Bonner,
1615–1617,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1971. John Jourdain’s diary of his time in the East is published in
The
journal of John Jourdain, 1608–1617,
Hakluyt Society 1905.
François Caron’s description of ritual suicide is to be found in Michael Cooper’s
They Came to Japan.
For more information on Christianity in Japan, see Pages’s
Histoire de la Religion Chrétienne au Japon.
The growing hostility to Christianity has been studied in detail by George Elison in
Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan,
Harvard University Press, 1973. This includes lengthy quotations from original sources.
Chapter 11
This chapter is drawn almost entirely from Richard Cocks’s
Diary
and Anthony Farrington’s
The English Factory in Japan.
An inventory of Richard Wickham’s possessions is given in
The English Factory in Japan,
Volume 1, pp. 729–36.
The account of Adams’s voyage to Ayutthaya is also contained in
The English
Factory in Japan,
as is his voyage to Cochinchina in the
Gift of God.
This latter voyage was also documented by Edmund Sayers in
The English Factory in Japan
, Volume 2, pp. 1128–40.
Chapter 12
A portion of Richard Cocks’s diary—from January 1619 to December 1620—has been lost. Information from those years has been gleaned from letters written by him and his men. Cocks’s finest letters are those that he wrote to his old friend Sir Thomas Wilson.
The story of the battles for the Spice Islands—and in particular the Banda archipelago—is told in my
Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: or, The True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History
, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. This book also contains an account of an attack by Japanese pirates in 1605 on the Jacobean adventurer Sir Edward Michelbourne.
There is a lengthy discussion of Sir Thomas Dale’s disastrous mission, and Jourdain’s assassination, in George Masselman’s
The Cradle of Colonialism
. For more on Dale’s time in Virginia, see my
Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America
, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
Chapter 13
The decline of the Jesuits is dealt with in considerable detail by C. R. Boxer,
Christian Century in Japan.
Individual persecutions are covered by Masakaru Anesaki in his detailed
A Concordance to the History of Kirishitan Missions
(supplement to Volume 6), 1930. Among the more interesting accounts are those published by Jesuits at the time. See Pedro Morejon’s
A Briefe Relation of the Persecution Lately Made Against the Catholike Christians in the Kingdome of Japonia,
translated by William Wright and published at St. Omer in 1619;
Exhortation to Martyrdom
(extracts printed in C. R. Boxer,
Christian Century in Japan);
and
The Palme of Christian Fortitude
, translated by Edmund Sale and published in St. Omer in 1630. Other, grisly descriptions of torture are contained in François Caron’s
A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam,
written in 1636 but not published in English until 1663. C. R. Boxer’s edition, published in 1935 by the Argonaut Press, also contains Reyer Gysbertsz’s horrific account of public burnings, first printed in 1637.