The Honourable Company

CHAPTER THREE Pleasant and Fruitfull Lands

JAPAN, SIAM, AND THE COAST

History is not short of reasons why the East India Company was founded. Some have already been noticed: the expected profits from the spice trade, the growth of English sea power in the Armada period, the about-turn in Anglo-Portuguese relations following the dynastic union of Spain and Portugal, and the encouragement afforded by the first Dutch voyages to the East. Another and an older reason of which much was made in contemporary debate was the need to find new markets for England’s staple export of woollen cloth. Ever since the 1570s and the sack of Antwerp, the traditional entrepot for English cloth, the search for new markets and new distributive systems had been a national priority. The Muscovy (Russia), Eastland (Baltic), and Levant Companies were all export-orientated and the various attempts to find a north-west passage were partly inspired by expectations of discovering potential buyers for English woollens shivering somewhere in the northern hemisphere.

The East India Company, it is true, was different. Right from the start its directors insisted on their ships carrying more bullion than broadcloth. They had no illusions about clothing the spice islanders in tweed; the Company was determinedly import-orientated and much criticized for it. But to counter this criticism, to assuage national expectations about woollen exports, and to find some alternative to bullion as a purchasing agent, the directors urged early diversification of the Company’s trading activities. Factors were encouraged to report on the patterns of existing trade in the East and, in the case of Bantam, they quickly discovered the south-east Asian archipelago’s insatiable demand for both Indian cottons and Chinese silks. In a perfect world, of course, the Indians and the Chinese would have been crying out for tweeds and thus a triangular trade, boosting English exports and involving no transfer of bullion, would have been established.

Unfortunately no such simple solution would emerge; but between 1607 and 1611 departing fleets were instructed to conduct commercial reconnaissances in the Indian Ocean en route to Bantam and indeed in the South China Sea beyond Bantam. These remarkable voyages would have far-reaching consequences. They gave the Company a multi-national complexion which would never fade. And they provided an alternative direction for the Company’s activities once expectations of the spice trade dimmed.

Given the desirability of starting any trade cycle with an outgoing fleet laden with broadcloth, those countries with a cooler climate were of particular interest. Judging by Dutch experience, China was exceedingly difficult to penetrate but in 1608 John Saris (or sometimes ‘Sayers’), serving as a factor under Towerson at Bantam, submitted a report on all those eastern lands with which the Dutch were trading and singled out as especially promising the islands of Japan. There and there alone he foresaw substantial sales for ‘broad-cloathes’ and he put them at the top of his list of ‘requestable commodities’.

This information was soon after confirmed from a most unlikely source, namely an Englishman who was already resident in Japan; indeed he had been there since 1600. William Adams had apparently sailed through the Straits of Magellan as pilot of a Dutch fleet and had eventually come ashore, one of only six men on his ship still able to walk, on the island of Kyushu. The ship had been confiscated but Adams had since done extremely well for himself. He was now in high favour with the Shogun as a marine architect and had been handsomely rewarded with a salary and an estate. He had also acquired a Japanese wife and family. But he had not forgotten his home in Rochester in Kent, nor his English wife to whom he somehow managed to write, nor his countrymen. He was at their service, and his story seemed to confirm that in Japan not only was woollen cloth in demand but also that ‘there is here much silver and gold [which would] serve their turnes in other places where need requireth in the East Indies’. The Dutch, he said, already recognized Japan as ‘an Indies of money’, so much so that ‘they need not now bring silver out of Holland’.

Such news was music to English ears. Broadcloth to Japan, Japanese silver to Java and the Spice Islands, and pepper and spices back to England – it was the perfect trading cycle. In 1611 John Saris, just back from his first five years in the East, was given command of a new fleet (the Company’s Eighth Voyage) and instructed, after numerous other commissions, to take the Clove and proceed from Bantam ‘with all possible speede for Japan’. There he was to consult with Adams, assess the commercial climate and, if favourable, establish an English factory.

The first part of his voyage, a veritable Odyssey if ever there was one, will be noticed later. By the time he left Bantam for Japan in January 1613 he had sailed right round the Indian Ocean and had been at sea for most of the past twenty-one months. He had also earned for himself the reputation of an able but harsh commander whose men had more than once been on the point of mutiny. Specifically they had complained of their rations, which were more inadequate and monotonous than usual and which Saris refused to supplement with those local delicacies that more considerate commanders made a point of procuring. Aware that such complaints would reach the ears of his employers, he now adopted the unusual practice of filling his journal with catering details. ‘Two meales rice and honey, sack and biskett’, ‘1 meale beefe and dumplings, 1 meale wheate’; it was hardly mouth-watering. But as the Clove sailed east for the Moluccas and then north into unknown seas, only the weather and the menu afforded his diary any variety at all.

For a chart he used the book of maps and sailing directions prepared by the Dutch cartographer, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten. During five years as secretary to the Archbishop of Goa (the Portuguese headquarters in India) van Linschoten had quietly compiled a dossier on the eastern sea routes which he then smuggled back to Europe, an achievement which may constitute the most momentous piece of commercial and maritime espionage ever. Published in Holland in 1595-6, Linschoten’s works were the inspiration for the first Dutch voyages to the East and, translated into English in 1598, they played no small part in the East India Company’s designs on the spice trade. The book of maps was required reading for every Dutch and English navigator, and Saris for one found it invaluable and ‘verie true’.

On 3 June, seven long weeks after leaving the Moluccas, the Clove came within sight of an island which Saris identified as part of Linschoten’s ‘Dos Reys Magos’. It may well have been Okinawa and to men who had now spent over two years sailing half way round the world in a ship not much bigger than a railway carriage this first glimpse of Japanese soil and journey’s end was not without excitement. ‘It seemed’, as well it might, ‘a most pleasant and fruitfull lande as anye we have scene since we came out of England’, wrote Saris. A sudden squall prevented their landing but other islands took its place and a week later they learned from a fishing fleet that they were off Nagasaki. The Portugese had trading rights at Nagasaki and had long since converted many of its people to Catholicism. As yet the English preferred the company of coreligionists, so the Clove made for Hirado, an island just off the west coast of Kyushu where the Dutch had established themselves four years earlier.

Unlike in the Spice Islands, in Japan there was of course no question of Europeans dictating their own terms. Here foreigners prospered or languished at the Shogun’s pleasure; they came as petitioners and they stayed on sufferance. A martial and self-sufficient state, Japan was ruled by warlords who tolerated Europeans only so long as they were an irrelevance. Hirado buzzed with rumours of distant campaigns and sacked cities while the Europeans doled out presents and paraded their wares in an atmosphere of friendship tinged with menace. Saris and his seventy-odd followers were in for a number of surprises.

As the Clove dropped anchor some forty boats ‘some with tenne, some with fifteen oars a side’ raced forth to meet them. From one the ‘king’ (governor) of Hirado and his grandson came aboard. They were dressed in silk with long swords by their sides and ‘the forepartes of their heads were shaven to the crowne, and the rest of their hair, which was very long, was gathered together and bound up in a knot behind’. The ‘king’ was about seventy. Both seemed friendly and saluted Saris ‘after their manner which is this’:

First…they put off their shoes (stockings they weare none), and then clapping their right hand with their left, they put them downe towards their knees, and so wagging or moving of their hands a little to and fro, they stooping steppe with small steps sideling from the party saluted, and crie ‘Augh, Augh’.

Sadly Saris fails to mention whether he returned this salute. ‘I led them into my cabbin where I had prepared a banquet for them and a good consorte of musicke.’ Saris was fond of music and had managed to purloin a viol, flute and tabor from the Trades Increase, Henry Middleton’s ill-starred flagship that was now rotting at Bantam. Being ‘much delighted’ with the madrigals, the ‘king’ next day returned the compliment, coming aboard with four female musicians. Although ‘somewhat bashfull’ they soon recognized Saris as a connoisseur and ‘became frolicke’. ‘They were well faced, headed and footed, clear skinned and white but wanting colour which they amended by arte.’ Their hair was long and tied up ‘in a comely fashion’ and he could not but notice that beneath gowns of silk their legs were bare.

Between these official exchanges the ship became overrun with such a multitude of visitors that it was impossible to move on deck. All, ‘boath men and women’, had produce to sell and services to offer. It was the sort of landfall sailors dreamt of and soon the entire crew would be absconding ashore. Not that Saris himself was setting much of an example. Singling out ‘divers of the better sort of women’ he enticed them into his cabin ‘where a picture of Venus hung, most lasciviously sett out’. Pin-ups and pornography were destined to cause him some embarrassment, but in this instance they were simply misunderstood. For ‘with showes of great devotion’ the ladies ‘fell down and worshipped the picture [mistaking it] for Our Ladye…whereby we perceaved them to be of the Portingall-made papists’.

Tainting pleasure with business, Saris wrote to summon Adams, rented a house and store-room, and began to unload his cargo. Trade was far from brisk. His journal for the period, while less exercised over the catering, is taken up with a succession of disciplinary actions. The gunner’s mate, one Christopher Evans, was the worst offender, habitually staying ashore without leave and refusing to come even when summoned. ‘In most lewd fashion’ he persisted in ‘spending his time in most base bawdy places.’

For which cause I gave order to sett him in the bilbowes [stocks] where, before the boatswain and most of the company, he did most deepelye swear to be the destruction of Jack Saris, for so it pleased him to call me.

Fearing Evans quite capable of breaking loose and making good his threat, Saris ordered a double guard. He still broke loose and when, a month later, he was dragged reluctantly from a Hirado whorehouse, he had to be chained to the masthead, ‘the bilbowes by one of his crew having been throwne overboard’. Other commanders might have sentenced him to the lash or the near fatal ordeal of being dragged underneath the ship’s keel. Perhaps Saris, usually far from lenient, had a sneaking admiration for the incorrigible Evans whose best defence had been ‘to stand boldly in it that he was a man and would have a woman if he could get her’.

On 29 July the long-awaited Adams at last made his appearance. Saris ordered a nine-gun salute and ‘received him in the best manner I could for his better grace’. But Adams seemed not to notice. He was more inscrutable than the Japanese. He evinced no discernible pleasure at meeting some of his long lost countrymen, and when quizzed about trading prospects, became infuriatingly vague. ‘He said it [trade] was not always alike, but sometimes better and sometimes worse, yet doubted not that we should doe as well as others and saying he would doe his best.’ He then talked, with some enthusiasm, about the delights of Japan and prepared to take his leave. This was not at all what Saris had in mind. Rooms in the house were ready for him and Mr Cocks, Saris’s senior merchant, was looking forward to showing him round the town. ‘Praying him to remember that I was alone and that I should be glad to enjoy his most acceptable company which I had long expected’, Saris prevailed on him to stay for dinner. But there was no moving him in the matter of accommodation. He had hoisted his colours – ‘a St George made of coarse cloth’ – over a run-down house on the other side of town and there he would stay, refusing entry to his fellow countrymen and not even permitting them to walk home with him, ‘which unto us was very strange’. The men of the Clove, ‘thinking that he thought them not good enoffe to walk with him’, concluded that Adams was already ‘a naturalised Japanner’.

Dealing with such a man was never going to be easy; but in fairness to Adams it may be noted that he had far more to lose than Saris and could ill afford to identify himself too closely with the truculent crew of the Clove. As an intermediary and patron he would prove as good as his word and, two weeks later, he was ready to accompany Saris on the long journey to Yedo (Tokyo) where presents and a letter from King James must be delivered as a preliminary to any grant of trading privileges.

The first leg of this journey was from Hirado off the island of Kyushu to Osaka on that of Honshu. They passed a mammoth junk, ‘much like Noah’s ark’, of 1000 tons (the Clove was a mere 500) and found both Fukuoka and Osaka ‘as bigge as London is within the walls’. The latter boasted ‘a marvellous large and strong castle’ with walls seven yards thick and bristling with drawbridges. Thence they continued overland, riding in palanquins with a pike-bearer jogging in front to clear the way. Shizuoka (Sampu) was even larger than Osaka, ‘as bigge as London with all the suburbs’, and Yedo larger still and of dazzling magnificence with its gilded roofs and lintels. The whole country was an eye-opener and Saris marvelled unreservedly at the roads, the people, the towns and the temples. (James I would not be impressed; on reading one of Saris’s letters he pronounced its observations ‘the loudest lies I have ever scene’.)

By contrast the audiences with Iyeyasu and his son, the latter the Shogun but the former still the power in the land, were somewhat disappointing. The gilt basin and ewer, standard centrepieces in any Company presentation to an Eastern potentate, were received without comment; so were the assorted lengths of finest cambric, lawn, and kersey, and the ornate looking-glass. Evidently the Japanese regarded such things as nothing wonderful; they accepted them out of a sense of obligation. But trading rights were granted and Saris returned towards Hirado well pleased. He even signified his gratitude to Adams by sending presents to Mrs Adams and the children.

It was November (1613) by the time the Yedo party put into Hirado and right glad was Richard Cocks, Saris’s second in command, to see them. ‘The honest Mr Cocks’, as Saris always called him, was an elderly and endearing figure already much attached to his vegetable garden and his pigeons. He was not cut out for authority and had made heavy weather of his stewardship. A Hirado brothel owner had threatened to kill him if he came calling for his men again, and Cocks had twice had to make official apologies for their drunken assaults on the townsfolk. Finally indiscipline had become mutiny when seven men, the womanizing Evans amongst them, had made off with one of the Clove’s boats; they were now said to be living it up with the ‘Portingalls’ in Nagasaki. Additionally a typhoon had demolished part of the English factory, several fires had almost consumed it, and trade was at a standstill. Even news of the privileges granted by the Shogun was making little difference. The Dutch had evidently resolved to dispose of their new rivals by undercutting them, and in effect, dumping on to the Japanese market all the woollens they could obtain.

That, at least, was the official reason. Saris, though, thought there might be another.