Will Adams summoned to Edo

Empires are not always opened by their conquerors. Sometimes they are opened by a single foreigner washed up on a beach, half-dead, who happens to carry inside his head the one body of knowledge the receiving power has been waiting for. The receiving power recognises him before he recognises himself, and the door closes behind him at the very moment it opens.

THE PILOT OF GILLINGHAM

William Adams was born at Gillingham in Kent on the twenty-fourth of September 1564, son of John Adams the Chatham shipwright. At twelve he was apprenticed to Master Nicholas Diggines at Limehouse, twelve years bent over keel-blocks and rope-walks, learning the trade in which the English navy was then becoming the equal of Spain. At twenty-four he took the Queen's pay as a pilot, and stood off the Armada in the supply pinnace Richarde Dyffylde in the summer of 1588. After that, the Barbary trade, the long charts of the African coast, the slow accumulation of a science: latitude by the sun, the run of currents, the trick of the cross-staff at dawn. In 1598 he signed with the Rotterdam company as pilot-major of a five-ship Pacific expedition under Mahu and de Cordes. He left a wife, Mary Hyn, at Limehouse, and a daughter Deliverance. He expected to be away two years.

TWENTY-TWO MONTHS OF SEA

Of the five ships only one came through the Strait of Magellan, the Pacific, and the Japan current. The others were lost to Spanish guns, to scurvy, to the cold off Tierra del Fuego, to mutiny. De Liefde, Charity in the Dutch tongue, made landfall at Usuki on Kyushu on the twelfth of April 1600, drifting under bare poles with twenty-four men alive out of a hundred and ten, most of those too weak to stand. The local daimyo of Bungo took the ship into custody. The Portuguese Jesuits, established at the court since 1550 and the sole European interpreters to the Japanese government, came down from Nagasaki and asked, by way of the Bungo officials, that the heretic crew be crucified as pirates. Word of the strange ship travelled to Osaka in eight days. The summons came on the second of May. Adams, the only Englishman in the crew, was to attend the senior regent.

THE HALL AT OSAKA

Twenty past noon, the fifteenth of May 1600. Heavy spring light off the moat, the smell of cut pine from the new wings of the castle, the tatami cool under his stockinged feet. His boots are at the threshold, as the interpreter has shown him. The clothes on his back are the clothes of the Pacific voyage, frayed at every seam, salted to a colour that is no longer a colour. At the east end of the hall, on the dais, sits a man of fifty-eight in plain dark silk, broad in the chest, the eyes steady and unhurried: Tokugawa Ieyasu, senior of the Council of Five Regents, in the seventh year since the death of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, four months from the field of Sekigahara on which he will become the master of Japan. Between them stands the Jesuit. Adams has no Japanese. He has only the Portuguese priest, who has already, in the antechamber, told him through gritted Latin that his death is the proper outcome of this audience.

THE INTERPRETER'S SHADOW

The questions begin in Japanese, pass through Portuguese into the broken English the priest will allow, and come back the same road. What country. What religion. What war with the Portuguese. What ships. What guns. Adams answers carefully, in the plain Kentish of a Limehouse yard. He notices, after the third or fourth exchange, that the priest is taking longer to render his answers than the answers themselves take to speak; that Ieyasu's eyes do not leave Adams's face during the priest's longer renderings; that the regent's secretary, on a low desk to the right, is writing without lifting his brush. He sees, with the clear inner cold of a pilot who has just understood a current he had been fighting blind, that the regent already knows the translation is not faithful, and is watching to see whether the Englishman knows it too. He had come into the hall expecting to plead. He understands now that he is being weighed. I gave his Highness to understand of our country, and the long and perillous voyage which we had made, he will write to his wife eleven years later from this same country he cannot leave, which his Highness wondered at. In the small interval between one question and the next, the length of two slow breaths, he decides not to plead at all. He will give Ieyasu the thing the Jesuits cannot give him: the cosmography of the European wars in plain proportion, the mathematics of a galleon's draught, the names of the powers and what each one wants in the Pacific. He will speak as a pilot, not as a captive. If the regent wants a chaplain, the regent has one already at his elbow. If the regent wants a navigator, there is, in this hall, exactly one. He bows lower than he has been instructed to bow, and begins to draw, with his finger on the tatami, the shape of the world he has come across.

MUCH PLEASED

The audience ran until the late afternoon and was resumed the following day, and the day after that, for forty days. The Jesuits' petition for crucifixion was set aside. The Bungo crew were released from confinement and given a stipend. Ieyasu took De Liefde into the harbour at Edo and her guns into his arsenal, nineteen brass cannon that would serve him at Sekigahara that autumn. He commissioned Adams in the summer of 1600 to lay down the first Western-rigged ship built in Japan, an eighty-ton vessel built at Ito on the Izu peninsula in 1604 and named, by the Spanish governor of the Philippines who would later receive her as a gift, the San Buena Ventura. The court chronicle of the fifteenth of May records that the regent was much pleased. The phrase, in the formal register of the Tokugawa secretariat, is the highest reaction a foreigner could draw from the bench.

THE PRIEST GOES OUT

The Jesuit walked out of the castle that evening and back along the moat road toward the mission house, and his step, by the brief account of a Portuguese lay brother who saw him pass, was the step of a man who has lost a province. Sixty years of Portuguese monopoly at the Japanese court, sixty years of being the only European voice in the room, had ended in a single afternoon because an English pilot in stockinged feet had drawn a circle on the floor and named the powers along its rim. The expulsion edict of 1614 was already, on that May evening, on its slow way through the grammar of the next fourteen years. The priest did not know it. He only knew that the Englishman was not going to be crucified.

MIURA ANJIN

On the fifteenth of April 1605 William Adams was raised to the rank of hatamoto, samurai retainer of the shogun, the only Western European ever to hold the rank. He was given the two swords, a fief at Hemi near Yokosuka of about ninety tenants, and the Japanese name Miura Anjin, the pilot of Miura. He married Oyuki, daughter of an official of the Edo post-station on the Tokaido road; they had a son Joseph and a daughter Susanna. He wrote to Mary Hyn at Limehouse in 1611, the letter that Captain John Saris carried home in 1614 and that Samuel Purchas printed in Pilgrimes in 1625, asking that she be told he was alive and that he had been in this land serving in the way of God and the world. He never saw her again. He asked Ieyasu's leave to sail for England in 1605, in 1611, in 1613; the leave was refused each time, courteously, on the grounds that the pilot's knowledge was a thing of state. He helped found the English East India Company factory at Hirado in 1613. He died there on the sixteenth of May 1620, fifty-six years old, and was buried on the hill at Tsukayama above his fief, looking south to the sea-road he had not been permitted to take.

THE GRAVE AT TSUKAYAMA

The door that opened in the hall at Osaka on a spring afternoon in 1600 opened only one way. The man who walked through it did not walk back. Yet the knowledge he carried in, the proportions of a galleon and the shape of the European wars, became part of the furniture of the Tokugawa state for two and a half centuries, and the name he was given in that country has outlived, in that country, the name he was born with in Kent. Each year on the sixteenth of May, since 1949, the British ambassador and the mayor of Yokosuka climb together to the hilltop at Tsukayama, where a low stone cut with the characters of Miura Anjin stands above a fief that is now a suburb, and lay flowers for a pilot from Gillingham who was, between one breath and the next in a castle hall, asked a question and chose to answer it as himself.