Adams · 1600
Will Adams summoned to Edo
On the morning of the twelfth of April 1600, the Dutch trading ship *De Liefde* (one of the five ships of the Mahu-De Cordes Pacific Expedition of 1598 from Rotterdam, the only one of the five to survive the Pacific crossing) made landfall at Usuki on the east coast of Kyushu in southern Japan, with about twenty-four surviving Dutch and English crew of the original hundred-and-ten. The pilot-major of the ship, William Adams, thirty-six years old, Kentish-born, formerly a Royal Navy pilot in the Drake Spanish-Armada campaign of 1588, was the only Englishman of the surviving crew. The ship was held by the Bungo daimyo; the surviving officers were summoned to the court of Tokugawa Ieyasu (the of the five-regent Council of the Toyotomi minority, who would within six months become the shogun of Japan) at Osaka on the fifteenth of May 1600. Ieyasu, by his curiosity about the European arrivals and by his strategic-political interest in European shipbuilding-and-mathematical-navigation expertise, kept Adams in Japan; he was made a *hatamoto* (a samurai retainer of the shogun) in 1605, given an estate at Hemi near Yokosuka in Sagami province, and the Japanese name *Miura Anjin* (the pilot of Miura). He was never permitted to leave Japan. He married a Japanese wife (Oyuki, daughter of a samurai family of the Edo road-station, no children of his first English marriage to Mary Hyn at Stepney; two children, Joseph and Susanna, by Oyuki). He died at Hirado on the northwest coast of Kyushu on the sixteenth of May 1620, fifty-six years old. He is the model for John Blackthorne in James Clavell's *Shōgun* (1975) and the 1980 NBC television series and the 2024 FX-Hulu series of the same name. The real story is the slow assimilation of the first Englishman in Japan into the service of the Tokugawa shogunate.
It is twenty past noon on the morning of the fifteenth of May 1600, in the reception-hall of the Toyotomi-period Osaka Castle (the castle the late Toyotomi Hideyoshi had built in 1583, now the castle of the Council of Five Regents who govern Japan in the minority of Hideyoshi's five-year-old son Hideyori), in heavy spring light off the castle moat. He is thirty-six years old. He is William Adams, born at Gillingham in Kent on the twenty-fourth of September 1564, son of the shipwright John Adams of the Chatham dockyard, apprenticed in the shipbuilding trade at Limehouse from twelve, in the Royal Navy from twenty-four (he had been a pilot of the Drake-and-Howard Spanish Armada campaign of 1588), in the Dutch-East-Indies-Pacific-Expedition trade since 1598.
He is standing in his stockings (his boots, by the Japanese-court etiquette he has been instructed in by the interpreter, are at the door). He is in frayed European clothes, the same clothes he has been wearing for the twenty-two months of the Pacific voyage. He has, by the Spanish Jesuit interpretation through which he is being questioned by the court (the Portuguese Jesuits who had been at the Japanese court since 1550 have been the European-translators of the Tokugawa government, and they are, on the political-religious grounds of the Catholic-versus-Protestant European wars, hostile to the Adams arrival), no direct Japanese-language access.
Tokugawa Ieyasu, the fifty-eight-year-old senior regent and the effective ruler of Japan after the 1598 death of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, sits on the dais at the east end of the hall. He has, by the Jesuit translation, been asking Adams about the English-Dutch Protestant-versus-Spanish-Portuguese-Catholic religious-political situation in Europe, and the relative naval-strengths of the Pacific-trading powers.
He thinks: Ieyasu has been asking me, through the Jesuit interpreter, about the English navy. The Jesuit is, on the political grounds, translating my answers selectively. Ieyasu is, by the manner of his questioning, picking up that the translation is not faithful. Ieyasu is intelligent.
He thinks: if Ieyasu finds the direct-Japanese-language access by training me into Japanese, the Jesuit political-monopoly of the court's European-information ends. The Jesuit influence at the Japanese court is, on my Protestant religious-political reading, the cause of the resistance to the English-Dutch trading expansion in the Pacific.
He thinks: the Jesuits are arguing for my execution on the grounds that the Adams arrival is the vanguard of a English-Protestant invasion of Catholic Japan. The argument is, on the record of the 1597 Nagasaki martyrdoms of the twenty-six Catholic missionaries, the argument the Jesuits know will work with the Toyotomi-Council.
He thinks: if I am useful to Ieyasu, the Jesuits do not get my execution.
He speaks, through the Jesuit interpreter (whose name has not been recorded in the court chronicles), in English. He explains, by the account in his 1611 letter to his wife Mary Hyn at Limehouse (the letter that is the primary source for the event), the current state of the European political-religious situation, the mathematical-navigation principles of the European astronomical-survey trade, and the shipbuilding-techniques of the English-Dutch galleon construction.
Ieyasu, by his recorded reaction in the Toyotomi-court chronicle of the fifteenth of May, was, in the formal-terms, much pleased. He invited Adams to the residential court at Osaka for the following month. He had Adams's twenty-three Dutch crewmates released from the Bungo confinement. He commissioned Adams in the summer of 1600 to oversee the construction of the first Western-style sailing-ship built in Japan, the eighty-ton San Buenaventura (built at Ito on the Izu peninsula, launched 1604; Ieyasu later gave the ship to the Spanish viceroy of New Spain as a diplomatic gift after the 1609 wreck of the Spanish ship San Francisco on the Japanese coast).
William Adams was made a hatamoto of the shogun on the fifteenth of April 1605, given the Japanese name Miura Anjin (the pilot of Miura), and granted a fief at Hemi near Yokosuka in Sagami province of about ninety tenants. He was never permitted to leave Japan; Ieyasu refused his multiple requests of 1605–1615 to be allowed to return to England, on the grounds that Adams's expertise was the strategic asset of the Tokugawa government.
He took a Japanese wife (Oyuki, daughter of a samurai family of the Edo road-station; no children of his first English marriage to Mary Hyn at Limehouse, whom he had left in 1598; two children, Joseph and Susanna, by Oyuki). He was the principal English contact for the 1613 establishment of the English East India Company trading factory at Hirado under Captain John Saris. He died at the Hirado factory on the sixteenth of May 1620, fifty-six years old. He is buried at Tsukayama near Yokosuka, on the fief he had been granted in 1605.
The Will Adams story has been continuously in print in English and Japanese since the publication of his 1611 letter to Mary Hyn (which Captain Saris brought back to England in 1614 and which was published in Samuel Purchas's Pilgrimes of 1625). James Clavell's Shōgun (1975) is the most-read fictionalisation; the 2024 FX-Hulu series the most-widely-broadcast. The grave at Tsukayama is the annual site of a British-Japanese diplomatic-commemoration on the anniversary of Adams's death, attended by the British ambassador and the local mayor of Yokosuka. The tradition is unbroken since 1949.