The matter arranged, and having supplied the place of those of his crew who had died or deserted, by fifteen Japanese, and paid up a good many boarding-house and liquor-shop claims against his men, to be deducted out of their wages, Captain Saris sailed on the 5th of December for Bantam, where he arrived the 3d of January, 1614. Having taken in a cargo of pepper, he sailed for home on the 13th of February, anchored off the Cape of Good Hope on the 16th of May, and, on the 27th of September, arrived at Plymouth, having in the preceding six weeks experienced worse weather and encountered more danger than in the whole voyage beside[100].
CHAPTER XXIII
Ecclesiastical Retrospect—New Persecution—Edict of Banishment against the Missionaries—Civil War between Hideyori and Ōgosho-Sama—Triumph of Ōgosho-Sama—His death—Persecution more Violent than ever—Mutual Rancor of the Jesuits and the Friars—Progress of Martyrdom—The English and Dutch, A. D. 1613-1620.
Between the edict of Taikō-Sama against the Catholics, and those the issue of which by Ōgosho-Sama is briefly alluded to in the preceding chapter, sixteen years had elapsed, during the whole of which time the missionaries and the Catholic Japanese had been kept in a state of painful uncertainty.
It is true that the new emperor had greatly relaxed from the hostility of his predecessor, and seemed at times decidedly favorable. In many parts of Japan the Catholic worship was carried on as openly as ever. Many new laborers, both Jesuits and other, had come into the field, and conversion still continued to be made among persons of the highest rank. There was scarcely any part of the empire in which converts were not to be found, and the missionaries occasionally penetrated into the most remote provinces. The general of the Jesuits had been encouraged to raise Japan to the dignity of a province, of which China and the neighboring regions had been made a part, and of which Father Valentine Carvilho was made provincial. Japan had also a resident bishop, or at least coadjutor, in the person of Father Louis Serqueyra, himself taken from the order of the Jesuits; and under the bishop, as we have seen, were a few secular clergy. By a brief of Pope Paul V., just published in Japan, that empire had been opened to the members of all the religious orders of the church, with liberty to proceed thither by way of Manila as well as of Macao.
Yet, during these sixteen years, the Catholics of the different subordinate kingdoms had been more or less exposed to persecution, especially in the island of Shimo, where they were most numerous, and which, from being mainly ruled by converted princes, was now chiefly governed by apostates or infidels; nor could the favor of the emperor be at any time certainly relied upon.
The new Dutch and English visitors were prompted no less by religious than by mercantile jealousies and hatreds to do all they could to diminish the credit of the Catholic missionaries; and it is by no means improbable that, as the Portuguese asserted, their suggestions had considerable weight in producing the new persecuting edicts of Ōgosho-Sama. Indeed, they had only to confirm the truth of what the Portuguese and Spanish said of each other to excite in the minds of the Japanese rulers the gravest distrust as to the designs of the priests of both nations.
The edicts already mentioned were followed by another, about the beginning of the year 1614, of which the substance was that all priests and missionaries of the Catholic faith should forthwith depart the empire, that all their houses and churches should be destroyed, and that all the Japanese converts should renounce the foreign faith.
There were in Japan when this edict was issued about a hundred and thirty Jesuits, in possession of some fifty schools, colleges, and convents, or houses of residence, also some thirty friars of the three orders of St. Augustin, St. Dominic and St. Francis, besides a few secular ecclesiastics, or parish priests. Most of them were shipped off at once. Some found means to return in disguise; but the new persecution speedily assumed a character far more alarming than any of the former ones. Severe measures were now taken against the native converts. Those who refused to renounce their faith were stripped of their property, those of the most illustrious rank, among whom was Ukondono [Kōyama Ukon], being shipped off to Manila and Macao, and others sent into a frightful sort of Siberian banishment among the mountains of Northern Japan, now first described in the letters of some of the missionaries who found their way thither to console and strengthen these exiles. Many, also, were put to death, most of whom exhibited in the midst of torments all the firmness of the national character.
The violence of this persecution was interrupted for a moment by an attempt on the part of Hideyori now grown to man’s estate, to recover his father’s authority—a rebellion in which many of the converts joined in hopes of gaining something by the change.