Nagasaki had been from its foundation a Catholic city. Hitherto, notwithstanding former edicts for their destruction, one or two churches and monasteries had escaped; but, in 1621, all that were left, including the hospital of Misericordia, were destroyed. The very graves and sepulchres, so Cocks wrote, had been dug up: and, as if to root out all memory of Christianity, heathen temples were built on their sites.

One of the Jesuits wrote home that there was not now any question as to the number of Jesuit residences in Japan, but only as to the number of prisons. Even those who had not yet fallen into the hands of the persecutors had only caves and holes in the rocks for their dwellings, in which they suffered more than in the darkest dungeons.

It is not necessary to give implicit credit to all which the contemporary letters and memoirs related, and which the Catholic historians and martyrologists have repeated, of the ferocity of the persecutors, the heroism of the sufferers, and especially of the miracles said to be wrought by their relics. Yet there can be no question, either of the fury of the persecution, or of the lofty spirit of martyrdom in which it was unavailingly met. Catholicism lingered on for a few years longer in Japan, yet it must be considered as having already received its death-blow in that same year in which a few Puritan pilgrims landed at Plymouth, to plant the obscure seeds of a new and still growing Protestant empire.

CHAPTER XXIV

Collisions of the Dutch and English in the Eastern Seas—The English retire from Japan—The Spaniards repelled—Progress of the Persecution—Japanese Ports, except Hirado and Nagasaki, closed to Foreigners—Charges in Europe against the Jesuits—Fathers Sotelo and Collado—Torment of the Fosse—Apostasies—The Portuguese confined to Deshima—Rebellion of Shimabara—The Portuguese excluded—Ambassadors put to Death—A. D. 1621-1640.

Already the relation of the Dutch and English in the East had assumed the character of open hostility. A letter from Cocks, of March 10, 1620,[105] complains that the Hollanders, having seven ships, great and small, in the harbor of Hirado, had, with sound of trumpet, proclaimed open war against the English, both by sea and land, to take their ships and goods, and kill their persons as mortal enemies; that they had seized his boat, fired at his barks, and had beset the door of his factory,—a hundred Dutchmen to one Englishman,—and would have entered and cut all their throats but for the interference of the Japanese: all because Cocks had refused to give up six Englishmen who had escaped from two English ships[106] which the Dutch had captured, and whom they claimed to have back, representing them to the Japanese as their “slaves.”

To sustain the English interest in the eastern seas, the English East India Company, by great efforts, had fitted out, in 1617, the largest expedition yet sent from England to the East Indies. It consisted of the “Royal James,” of one thousand tons; the “Royal Anne,” of nine hundred; the “Gift,” of eight hundred; the “Bull,” of four hundred; and the “Bee,” of one hundred and fifty tons; and sailed from London under the command of Martin Pring, who, twelve years before, following up the discoveries of Gosnold, had entered and explored—the first Englishman to do so—Penobscot bay and river, on the coast of what had since begun to be known as New England. Pring sailed first for Surat, where the Company had a factory, and where he assisted the native prince against the Portuguese, with whom he was at war. On the 17th of June, 1618, he arrived at Bantam, whence he proceeded, in September, to Jacatra, a city of the natives, the site of the present Batavia. There he received news that the Dutch in the Moluccas, not content with driving out the Spaniards, had attacked the English also, making prisoners of the merchants, whom they had treated with great harshness. News had also reached England of these Dutch outrages, and to make head against them, the Company, not long after Pring’s departure, despatched Sir Thomas Dale—also well known to readers of American history as high-marshal of the colony of Virginia, one of its first legislators, and for three or four years its deputy governor—with a fleet of six large ships, with five of which he joined Pring in November, 1618, in the Bay of Bantam, assuming the command of the whole, including others which he found there.

Both fleets were in a very leaky condition, and after some skirmishing with the Dutch, and the capture of a richly laden Dutch ship from Japan, the English sailed for the coast of Coromandel, to refit and to obtain provision, which could not be had on the coast of Java. Having arrived at Musilapatam, Dale died there August 9, 1619. Toward the end of the year, Pring, who succeeded in the command, returned again towards the Straits of Sunda, and on the 25th of January, 1620, met, off the coast of Sumatra, three English ships of a new fleet, from which he learned that four others of the squadron to which they belonged had been surprised while at anchor off the coast of Java, and taken by the Dutch; that another had been wrecked in the Straits of Sunda; and that the Dutch were in pursuit of two others, with every prospect of taking them.

As the Dutch at Jacatra were three times as strong as the three squadrons now united under Pring, and as three of his largest ships were very leaky, and the whole fleet short of provisions, it was resolved to send part of the vessels to a place at the north end of Sumatra, in hopes to meet with the Company’s ships on their way with rice from Surat, while Pring himself, with his leaky vessels, should proceed to Japan,—reported to be a good place for repairs as well as for obtaining provisions. Just at this time the happy news arrived, brought by two vessels despatched for that purpose from Europe, of an arrangement of the pending dispute, and of the union of the Dutch and English East India Companies into one body.

Shortly after this welcome information, Pring sailed for Japan with two of his leaky vessels, having made an arrangement to be followed in a month by a united fleet of five English and five Dutch ships. These ships were intended partly, indeed, for trade, but their principal object appears to have been attacks upon Manila and Macao.