“M. Fillmore.
“By the President:
“D. Webster, Secretary of State.”
[116] These islands lie between 26° 30´ and 27° 45´ north latitude, about five hundred miles west of Lew Chew and the same distance south of Yedo, on the direct route from the Sandwich Islands to Shanghai, three thousand three hundred miles from the former, and about one thousand one hundred from the latter. They consist of three groups. The largest island is about forty miles in circumference. There are nine others, diminishing down to five or six miles of circumference, and about seventy rocky islets, all evidently of volcanic origin. The extent of the whole is about two hundred and fifty square miles. The name is Japanese, and signifies “uninhabited,” descriptive of the state in which they were found when discovered by a Japanese vessel in 1675; and, except some ineffectual attempts at penal colonization by the Japanese, so they remained till occupied, in 1830, by a colony from the Sandwich Islands, partly Americans and Europeans, and partly Sandwich Islanders. They had been visited and claimed for the British crown in 1827, by Captain Beechey, in the surveying ship “Blossom.” The larger ones are fertile and well watered, but scantily wooded. The largest, called Peel’s Islands by Beechey, has a good harbor, and here Perry bought a piece of land from a squatter for a coal depot.
[117] There is another province of the same name in the island of Shikoku. That above-mentioned is otherwise called Bōshū.
[118] The squadron had as Chinese interpreter Mr. S. W. Williams, an American, long resident at Macao, one of the editors of the “Chinese Repository,” and one of the party of the “Morrison,” to carry back the shipwrecked Japanese, from whom he had obtained some knowledge of that language.
[119] The account of this visit is drawn partly from Commodore Perry’s official reports, and partly from the letters of Lieutenant Contee and others, published in the newspapers.
[120] Mistake for Kanagawa.—Edr.
[121] Rather on their heels.
[122] The number of American officers present at these interviews was from twenty to fifty.
[123] The treaty is dated at Kanagawa, probably because it was the nearest town. See Kämpfer’s mention of it, p. 74. Mr. Bidinger, chaplain of the squadron, in one of his excursions on shore, managed to reach and pass through it. He found it a large town.
[124] See, as to the roofs in Hakodate, p. 306, and employ these two passages to reconcile the discrepancy noticed in vol. i, p. 392, note.