Women carrying Rice
The Cultivation of Grain
When repaired and reloaded, the “Eliza” sailed again; but being dismasted in a storm, returned to refit, by reason of which she was detained so long, that the ship of 1799, also under American colors, and this time it would seem a real American, the “Franklin,” Captain Devereux, arrived at Nagasaki, and was nearly loaded before Captain Stewart was ready to sail. In this ship of 1799 came out, to be stationed as an officer at the factory, Heer Hendrick Doeff, who remained there for the next seventeen years, and to whose “Recollections of Japan,” written in Dutch, and published in Holland in 1835, we are greatly indebted for what we know of the occurrences in Japan during that period. It was, however, a very unfortunate circumstance, tending considerably to diminish the value of his book, that all his papers were lost by the foundering of the ship in which he sailed from Batavia for Holland, in 1819, the crew and passengers escaping barely with their lives; after which he allowed near fifteen years more to pass before he drew upon his memory for the materials of his book, which was only published at length to correct some misapprehensions, upon matters personal to himself, likely to arise, as he feared, from publications which preceded his own. His book, indeed, is mainly devoted to the defence of the Dutch nation and the affairs of the factory, against the strictures of Raffles and others, throwing only some incidental light upon the Japanese, the knowledge of whom, so far as it is accessible to residents at Deshima, had indeed been pretty well exhausted by previous writers.
Captain Stewart, refusing to wait for the other ship, set sail at once; but he did not arrive at Batavia. He reappeared, however, the next year at Nagasaki, representing himself as having been shipwrecked, with the loss of everything; but as having found a friend at Manila, who had enabled him to buy and lade the brig in which he had now come back, for the purpose, as he said, of discharging, out of the sale of her cargo, his debt due to the factory for the advances made for the repairs of his lost vessel. Heer Wadenaar, the director, saw, however, or thought he saw, in this proceeding, a scheme for gaining a commercial footing at Nagasaki, independent of the regular trade from Batavia. He caused the goods to be sold and applied to the discharge of Stewart’s debt; but he declined to furnish any return cargo for the brig, and he arrested Stewart, and sent him a prisoner to Batavia; whence, however, soon after his arrival there, he made his escape. He reappeared again at Nagasaki in 1803, still under the American flag, but coming now from Bengal and Canton, with a cargo of Indian and Chinese goods. He solicited permission to trade and to supply himself with water and oil. With these latter he was gratuitously furnished, but liberty to trade was refused, and he was compelled to depart; nor was anything further heard of him. Doeff seems to have supposed him a real American, and his last expedition an American adventure; but in a pamphlet on Java and its trade, published at Batavia in 1800, by Heer Hagendorp, and quoted by Raffles in his history of Java, Stewart is expressly stated to have been an Englishman from Madras or Bengal,—a statement which seems to be confirmed by his coming from Bengal on his last arrival at Nagasaki, and a fact as to which Hagendorp, who held a high official position, would not have been likely to be mistaken.[81]
The next circumstance of importance mentioned by Doeff was the arrival in October, 1804, in the harbor of Nagasaki, of a Russian vessel, commanded by Captain Krusenstern, and having on board Count Resanoff, sent as ambassador from the Czar, in somewhat late prosecution of the negotiation commenced by Laxman in 1792. This vessel brought back a number of shipwrecked Japanese,[82] and her coming had been notified to the governor of Nagasaki, through the medium of the Dutch authorities at Batavia and Deshima. There are two Russian narratives of this expedition, one by Krusenstern, the other by Langsdorff, who was attached to the embassy. Both ascribe the failure of the mission to the jealous opposition of the Dutch. Doeff, on the contrary, insists that he did everything he could—for by this time he was director—to aid the Russians, and that they had only to blame their own obstinacy in refusing to yield to the demands of the Japanese.
The dispute began upon the very first boarding of the Russian ship, on which occasion the Japanese officers took the Dutch director with them. Resanoff consented to give up his powder, but insisted upon retaining his arms; he also refused those prostrations which the boarding-officers demanded as representatives of the emperor. These points were referred to Yedo; but, meantime (Doeff says, through his solicitations) the ship with the arms on board was permitted to anchor. The Dutch and Russians were allowed to pass the first evening together, but afterwards they were jealously separated, though they contrived to keep up an occasional intercourse through the connivance of the interpreters. The annual ship from Batavia, this year Dutch, then at Deshima, was removed to another and distant berth. When she left, no letters were allowed to be sent by the Russians, except a bare despatch, first inspected by the governor, notifying the ambassador’s arrival, and the health of his company. Nor were the Dutch allowed in passing even to return the salutation of the Russians. The Dutch captain put his trumpet to his lips, but was under strict orders from the director not to speak a word,—a discourtesy, as they thought it, which the Russians highly resented. Of the Russians, none were allowed to land till two months and a half after their arrival, the matter having first been referred to Yedo. Finally, a fish-house, on a small island, closely hedged in with bamboos, so that nothing could be seen, was fitted up for the ambassador. All the arms were given up, except the swords of the officers and the muskets of seven soldiers who landed with the ambassador, but who had no powder. The ship was constantly surrounded by guard-boats.
After a detention of near six months, a commissioner from Yedo made his appearance, with the emperor’s answer. The ambassador, having been carried on shore in the barge of the prince of Hizen, was conveyed to the governor’s house in the norimono of the Dutch director, borrowed for the occasion; but all his suite had to walk, and, in order that they might see nothing, the doors and windows of the houses, wherever they passed, were closed; the street gates were fastened, and the inhabitants were ordered to keep at home. A second interview took place the next day, when a flat refusal was returned to all the ambassador’s requests, and even the presents for the emperor were declined.
In the midst of all these annoyances everything was done with the greatest show of politeness. The emperor’s answer, which Doeff was called upon to assist in translating into Dutch, placed the refusal to receive the ambassador or his presents on the ground that, if they were received, it would be necessary to send back an ambassador with equal presents, to which not only the great poverty of the Japanese was an obstacle, but also the strict law, in force for a hundred and fifty years past, against any Japanese subject or vessel going to foreign countries. It was also stated that Japan had no great wants, and little occasion for foreign productions, of which the Dutch and Chinese already brought as much as was required, and that any considerable trade could only be established by means of an intercourse between foreigners and Japanese, which the laws strictly forbade.
The ambassador did not depart without bitter reproaches against Doeff, whom he charged as the author of his miscarriage. He arrived at Okhotsk in May, 1805, afterwards passed over to Sitka, on the American coast, and the next year, having returned again to Okhotsk, despatched two small Russian vessels to make reprisals on the Japanese. They landed on the coast of Sakhalin, in the years 1806 and 1807, plundered a Japanese settlement, loaded their vessels with the booty, carried off several Kurile and two Japanese prisoners, and left behind written notifications, in Russian and French, that this had been done in revenge for the slights put upon Resanoff.[83]
In 1805 and 1806, Klaproth, the learned Orientalist, passed some months at Irkutsk, as secretary to a Russian embassy to China. He found the Japanese professorship, established there by Catherine II, filled by a Japanese, who had embraced the Greek religion, and, from him and the books which he furnished, Klaproth acquired such knowledge as he had of the Japanese tongue.