While the governor of Nagasaki was exchanging messages with director Doeff as to what could be the meaning of this occurrence, Captain Pellew, who was in search of the annual Dutch ship, stood directly into the harbor, without a pilot. The director, fearing to be himself taken, fled, with the other Dutchmen, to the governor’s house. “In the town,” he says, “everything was in frightful embarrassment and confusion. The governor was in a state of indescribable wrath, which fell, in the first instance, upon the Japanese officers for having returned without the Dutchmen, or information as to what nation the ship belonged to. Before I could ask him a question, he said to me, with fury in his face, ‘Be quiet, director; I shall take care that your people are restored.’ But the governor soon learned, to his consternation, that at the harbor guard-house, where a thousand men ought to have been stationed, there were only sixty or seventy, and those uncommanded.”
After a while came a letter from one of the detained Dutchmen, in these words: “A ship is arrived from Bengal. The captain’s name is Pellew; he asks for water and provisions.” The governor was little disposed to yield to this demand, and, about midnight, his secretary waited on Doeff to inform him that he was going to rescue the prisoners. Being questioned as to the manner how, he replied, “Your countrymen have been seized by treachery; I shall, therefore, go alone, obtain admission on board by every demonstration of friendship, seek an interview with the captain, and, on his refusal to deliver his prisoners, stab him first, and then myself.” It cost Doeff a good deal of trouble to dissuade the secretary and the governor from this wild scheme. The plan finally adopted was to manage to detain the ship till vessels and men could be collected to attack her.
The next afternoon one of the detained Dutchmen brought on shore the following epistle from the English captain: “I have ordered my own boat to set Goseman on shore, to procure me provisions and water; if he does not return with such before evening, I will sail in to-morrow early, and burn the Japanese and Chinese vessels in the harbor.” The provisions and water were furnished, though the Japanese were very unwilling to have Goseman return on board. This done, the two Dutchmen were dismissed.
The governor, however, was still intent upon calling the foreign ship to account. One scheme was to prevent her departure by sinking vessels, laden with stones, in the channel. The prince of Ōmura proposed to burn her, by means of boats filled with reeds and straw, offering himself to lead; but while these schemes were under discussion, the frigate weighed and sailed out of the harbor. The affair, however, had a tragical ending. Within half an hour after her departure, the governor, to save himself from impending disgrace, cut himself open, as did several officers of the harbor-guard. The prince of Hizen, though resident at Yedo at the time, was imprisoned a hundred days, for the negligence of his servants in the maintenance of the guard, and was also required to pay an annual pension to the son of the self-executed governor, whom Doeff, on again visiting Yedo in 1810, found to be in high favor at court.[87]
Up to 1809,[88] the ships from Batavia had arrived regularly; but from that time till 1818 neither goods nor news reached the lonely Dutchmen at Deshima. The first and second failure they bore with some resignation, looking confidently forward to the next year; “but, alas!” says our by this time very thirsty, and somewhat ragged, director, “it passed away without relief or intelligence, either from Europe or Batavia! All our provision from Java was by this time consumed. Butter we had not seen since the supply of 1807, for the ship “Goede Frouw” (good wife, but not good housewife) “had brought us none in 1809. To the honor of the Japanese, I must acknowledge that they did everything in their power to supply our special wants.... The inspector, Shige Dennozen, among others, gave himself much trouble to distil gin for us, for which purpose I supplied him with a still-kettle and a tin worm, which I chanced to possess. He had tolerable success, but could not remove the resinous flavor of the juniper. The corn spirit (whiskey), which he managed to distil, was excellent. As we had also been without wine since the supply of 1807, with the exception of a small quantity brought by the “Goede Frouw,” he likewise endeavored to press it for us from the wild grapes of the country, but with less success. He obtained, indeed, a red and fermented liquor, but it was not wine. I myself endeavored to make beer; and, with the help of the domestic dictionaries of Chaud and Bays, I got so far as to produce a whitish liquor, with something of the flavor of the white beer of Haerlem, but which would not keep above four days, as I could not make it work sufficiently, and had no bitter with which to flavor it. Our great deficiency was in the articles of shoes and winter clothing. We procured Japanese slippers of straw, and covered the instep with undressed leather, and thus draggled along the street. Long breeches we manufactured from an old carpet which I had by me. Thus we provided for our wants as well as we could. There was no distinction among us. Every one who had saved anything threw it into the common stock, and we thus lived under a literal community of goods.”
Great was the delight of our disconsolate director, when, in the spring of 1813, two vessels appeared in the offing of Nagasaki, displaying the Dutch flag, and making the private signals agreed upon in 1809. A letter was brought on shore, announcing the arrival from Batavia of Heer Waardenaar, Doeff’s predecessor as director, to act as warehouse master, of Heer Cassa, to succeed Doeff as director, and of three assistants or clerks. A Japanese officer and one of the Dutch clerks were sent on board. The Japanese speedily returned, saying that he had recognized Waardenaar, who had declined, however, to deliver his papers except to Doeff personally, and that all the officers spoke English, whence he concluded that the ships must be chartered Americans. Doeff went on board, and was received by Waardenaar with such evident embarrassment, that Doeff declined to open the package of papers which he presented, except at Deshima, whither he was accompanied by Waardenaar. This package being opened was found to contain a paper signed “Raffles, Lieutenant-governor of Java and its Dependencies,” appointing Waardenaar and a Dr. Ainslie commissioners in Japan. In reply to his question, “Who is Raffles?” Doeff learned that Holland had been annexed to France, and Java occupied by the English. But the annexation of Holland to France, Doeff patriotically refused to believe, and, in spite of all the efforts of Waardenaar to shake his resolution, he declined obedience to an order coming from a colony in hostile occupation.
His mind thus made up, Doeff called in the Japanese interpreters, and communicated to them the true state of the case. Alarmed for their own safety, they made to Waardenaar frightful representations of the probable massacre of the crews and burning of the vessels, should this secret go any further,—especially considering the hostile feelings towards the English, excited by the proceedings of the “Phaeton” in 1808; and finally the commissioners were persuaded to enter into an arrangement by which Doeff was to remain as director, and was to proceed to dispose of the cargoes as usual, first paying out of the proceeds the debt which, since 1807, the factory had been obliged to contract for its sustenance. Ainslee was also to remain as factory physician, but passing as an American.[89]
The cost of the cargoes, as given by Raffles, with freight and charges, amounted to two hundred and seventy-three thousand one hundred and fifty Spanish dollars. Out of the proceeds in Japan had to be paid forty-eight thousand six hundred and forty-eight dollars, debts of the factory; and twenty-five thousand dollars for copper to make up the cargo, bought of Doeff at a higher rate than was paid the Japanese. There were left at the factory four thousand six hundred and eighty-eight dollars in cash, and fifteen thousand dollars in woollens, and advances were made to persons on board, to be repaid in Batavia, to the amount of three thousand six hundred and seventy-eight dollars; thus swelling the whole expenses to three hundred and seventy thousand one hundred and sixty-four dollars; whereas the copper and camphor of the return cargo produced only three hundred and forty-two thousand one hundred and twenty-six dollars, thus leaving an outgo on the voyage of twenty-eight thousand and thirty-eight dollars, which the credits in Japan and Batavia were hardly sufficient to balance. These ships carried out an elephant as a present to the emperor; but, though it excited great curiosity, the Japanese declined to receive it, alleging the difficulty of transporting it to Yedo.
In 1814, a single ship was sent from Batavia with Heer Cassa again on board. He brought tidings of the insurrection in Europe against France, and relied upon the probable speedy restoration of Java as an argument for inducing Doeff to submit temporarily to the English,—an object which Sir Stamford Raffles had very much at heart. When Doeff refused, Cassa resorted to intrigue. He gained over two of the interpreters, through whom he endeavored to induce at Yedo a refusal to allow Doeff (whose term of office had already been so unusually protracted) to remain any longer as director. Doeff, however, got wind of this intrigue, frightened the two interpreters by threatening to tell the whole story to the governor of Nagasaki, and finally carried the day. He paid, however, rather dearly for his obstinacy, as Raffles sent no more ships, and director Doeff was obliged to pass three years more without either goods or news, cooped up and kept on short allowance in his little island, with the satisfaction, however, that there, if nowhere else in the world, the flag of Holland still continued to wave.
The Japanese government, obliged to advance the means for the support of the factory, did not leave the director entirely idle. He was set to work, with the aid of ten Japanese interpreters, in compiling a Dutch and Japanese dictionary, for the use of the Japanese men of science and the imperial interpreters. A copy of this work was deposited in the imperial library at Yedo; another, made by Doeff for his own use, lost, with all his other papers and effects, on his return to Europe. The original rough draft of the work was found afterwards, however, at Deshima, by Herr Fisscher, and having made a transcript, though less perfect than the original, he brought it home in 1829, and deposited it in the royal museum at Amsterdam.[90]