William Adams (samurai)
William Adams (September 24, 1564 – May 16, 1620), also known in Japanese as Anjin Sama (Jp:按針様, lit. "Mr Pilot") and Miura Anjin (Jp:三浦按針, lit. "The pilot of Miura"), was an English navigator who went to Japan, and is believed to be the first Briton ever to reach Japan.
Early life
William Adams was born at Gillingham, in Kent, England. After losing his father at the age of 12, he was apprenticed to shipyard owner Master Nicholas Diggins at Limehouse for the seafaring life. He spent the next 12 years learning shipbuilding, astronomy and navigation afterwards entering the British navy.
After serving in the Royal Navy under Sir Francis Drake, Adams became a pilot for the company Barbary Merchants. During this service, he took part in an expedition to the Arctic that lasted about two years in search of a Northeast Passage along the coast of Siberia to the Far East.
- "... I am a Kentish man, born in a town called Gillingham, two English miles from Rochester, one mile from Chattam, where the King's ships do lie: from the age of twelve years old, I was brought up in Limehouse near London, being Apprentice twelve years to Master Nicholas Diggins; and myself have served for Master and Pilot in her Majesty's ships; and about eleven or twelve years have served the Worshipfull Company of the Barbary Merchants, until the Indish traffic from Holland began, in which Indish traffic I was desirous to make a little experience of the small knowledge which God had given me. So, in the year of our Lord 1598, I was hired for Pilot Major of a fleet of five sails, which was made ready by the Dutch Indish Company ..." (1611 Letter, William Adams)
Expedition to the Far East
Attracted by the Dutch trade with India, Adams, then 34, shipped as pilot major with a five-ship fleet despatched from the Texel to the Far East in 1598 by a company of Rotterdam merchants.
He set sail from Rotterdam in June 1598 on the Hoop and joined up with the rest of the fleet (Liefde, Geloof, Trouw and Blijde Boodschap) on June 24.
The vessels, boats ranging from 75 to 250 tons and crowded with men, were driven to the coast of Guinea, where the adventurers attacked the island of Annabon for supplies, and finally reached the straits of Magellan. Scattered by stress of weather the following spring the Liefde with Adams on board, and the Hoop met at length off the coast of Chile, where the captains of both vessels lost their lives in an encounter with the Indians.
Adams changed ships to the Liefde (originally Erasmus because of the wooden figurehead of Erasmus on her bow) and waited for the other ships at Santa Maria Island. Only the Hoop arrived. It was late November 1599 when the two ships sailed westwardly for Japan. The Trouw later turned up in Tidore, where the crew was eliminated by the Portuguese in January 1601.
Arrival in Japan
In fear of the Spaniards, the remaining crews determined to sail across the Pacific. On this voyage a typhoon claimed the Hoop in late February 1600, but in April 1600 the Liefde with a crew of sick and dying men, was brought to anchor off the island of Kyushu, Japan.
When the Liefde made landfall on April 19, 1600, off Bungo (present-day Usuki, Oita Prefecture) only nine of the remaining 24 crew members could even stand. The Portuguese Jesuit priests claimed that Adams' ship was a pirate vessel, and that the crew should be cruxified as pirates. The ship was seized, and the sickly crew was imprisoned at Osaka Castle on orders by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the daimyo of Mikawa who became Shogun in 1603.
Adams met with Ieyasu in Osaka three times between May and June 1600. He was questioned by Ieyasu, then a guardian of the young son of the Taiko (Toyotomi Hideyoshi), the ruler who had just died. Adams knowledge of ships and shipbuilding, and his nautical smattering of mathematics, appealed to Ieyasu.
- "Coming before the king, he viewed me well, and seemed to be wonderfuly favorable. He made many signs unto me, some of which I understood, and some I did not. In the end, there came one that could speak Portuguese. By him, the king demanded of me, of what land I was, and what moved us to come to his land, being so far off. I showed unto him the name of our country, and that our land had long sought out the East Indies, and desired friendship with all kinds and potentates in way of merchandise, having in our land diverse commodities, which these lands had not .... Then he asked whether our country had wars? I answered him yeah, with the Spaniards and Portugals, being in peace with all other nations. Further, he asked me, in what I did believe? I said, in God, that made heaven and earth. He asked me diverse other questions of things of religion, and many other things: as what way we came to the country. Having a chart of the whole world, I showed him, through the Strait of Magellan. At which he wondered, and thought me to lie. Thus, from one thing to another, I abode with him till midnight." (William Adams's letter to his wife)
Adams further explained that Ieyasu finally denied the Jesuit's request for punishment, on the ground that:
- "we as yet had not done to him nor to none of his land any harm or damage; therefore against Reason or Justice to put us to death. If our country had wars the one with the other, that was no cause that he should put us to death; with which they were out of heart that their cruel pretence failed them. For which God be forever praised." (William Adams's letter to his wife)
Japan's first western-style sailing ships
In 1604, Ieyasu ordered Adams and his companions to build a western-style sailing ship at Ito, on the east coast of the Izu Peninsula. An 80-ton vessel was completed and the Shogun ordered a larger ship, 120 tons, to be built the following year (both were slightly smaller than the Liefde, which was 150 tons). According to Adams, Ieyasu "came aboard to see it, and the sight whereof gave him great content". The ship, San Buena Ventura, was lent to shipwrecked Spanish sailors for their return to Mexico in 1610.
Following the contruction, Ieyasu said that he invited Adams to visit the palace whenever he liked, and "that always I must come in his presence" (Letters).
Other survivors of the Liefde were also rewarded with favours and even allowed to pursue foreign trade. Although Adams could not receive permission for himself to leave Japan, he obtained that the Liefde's Captain Jacob Quaeckernaeck and the treasurer Melchior van Santvoort could leave in 1604 on a Shogun-licensed Red Seal Ship to go to Patani in Southeast Asia. Melchior van Santvoort together with another crew Jan Joosten van Lodensteijn reportedly made a fortune in trade between Japan and Southeast Asia. Both of them were reported by Dutch traders in Ayutthaya, onboard richly cargoed junks, in early 1613. William Adams also is recorded as having chartered Red Seal Ships during his later travels to Southeast Asia.
The first foreign samurai
The Shogun took a liking to Adams, and made him a revered diplomatic and trade adviser and bestowing great privileges upon him. Ultimately, Adams became his personal advisor on things Western, and after a few years replaced the Jesuit Padre João Rodrigues as his official interpreter. Padre Valentim Carvalho wrote: "After he had learned the language, he had access to Ieyasu and entered the palace at any time".
Adams had a wife and children in England, but Ieyasu had forbidden the Englishman to leave Japan. He was presented with two swords representing the authority of a Samurai. The Shogun decreed that William Adams the pilot was dead and that Miura Anjin (三浦按針), a samurai, was born. This made Will's wife in England, in effect, a widow, and "freed" Adams to serve him on a permanent basis. Adams also received the title of hatamoto (bannerman), a high-prestige position as a direct retainer in the Shogun's court.
He was provided with generous revenues: "For the services that I have done and do daily, being employed in the Emperor's service, the emperor has given me a living" (Letters). He was granted a fief, in Hemi (Jp:逸見) within the boundaries of present-day Yokosuka City, "with eighty or ninety husbandmen, that be my slaves or servants" (Letters). His estate was valued at 250 koku (measure of the income of the land in rice, about five bushels). He finally wrote "God hath provided for me after my great misery" (Letters).
This gave him the means to marry Oyuki, the daughter of Magome Kageyu, a noble samurai and official of Edo Castle, which stood in present day Tokyo. Anjin and Oyuki had a son called Joseph, and a daughter, Susanna. The Anjin, however, found it hard to rest his feet and was constantly on the road. Initially, it was in the vain attempt to organize an expedition in search of the Arctic passage that had eluded him previously.
Adams had a high regard for Japan, its people, and its civilization:
- "The people of this Land of Japan are good of nature, curteous above measure, and valiant in war: their justice is severely excecuted without any partiality upon transgressors of the law. They are governed in great civility. I mean, not a land better governed in the world by civil policy. The people be very superstitious in their religion, and are of divers opinions." (William Adam's letter)
Religious rivalries
Adams was seen as a rival by the Portuguese and Catholic religious orders in Japan. Catholic priests insisted that he was using his influence on Ieyasu to discredit them:
- "In his character of heretic, he constantly endeavoured to discredit our church as well as its ministers" (Padre Valentim Carvalho).
He also apparently warned Ieyasu against Spanish approaches, explaining that they typically try to establish Catholic converts as a prelude to invading a country.
Establishment of an English trading factory
In 1611 news came to him of an English settlement in Bantam, Indonesia, and he sent them a letter, asking them to give news of him to his familly and friends in England, and enticing them to engage in trade with Japan, in which "the Hollanders have here an Indies of money" (Adams's letter to Bantam).
In 1613 Captain John Saris arrived at Hirado in the ship Clove with the object of establishing a trading factory for the British East India Company (Hirado was already a trading post for the Dutch East India Company (the "VOC")).
Adams met with Saris's ire over his praise of Japan and adoption of Japanese customs:
- He persists in giving “admirable and affectionated commendations of Japan. It is generally thought amongst us that he is a naturalized Japaner.” John Saris
In Hirado, Adams refused to stay in English quarters, and instead resided with a local Japanese magistrate. It was also commented that he was wearing Japanese dress and spoke Japanese fluently.
Adams travelled with Saris to Shizuoka, where they met with Ieyasu at his principal residence in September, and then continued to Kamakura, where they visited the famous Buddha (the 1252 "Daibutsu"... on which the sailors etched their names), and then Edo, where they met with Ieyasu's son Hidetada (who gave Saris two varnished suits of armor for King James I, today housed in the Tower of London).
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On their way back, they visited again Ieyasu, who confered trading priviliges to the British, giving them "free license to abide, buy, sell and barter" in Japan. They headed back to Hirado on October 9, 1613.
On this occasion, Adams asked for, and obtained, Ieyasu's authorization to return to his home country. He ultimately declined Saris's offer to bring him back to England however: "I answered him I had spent in this country many years, through which I was was poor... [and] desirous to get something before my return". His true reasons seem to lie rather with his profound antipathy for Saris: "The reason I would not go with him was for diverse injuries done against me, the which were things to me very strange and unlooked for." (William Adams letters)
He accepted an employement with the newly founded Hirado trading factory, signing a contract on November 24, 1613, by which he became an employee of the East India Company, for the yearly salary of 100 English Pounds, more than double the regular salary of 40 Pounds earned by the other factors at Hirado. Adams was to take a leading part, under Richard Cocks, and together with six other compatriots, in the organization of this new English settlement.
Participation in Asian trade
Adams political prominence seems to have disminished after the death of Ieyasu in 1616.
The latter part of his life was spent in the service of the English trading company, for whom he undertook a number of voyages to Siam in 1616, and Cochin China in 1617 and 1618.
He died at Hirado, north of Nagasaki on May 16, 1620 at the age of 56, some three years before the dissolution of the English factory.
Adams's legacy
His Japanese title was Anjin-sama, and his memory was preserved in the naming of a street in Yedo, Anjin Cho (Pilot Street), where he used to have a house, and by an annual celebration on June 15 in his honour.
Also, in the city of Itō, Shizuoka, "The Miura Anjin Festival" is held all day on August 10.
Today, both Itō and Yokosuka share twined city status with Adam's birth town of Gillingham.
Bibliography
- England's Earliest Intercourse with Japan, by C. VV. Hillary (1905)
- Letters written by the English Residents in Japan, ed. by N. Murakami (1900, containing Adams's Letters reprinted from Memorials of the Empire of Japan, ed. by T. Rundall, Hakluyt Society, 1850)
- Diary of Richard Cocks, with preface by N. Murakami (1899, reprinted from the Hakluyt Society ed. 1883)
- R. Hildreth's Japan (1855)
- J. Harris's Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca (1764), i. 856
- Voyage of John Saris, edited by Sir Ernest M. Satow (Hakluyt Society, 1900)
- Asiatic Society of Japan Transactions, xxvi. (sec. 1898) pp. I and 194, where four more hitherto unpublished letters of Adams are given;
- Collection of State Papers; East Indies, China and Japan. The MS. of his logs written during his voyages to Siam and China is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
- Samurai William: The Adventurer Who Unlocked Japan; Giles Milton (UK 2002: ISBN 0-340-79468-2)
- William Adams and Early English Enterprise in Japan, by Anthony Farrington and Derek Massarella [1]
- Adams the Pilot: The Life and Times of Captain William Adams: 1564-1620, by William Corr, Curzon Press,1995 ISBN 1873410441
In James Clavell's Shogun, the fictional heroics of John Blackthorne are loosely based on Adams' exploits.