Story
The ship that did not come
Around 1628 a storyteller set down a little joke. In Nishijin, he wrote, where the silk weavers are, one year "the black ship did not come, and silk was dear."Everyone would have understood him. For three generations the arrival of the kurofune, the black ship, so called because its hull was painted black, was the event of the year in the ports of western Japan.It came in the summer monsoon and left with the autumn one, and while it lay at anchor the price of silk in the capital, the profits of the Kyushu lords and, in large part, the life of the Catholic mission depended on it.
From Tanegashima to Nagasaki
The trade began by accident. In 1543 Portuguese drifted ashore on Tanegashima, and Portuguese merchant ships and their junks began to call at the harbours of south-western Kyushu: , Yamagawa, Bōnotsu, and .In about 1557 the Portuguese obtained leave from the Chinese to settle at , which they made the relay point of a regular route linking , Malacca and Japan.Because the Ming government had banned its own subjects from sailing, and the wakō pirates had cut direct trade between China and Japan, the Portuguese could carry the trade between the two countries themselves.Japan wanted Chinese raw silk, silk cloth, gold and musk, and guns; China wanted Japanese silver.
The Portuguese crown gave the command of the Japan voyage as a reward to noblemen who had served it, with the title capitão-mor, captain-major. Each year he sailed in a licensed ship, financed largely by the merchants and the city council of Macao, who shared the profits.The route ran from Goa by Malacca to Macao, where European silver, olive oil, wine, spices and drugs were exchanged for silk and other goods for Japan; the ship then rode the southern monsoon to arrive in Japan in the sixth or seventh month, traded, and returned to Macao with the winds of late autumn.At first it was a large carrack, the nau; later the Portuguese used smaller galeota.The profit, Britannica says, was two or three times the outlay.
Ports and lords
Nipponica puts the link with the mission plainly: Portuguese trade was then always closely tied to the Catholic mission led by the Jesuits, so the trading ships naturally chose ports in the domains of lords who protected Christianity.Heibonsha's encyclopedia makes the same point from the lords' side: the lords of Kyushu, wanting guns, saltpetre and the profits of trade, allowed the missionaries to preach and worked to draw the ships to their own harbours.Ōbunsha calls the union of trade and mission the defining feature of the Nanban trade.
The first ship came to Hirado in 1550, the year preached there.In 1561 a brawl at Hirado left fourteen Portuguese dead, and the Portuguese began to look for another port.Brother had the bay of Yokoseura sounded, and opened it to them; Sumitada was baptised in 1563.After Yokoseura was burned, the ships went to Fukuda and to Kuchinotsu.In 1571 the first Portuguese ship entered the new harbour of , and from then on, after Sumitada gave the port to the Jesuits in 1580, the ships came there every year.
It was on the great ship of Captain-Major Leonel de Brito that the Visitor arrived at Kuchinotsu on 25 July 1579.It was on the great ships that the four boys of the sailed for Europe in 1582 and came home in 1590.The boys came home with paintings, maps and, above all, a European printing press with movable type, which Valignano had told them to bring.
How the mission lived
By Valignano's death in 1606 the mission had a college, a novitiate, seminaries and a press, with some 800 lay helpers.It lived partly on the silk trade between Macao and Nagasaki, as our page on puts it.From 1568 the merchants of Macao formed an association, the armação, which in principle sent 1,600 piculs of raw silk a year, about 96 tonnes, under contract with the captain-major.The Jesuits had a part in this trade, and their procurator in Nagasaki handled the mission's money and trade.João Rodrigues, who held the office from 1598 (or 1591; ), was made by his own commercial agent in Nagasaki in 1601, so that one Jesuit had a say in the price of every bale.It was, the page says, a great honour and a great danger.
The arrangement also gave the mission some protection. When expelled the missionaries in 1587, his edict said in its fourth article that the black ships came for trade, "a separate matter", and trade might go on.When he ordered the priests out of Nagasaki in 1597, he made exceptions for Rodrigues and a few men needed for the Macao trade.
The shadow on the trade
Honesty requires one dark page. Hideyoshi in 1587 also raised the sale of Japanese people abroad, and a Japanese account of his campaign, the Kyūshū godōza ki, describes men and women bought by the hundreds into the black ships.Our page on the edict records that the trade was real, carried on by Portuguese merchants against their own king's law, and against the protests of the Church: the Portuguese crown had forbidden the trade in Japanese slaves on 20 September 1570, and Bishop Martins and his successor Cerqueira excommunicated buyers of slaves, Cerqueira renewing the measure in 1598.
Control, then rupture
The Tokugawa shogunate moved to take the trade into Japanese hands. In 1604 it created the itowappu system: a guild of merchants of Sakai, Kyoto and Nagasaki, later joined by Edo and Osaka, bought the imported silk in a single lot at a fixed price and divided it among themselves, ending the Portuguese hold over the price.Dutch and English ships came to Hirado; Japanese red-seal ships sailed to Southeast Asia.
The great ship itself became the scene of violence. In January 1610 the carrack Nossa Senhora da Graça, called the Madre de Deus, was attacked off Nagasaki at Ieyasu's order by the Christian lord , and blown up by her own captain, André Pessoa.Rodrigues, the most exposed Westerner in Japan, was sent away, and his place as interpreter went to the Englishman William Adams.Harunobu's hopes of reward led to the Okamoto Daihachi affair of 1612, and to his own exile.
From 1633 the shogunate sent a series of orders to its Nagasaki magistrates. The first, of the second month of Kan'ei 10, forbade Japanese to go abroad except in licensed ships, offered rewards for informing on priests, ordered ships searched for them and fixed the silk price under the itowappu.The last, of the fifth day of the seventh month of Kan'ei 16 (1639), gave the reasons: that Christians had been smuggled in, that they had formed parties and plotted, and that goods had been sent to priests in hiding. "From now on the voyages of the galeota are forbidden," it said; any ship that came would be destroyed and those aboard beheaded.Yamakawa's dictionary dates the end of the Portuguese trade to that year and links the order to the Shimabara rising.
Macao did not give up. In 1640 it sent envoys, among them Luís Paes Pacheco, to ask for the trade to be restored. They reached Nagasaki in the fifth month, were held at Dejima, and on the sixteenth day of the sixth month were beheaded at with the crew.The trade that had begun on a beach at Tanegashima ended on the martyrs' hill.
Waiting for the ship
The great ship of the Macao trade was a merchant venture with all the mixed motives of its age. But for Japan's Catholics it was also the road by which the Gospel came and the line along which the mission was fed, and its memory survived as hope.
Where to go next
Read the pages on Ōmura Sumitada, Nagasaki and the 1580 cession, João Rodrigues, Arima Harunobu, the expulsion edicts of 1587 and 1614, and Bastian's prophecy.