From Gillingham to the Strait of Magellan
William Adams (ウィリアム・アダムス) was born at Gillingham, two miles from Rochester in England.From the age of twelve he served a twelve-year apprenticeship to Nicholas Diggins at Limehouse, then worked as master and pilot in the Queen's ships and spent eleven or twelve years with the Barbary merchants.In 1598 he sailed as pilot major of a Dutch fleet of five ships under Jacques Mahu, which left Holland on June 27 that year.His ship was the Liefde, also recorded as the Erasmus.The voyage by the Strait of Magellan lasted twenty-two months and cost the lives of more than a hundred men.
Arrival in Bungo, 1600
The Liefde reached Bungo (豊後) in April 1600, towed into harbour by local boatmen.Only about two dozen men were still alive, and Adams wrote that just five of them could still walk.A few days after the landing, a Portuguese Jesuit and other Portuguese reported the crew as pirates, so that the men expected to be crucified.The ship carried cloth, mirrors, artillery, arquebuses and gunpowder, and the local lord judged its crew to be soldiers and corsairs driven to Japan by storm.Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川家康) confiscated the ship and had its eighteen guns and ammunition taken out.
Adams first met him at Osaka (大阪) on May 12, 1600 (old style), about three weeks after he reached Japan.Through an interpreter the ruler asked about the pilot's country, its wars and his religion; the pilot answered that he believed "in God, that made heauen and earth", and traced his route by the Strait of Magellan on a world chart.Twice Ieyasu sent him back to prison.The Jesuits and Portuguese pressed for the crew to be executed as thieves and robbers.The ruler refused, saying the Dutch had done no harm to him or his land, and that wars between European nations were no reason to kill them.
In the shogun's service
Adams stayed in Japan for the rest of his life and was in high favour with two shoguns.He built Ieyasu a ship of about 80 tons, taught him some geometry and mathematics, and received a yearly stipend with a daily allowance of rice.The ruler would not let him go home, though in 1605 he allowed the ship's captain, Quaeckernaeck, and the merchant Santvoort to leave with the shogun's licence for the Dutch to trade.In a letter the pilot asked that his wife and two children at home be told he was alive.For his service he was given "a living, like unto a lordship in England, with eighty or ninety husbandmen", a favour he says no foreigner had received before.
Adams had free entry at court.Officials leaned on him as interpreter and adviser: in 1611 Honda (本多), called Conzoukedono in the Spanish report, set aside both the usual Japanese interpreter and an able Franciscan and called on him instead.In 1604 Ieyasu offered him as pilot to bring a Spanish ship round to Edo (江戸), as he had just brought another.In 1609 he obtained access to the port of Hirado (平戸).He taught European shipbuilding and helped to open the way for Dutch and English trade.
Adams and the Catholic mission
Catholic missionaries regarded Adams as gifted but hostile to their work.In 1605 a Jesuit from Nagasaki (長崎) visited him and his Dutch companions at Edo, offering a safe-conduct out of Japan for fear they would spread heresy.He declined, saying Ieyasu would not let him leave.Asked in 1612 why the Spaniards were charting the coasts, he said that in Europe this would be a hostile act, and recounted Spanish and Portuguese conquests in America and the Indies.He also said that Catholic religious had been expelled from much of northern Europe, though he added that the English and Dutch saw no reason to make war on states for not being Christian.Bishop Cerqueira reported in 1612 that an English pilot showed the ruler on a world map the countries that had expelled the religious, and that the ruler replied it would be nothing new if he expelled them too.
In his own letters Adams blamed the Jesuits and friars for leading Toyotomi Hideyori (豊臣秀頼) into war with promises of miracles, and recorded that Ieyasu then ordered all Catholic clergy out of the country.At Uraga (浦賀) a young friar argued with the pilot that faith could move mountains, and was told that all miracles had ceased long ago.The friar then tried to walk on the sea before thousands of people, holding a wooden cross, and would have drowned but for the boat of the Dutchman Melchior van Santvoort.Sent back to Manila, he was imprisoned by the bishop there.
The same Jesuit report that called Adams a heretic who constantly tried to discredit the Church also said that he was friendly to the Spaniards and nursed their sick in his house, "but on the subject of the Catholic faith he was inaccessible" (translated).His Christian host at Miyako (都), Pierre Guzzano, accused him of stirring up the ruler against the missionaries, and the missionaries' letters made the same charge.
The English factory and the last years
Captain John Saris arrived in 1613 and obtained trading privileges from the shogun and freedom for Adams to leave.The pilot chose instead to enter the service of the English East India Company on November 24, 1613, at £100 a year, after first asking for £120.He had advised settling at Uraga, but Saris chose Hirado.Adams kept agencies at Edo, Shizuoka (静岡), Kyoto (京都) and two other towns, and wore two swords.When officials ordered the cross removed from an English ship's flag in 1613, the captain had him defend and keep the custom.In 1615 Richard Cocks, head of the English factory, wrote that the shogun esteemed him much.
Suspicion fell on him as the persecution tightened.In September 1616 there were reports that priests were hiding at his houses at Uraga and Hemi (逸見), and Adams warned his people to take care as they valued their lives.He died at Hirado in 1620, without seeing England again.Cocks called his death a great loss, because of his influence with two emperors.His will, kept in the East India Company archives, is written in Japanese and divided his estate equally between his English family and his Japanese family.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- The date of arrival. Murdoch says the Liefde was towed into a Bungo harbour on April 19, 1600,Pagès gives April 11, and Delplace's note gives a garbled date.
- The number of survivors. Murdoch gives 24,Valignano about 24 or 25,Pagès about 25 of 110, and a Spanish report 18 or 20 of 170.
- Nationality. Pagès calls Adams English by birth on one page and a Scot on the next.
- His part in the expulsion of the missionaries. Pagès blames him for eighteen years of anti-Catholic influence and Delplace repeats the missionaries' charges;Cary says only that Adams "is said to" have told Ieyasu that priests had been driven out of Protestant countries, though he thinks the account of the soundings probable.
- A letter by a nephew of Fr Sebastião Vieira claims that Adams gave a daughter to the shogun and, with a Dutchman, urged the shogun to root out the Catholic religion; the claim is secondhand.
- John Saris wrote that Adams was fit only to be master of a junk and favoured the Dutch and Spaniards over his own nation; Riess and Rundall judged Saris wrong and unjust.
- A second ship of 120 tons, said to have been lent in 1609 to the shipwrecked governor of Manila, appears only in a fact flagged as disputed.