The Invincible Armada in Japan
John S. Sewall, "The Invincible Armada in Japan," New Englander and Yale Review 53 (1890): 201-212.
In this article, written over thirty years after the Perry Expedition, Sewall reflected on the political meaning of the great event in which he had taken part. "The Invincible Armada in Japan" puts forward the idea of manifest destiny that propelled the nineteenth century imperialism of the United States. Manifest destiny and imperialism are not mentioned in the Official Narrative of the Perry Expedition, but "Invincible Armada" provides a blunt illustration of this American motivation.
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ARTICLE 10.—THE INVINCIBLE ARMADA IN JAPAN.
FIRST PAPER. [top]
JAPAN is the Emerald Isle of the East. Rather, it is a group of Emerald Isles, on the far-off edge of oriental continents; a land which its inhabitants call the "Empire of the Rising Sun." Its sun is rising fast. The morning of a Christian civilization is pouring new light over mountain and plain. So entire is the transformation that the Japan of forty years ago is forever past and gone. The scenes I am to record are now only reminiscences, and fast fading from the memories of men. Very few are left of those who witnessed them. Here and there a solitary survivor of the famous Expedition, as he reads of the marvelous strides the island empire is making in its breathless haste to overtake the civilizations of the West, cons over his treasured recollections, and realizes as no other can the immense contrast between the present and the past. In the summer of 1872 Mr. Mon, then Japanese minister at Washington, made a speech in good English before an educational convention in Boston; and I could hardly credit my senses as I listened and thought of the wondrous change. Less than twenty years before, I had witnessed the strange scenes which transpired on those mysterious shores, where by the laws of the realm it was death for a foreigner to set his foot; and here already was an educated Japanese gentleman addressing us in our own language! I could but dream over the novel scenes again; and am minded to set them down as they appeared to the eyes of a young captain's clerk.
I speak of the Japan Expedition under Commodore Matthew C. Perry. The interest felt in that resolute little armada was not confined to America. Over the secluded land it went to open had always hung a cloud of mystery; and that threw a sort of romantic halo over the fleet itself. Its progress was watched with eager curiosity not only by the nation whose flag it bore, but by all Europe as well. What was it for? What did this slender squadron of four ships hope to accomplish in those distant seas?
It was going to open Japan. The letter from our government to the Mikado was originally drafted in May 1851 by Daniel Webster, then Secretary of State, and was signed by President Fillmore. There it rested. Whether the Presidential signature proved too heavy a dignity, I do not know; but it never rose after that, and it never got to Japan. In November 1852 Edward Everett, who succeeded Mr. Webster, fished it out of its sarcophagus in the pigeon holes of the Department, and endowed it with new life. It was revised, rewritten, and resigned. Three copies were prepared, in English, Dutch, and Chinese. They were splendidly engrossed, and enclosed together in a sumptuous gold case. To make the whole still more Impressive to the Japanese mind, the gold case was enshrined in a rich coffer of rosewood. This letter asked of the Japanese court simply friendship and trade; trade, for the mutual benefit of the two countries, which might profitably share each other's productions; friendship, for the protection of our seamen who might be driven into their ports by storm or wrecked on their rugged coast. Those haughty islanders had sometimes welcomed such victims of the sea to a dungeon or a cage on shore; and this pastime was to be stopped at all hazards. The American flag is bound to protect the American seaman on every sea and in every port.
And it was high time that the Island Empire of the East should learn to treat the great Republic of the West with common courtesy, or at least with common humanity. Perhaps the expedition might not succeed in establishing commerce; but Commodore Perry was not to leave the waters of Japan until he had extorted a pledge of better manners.
Friday, the 8th of July, 1853. It seems a long while ago; but it was a red letter day through the fleet. It had been a voyage of adventure almost from the start. Our ship, the Saratoga, had been on the East India station, cruising up and down the China seas, for more than two years before the expedition arrived. We had chased pirates through the Gulf of Tonquin — where we caught no pirates, but did catch a typhoon that half tore us to pieces and nearly sent us to the bottom. We had visited the Madjicosimas, a beautiful group of islands some two or three hundred miles outside of Formosa; where we got another typhoon, and had the satisfaction that time of getting some pirates too. Our poor ship had laid her bones on a reef off Amoy-or rather her Chinese pilot did it, and as cleverly as though of all possible manoeuvres that was the one thing he was paid to do ; we only got clear by throwing our starboard battery overboard, with such other hamper as would lighten the ship; net loss by the operation two guns, a thirty-two pounder and a sixty-eight-the rest we recovered. We had interviewed the gentle ILew Chewans-a charmingly romantic episode in our common routine. That was followed by a still more unique exploration of the Bonins, a group of rugged islets a thousand miles further out in the bosom of the mighty Pacific; volcanic fragments thrown np ages ago, for the occupancy of wild hogs and goats, and a dozen human waifs who had drifted there from whale ships, and who represented as many different colors, countries, and religions.
But now at last we were at the gates of Japan. We had plowed through a solitary sea to reach it. "Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste," now lively and social with splendid lines of steamers and the multitudinous fleets of commerce, was lonely enough then. Not a sail did we meet in all the dreary distance. And when, Friday morning, the lookouts at the masthead echoed through the fleet the cry "land ho 1" it was a welcome relief. We rushed on deck. There it was at last. There it was, a dark silent cloud on the horizon, a terra incognita, still shrouded in mystery, still inspiring the imagination with an indefinable awe, just as it had years ago in our childhood. We came up with it rapidly. But the rugged headlands and capes still veiled themselves in mist, as if resolved upon secrecy to the last. About noon the clouds melted away, and there lay spread before us the Empire of the Rising Sun. It was a beautiful panorama, specially to eyes wearied with the monotony of China and the still deeper monotony of the rolling waves. How fair it was! A living picture of hill and dale, of green field and flowering hedge, of groves, orchards, bolles of verdure that tufted the lawns and mantled the highlands, of villages with streets a trifle wider and houses a little less densely packed than in China; and all defended by forts that were mounted with small barking cannon and stolid "quakers," and whose outer earth-works were long fences of black and white striped cotton flecked with the heraldic insignia of the province. On the waters were strange boats skimming about impelled by strange boatmen, uncouth junks wafted slowly along by the breeze, vanishing behind the promontories and reappearing in the distance, or lowering their cotton sails and dropping their four-fluked anchors in the harbor near us. And towering above all, forty miles inland, like a giant man-at-arms standing sentry over the scene, rose the snowy cone of Fujiyama, an extinct volcano thirteen thousand feet high, well named "the matchless mountain."
Our squadron comprised the steam frigates Mississippi and Susquehanna; the latter, by the way, in command of the Captain Buchanan who later commanded the Merrimac in the fight with the Monitor; and the sloops-of-war Saratoga and Plymouth. We mustered all told 61 guns and 9~7 men; no small force in those days, but now eclipsed and forgotten in the vaster armaments of the Civil War. Only a generation ago; and yet both countries have passed through changes so many and so great, that I seem to be writing of some distant event, like the armadas of the middle ages, or the buccaneering voyages of Cavendish and Drake.
Such a warlike apparition in Yedo bay made a terrible stir. Gulliver could not have startled the Lilliputians more effectively. Before our anchors were fairly down, a battery on Cape Kamisaki sent a trio of rockets or bombshells to inquire after our health; but they exploded harmlessly astern, and we sent no shells back to explain who we were. Our friends on shore knew something of gunnery evidently. How much, we could only conjecture; but our glasses showed us that not all the big black logs frowning down at us from their portholes were genuine. Some at least were "quakers," which could not be fired except in a general conflagration. And we were reminded of a droll scene in the harbor of Nagasaki some old Dutch traveller tells of, where a Japanese guard-boat was capsized in a squall, and most of her guns floated!
The alarm on shore rapidly spread. The "fire-vessels of the western barbarians" threw the whole country-side into a fever of excitement. The panic soon reached the metropolis. We did not know it then, but have learned since that "all Yedo was in a frightful state of commotion. With alarmed faces the people thronged to the shrines to pray, or hastily packed their valuables, to bury or send off to the houses of distant friends. In the southern suburbs thousands of houses were emptied of their contents and of the sick and aged. Many who could, left their homes to go and dwell with relatives in the country. Couriers on horseback had first brought details of the news by land. Junks and scull-boats from Uraga arrived hourly at Shinagawa, and foot-runners bearing dispatches panted in the government offices. They gave full descriptions of what had been said and done, the number, shape, and size of the vessels, and in addition to verbal and written statements showed drawings of the black ships and the small boats manned by the sailors.
By the time we had come to anchor, swarms of picturesque mandarins came off to challenge the strange arrival, and to draw around the fleet the customary cordon of gunboats. This looked like being in custody. Commodore Perry had not come to Japan to be put under sentries. He notified the mandarins that his vessels were not pirates and need not be watched. They pleaded Japanese law. He replied with American law. They still insisted, when he finally clinched the American side of the argument with the notice that if the boats were not off in fifteen minutes he should have to open his batteries and sink them. That was entirely convincing, and the guard-boats "stood not on the order of their going," but betook themselves to the shelter of the shore.
I well remember that still star-lit night which closed our first day in Yedo bay. Nothing disturbed its peaceful beauty. The towering ships slept motionless on the water, and the twinkling lights of the towns along the shore went out one by one. A few beacon-fires lighted on the hill tops, the rattling cordage of an occasional passing junk, the peal of a distant temple bell that came rippling over the bay at intervals during the night-these were to us the only tokens of life in the sleeping empire.[1]
*The author just quoted adds a supernatural element to the occasion; "For several years past unusual portents had been seen in the heavens, but that night a spectacle of singular majesty and awful interest appeared. At midnight the whole sky was overspread with a luminous blue and reddish tint, as though a flaming white dragon were shedding floods of violet sulphurous light on land and sea. Lasting nearly four hours, it suffused the whole atmosphere, and cast its spectral glare upon the foreign ships, making hull, rigging, and masts as frightfully bright as the Taira ghosts on the sea of Nagato. Men now living remember that night with awe, and not a few in their anxiety sat watching through the hours of darkness until, though the day was breaking, the landscape faded from view in the gathering mist." —Matthew Gaibraith Perry, pp. 320, 321.
This portent evidently made more impression on shore than it did on shipboard. By the Commodore's orders, to guard against any possible surprise, the starboard and port watches were kept on duty that night just as at sea, and all the officers, of whatever grade, had to take their turn. Thus it came to pass that for the first time in the voyage (being not a midshipman but the captain's clerk) I was put on watch and stationed in charge of the forecastle. But that was the first watch, from eight to twelve; and the only excitement was of a becalmed and badly frightened junk that came drifting athwart our bows, and with an immense deal of jabbering had to claw off as best she could. It was during the mid-watch that the firmament lighted up its aurora in honor of our arrival-but then I was sound asleep in my hammock, serenely dreaming of home.
A watchful eye was kept that night on all the silent shores. Nothing happened, however, and in the morning we were all alive and well. So too were the Japanese, who came around us during the day in great numbers, and were some of them admitted on board. Our first interviews with our oriental friends were a constant surprise to us; they were so well informed, so quick, so bright. They questioned us about the Mexican war, then recent, about General Taylor, and Santa Anna. One of them on board the Susquehanna asked the officer of the deck where he came from? "We came from America," was the reply. "O yes, I know," he said, "your whole fleet came from the United States. But did this ship come from Boston ?-or New York ?-or Philadelphia ?" He knew enough of our geography not to locate our principal sea-ports on our western prairies or among the Rockies; a reach of intelligence unattained by some of our European cousins — and apparently unattainable. One of them asked if the monster gun on the quarter deck was a "Paixhan gun ?" It was, but how could he have known its name? One of our midshipmen was taking the sun at noon, and laying down his sextant, a Japanese gentleman took it up and remarked (in Dutch-most of these conversations were carried on through our Dutch interpreter) "The best instruments of this kind are made in London." How could a Japanese know that? Not long after the treaty was signed, Mr. Townsend Harris,[2] our first consul in the Empire, was seeking a permit from the governor of Simoda to fire a salute on the twenty-second of February. The Prince of Ohinano happening in asked the subject of the conference. "Oh," said he, "that is Washington's birthday. A very great man-the greatest, I think, in the world. We know him very well in Japan."
Whence came all this knowledge? We naturally credited it to the Dutch, the only nation besides the Chinese which had for the last three centuries maintained its hold upon the good graces and the commerce of Japan. But it appears that the Japanese printers had been in the habit of reprinting in Japan the manuals and text-books our missionaries had prepared for the use of their schools in China. Their knowledge of America came straight from Dr. Bridgman's History of the United States, which had been published in China, and which had enjoyed what Dr. Bridgman had never dreamed of, a wide circulation in the Mikado's dominions. That book had already prepossessed them in our favor.
In their official relations however it was amusing to see how consistently and firmly the authorities clung to the time-honored policy of exclusion. It was a curious contest of steady nerve on one side, met by the most nimble evasion and subterfuge on the other. First they required the Commodore to go home; they wanted no letter from our President,nor any treaty. But the Commodore would not go home. Then they ordered him to Nagasaki, where foreign business would be transacted through the Dutch. But the Commodore declined to go to Nagasaki. If then this terrible barbarian would not budge and they must perforce receive his alleged letter, they would receive it without ceremony on board ship. But his Western Mightiness would not deliver it on board ship. Then they asked for tiiipe to consult the court at Yedo, and the Commodore gave them three days. What transpired at court in those fateful days may remain hidden forever; all we need to know is that our reluctant friends yielded at last, and the governor of Uraga notified the Commodore's aid, Lieutenant Contee, that the letter would be received, and that commissioners of suitable rank would come from Yedo for the purpose. Even after the preliminaries had been fully settled, the commissioners begged to receive the letter on board and not on shore. But the Rubicon was passed.
On the shore of a little semi-circular bay some three miles below our anchorage stood — and I suppose still stands — the village of Kurihama. That was the spot chosen for the meeting of the western envoy and the imperial commissioners; and there the Japanese erected a temporary hall of audience. It was a memorable scene. The two frigates moved slowly down and anchored off the harbor. How big, black, and sullen they looked, and full of pent-up force. Our little flotilla of fifteen boats landed under cover of their guns. We were not more than three hundred, all told, and found ourselves in the presence of four or five thousand Japanese troops drawn up on the beach to receive us, with crowds of curious spectators lining the honse-tops and grouped on the hills in the rear. But we were thoroughly armed, and could take care of ourselves in case of treachery.
I wish I were an artist. But having no pretensions in that line I cannot attempt to describe the emblazonry of those Japanese regiments. Their radiant uniforms and trappings and ensigns seemed to have been cut out of rainbows and sunsets; and the hundreds of boats fringing the shore heightened the effect with their fluttering plumage of flags. There was one thing that was not lively, and that was the prim dignity of the officers, who sat on camp stools in front of their gaudy troops.
The situation was unique, not likely to be forgotten by any who participated in it, either American or Japanese. It was a clear, calm summer morning. As our lines formed on the beach, the Commodore stepped into his barge to follow us. Instantly the "black fireships" were wrapped in white clouds of smoke, and the thunder of their sahite echoed among the hills and groves back of the village. To the startled spectators on shore they must have seemed suddenly transformed into volcanoes. And when the great man landed they gazed with wonder-for no mortal eye (no Japanese mortal) had been permitted to look upon hini before. During all the negotiations hitherto he had played their own game; he had veiled himself in the mystery that surrounds and magnifies the great. They could communicate with so lofty a being only through his subordinates. This was not mere child's play, nor an assumption of pomp inconsistent with republican simplicity. Commodore Perry was dealing with an oriental potentate according to oriental ideas. He showed his sagacity in doing so. I have always felt that his insight into the oriental character, his firmness and persistence, his stalwart physical presence and stateliness of manner, were prime factors in his success as a diplomat. He was just the man for our country to send on such a mission. On his arrival we marched to the hall through an avenue of soldiers. Leaving the escort drawn up without, the forty officers entered. We found ourselves within a broad covered court of cotton hangings, carpeted with white, with a scarlet breadth for a pathway leading along the center to the raised floor of the hall beyond. Many officials in state robes were kneeling on either side of this flaming track. Within the hail sat the princes of Idzu and Iwami, surrounded by their kneeling suite. They were both men of years, fifty or sixty perhaps; Idzu a pleasant, intellectual-looking man, Iwami's features small and sadly ravaged by the small-pox. The places opposite the commissioners were taken by the Commodore and his staff. Between the lines were the interpreters-on one side a Japanese, on his knees; on the other, the official interpreter of the squadron, Dr. Williams, erect and dignified.[3] Behind them stood a large scarlet lacquered chest, destined to receive the American missive for conveyance to court. Overhead drooped in rich folds the purple silk hangings, profusely decorated with the imperial arms and the national bird, the stork. I had scarcely noted these few particulars, and glanced at the genial face of Bayard Taylor as he stood behind the Commodore taking notes, when the ceremony began. It was very brief. A few prefatory words between the interpreters, and then at a signal entered two boys in blue, followed by two stalwart negroes bearing the aforesaid rosewood boxes which contained the President's letter and accompanying credentials. These were opened in silence and laid on the scarlet coffer. Iwami handed to the interpreters a formal receipt for the documents. The Commodore announced that he should return the following year for the answer. A brief conversation ensued about affairs in China, and the conference closed, having lasted not more than fifteen or twenty minutes. A short ceremony, and witnessed by not more than fifty or sixty persons out of the entire populations of both the great countries treating; but it "opened" Japan. It was the prologue to the drama of the next year. It brought together as neighbors and friends two nations that were the antipodes of each other, not only in position on the globe, but in almost every element of their two types of civilization.
This done, the squadron rested from its labors. A great weight was lifted off its mind. The next day, with lightened conscience, it set itself to the mechanical task of surveying and sounding the bay, exploring future harbors, locating islands and rocks, measuring distances and plotting charts. Our ship, anxious to do her full share, located one shoal with undoubted accuracy by running onto it, full sail. Fortunately the wind was light and the bottom smooth; no harm was done, to either ship or shoal. The Commodore paid us the doubtful compliment of naming it the "Saratoga spit," and that title it bears to this day. Some years later it acquired a tragic interest, when the U. S. S. Oneida, coming down the bay to sail for home, was run into in the night and sunk by the British mailship Bombay. She went down close by Saratoga spit, carrying with her a large number of her hapless crew.
A week was spent in these hydrographic operations. On the seventeenth of July, as silently as they had entered nine days before, the two frigates steamed out of the bay with the two sloops in tow. Outside they separated, and wended their several ways back to China. The Saratoga was ordered to winter at Shanghai in the north. The rest returned to Hong Kong, Macao, or Cumsingmun, in the south. How they fared, where they met, and what they did the next year, shall be told in another paper.
Bangor, Maine.
J. S. SEWALL.
ARTICLE 11.—THE INVINCIBLE ARMADA IN JAPAN.
SECOND PAPER. [top]
THE American fleet separated in a storm. If our Japanese friends could have known it, and could have seen our belabored ships scuttling away into the darkness and foam, they would have taken it for an interposition of the Wind-god. Surely the temerity of these western barbarians deserved to be visited with vengeance. The gale developed into a typhoon, the largest though by no means the most violent of the four encountered by the Saratoga during her four years' service in these uneasy seas. By a subsequent comparison of the log-books of several ships that were caught in different parts of its whirling circuit, it was found to have been more than a thousand miles in diameter, and to have swept over a wide area of the North Pacific Ocean. It raged for several days; and I believe every vessel in our fleet bot entangled in some part of its vortex. Our own ship, the Saratoga, left Yedo Bay under orders for Shanghai; and after the gale struck us, with battened hatches and sea-swept decks, we rode on the outer rim of that cyclone almost all the way back to China. It was riding a wild steed, as all sailors know who have tried it; but whatever the designs of the Wind-god, we reached Shanghai all the sooner for his ungracious aid. Six months we lay there at anchor off the consulate. It was the time of the Tae-ping rebellion. As if to give us further object-lessons in the oriental modus vivendi, one night the Tae-pings inside the walls rose and captured the city. The imperialist forces came down from Pekin to retake it. And thenceforward, about once in three days, we were treated to a Chinese battle-sometimes an assault by land, and anon a bombardment by the imperial fleet of fifty or sixty junks; all very dramatic and spectacular, celestial and yet entirely terrestrial, sometimes sanguinary, often funny.
In February, 1854, the American fleet again met in Yedo Bay. It went the first time with four vessels, this time with nine. The return of the western armada so greatly reinforced must have constrained the Japanese officials to do some hard thinking. It was the death knell of the old policy of exclusion. And yet how tenaciously they clung to it. Our second visit began with another chapter of the same refusals, evasions, subterfuges, with which they had tried to baffle our mission before. First, the Mikado's answer-if he should condescend to give one-would be given at Nagasaki, six hundred miles out "No," said the Commodore, "we can despatch business better at Yedo." But that could not be; Japanese law required that negotiations with foreigners be carried on at Nagasaki. So much the worse for Japanese law, but he was an American, under explicit orders from the American government. The officials concealed their chagrin, and making a virtue of necessity, admitted that a building was already in process of erection near Uraga, the little city off which the ships were anchored. "This is the stormy season," was the answer; "my squadron is not safe in a roadstead so exposed. It must move higher up." They protested with the utmost vigor; but this man could not be bluffed nor hoodwinked as some of their previous visitors had been. He shifted his anchorage to Yokohama, some twenty-five or thirty miles above, and within less than an hour's sail of Yedo. So powerful a force lying so near their great metropolis undoubtedly expedited the negotiations.
Meanwhile, as in all historical movements, other influences were at work behind the scenes. It was only another part of the mystery brooding over this strange land that things we did not suspect should be working for us in the dark. Not till years after did it transpire what an unknown friend the American fleet had in Nakahama Manjiro. The story of this young Japanese waif reads like a romance. In 1838, while out fishing with two other boys, their boat was carried out to sea by the current and wrecked on a desolate island. Here they lived a Robinson Crusoe life for half a year, and were then picked off by an American whaler and carried into Honolulu. Manjiro remained with his new friends, acquired the language, and ultimately reaching the United States, received an education. Another whaling voyage, a visit to the California mines, and he was back in Honolulu, anxious to revisit the scenes of his childhood. Nothing could deter him; the representations of his friend, Chaplain Damon-the distance and perils of the way, the risk of being beheaded for his pains in case he should succeed-no argument or obstacle could stand for a moment before his unutterable longing for home. The chaplain set to work; and in due time Manjiro and his two companions, now grown from lads to young men of twenty-five, were equipped with a whaleboat, a compass, a Bowditch's Navigator, and a sack of hard bread, and were put on board an American merchantman bound for Shanghai. A few miles from Lew Chew they and their whaleboat were launched and committed to the waves. A hard day's rowing brought them to the shore. Six months later they were forwarded in a trading junk to Japan. They did not land with impunity. An imprisonment of nearly three years was needed, before the authorities could decide whether it was a capital crime to be blown off the coast in boyhood and return in manhood. The year 1853 came round. The great Expedition had come and gone, and was to come again. Here was a prisoner in their dungeons who had actually lived in the country of the western barbarians, spoke their language, and knew their ways. It would not be wise to behead such an expert. Let him come to court and tell us what he knows. He was summoned accordingly, and the court made large drafts upon his stores of information. From a prisoner he was transformed into a noble, elevated to the rank of the Samurai, and decorated with the two swords. His whaleboat was made the parent of a whole fleet of boats constructed exactly like it, even to the utmost rivet. His Bowditch's Navigator he was required to translate; and a corps of native scribes under his direction made some twenty copies of it for use in the Japanese marine. One of these copies Manjiro afterwards gave to his friend, Chaplain Damon, and it was on exhibition at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. Dr. Damon had often inquired after the three adventurers, but had never learned their fate. Years after the treaty had been signed, a fine Japanese steamer, the Candinamara, anchored in the harbor of Honolulu, and the commander came on shore to call on Dr. Damon. It was no other than Manjiro, now an officer of high rank in the Japanese navy. The mutual inquiries and explanations can be imagined. "Where were you at the time of the Expedition ?" asked the chaplain. "I was in a room adjoining that in which the interview took place between Perry and the Imperial Commissioners. I was not allowed to see or to communicate with any of the Americans; but each document sent by Commodore Perry was passed to me to be translated into Japanese before it was sent to the imperial authorities: and the replies thereto were likewise submitted to me to be translated into English before they went to Commodore Perry." Manjiro was more than interpreter. His knowledge did not stop with the mere idioms of the language. He knew the American people, their ways, their manner of life, their wealth and commerce, the magnitude of their country, their power and national prestige. He was the divinely appointed channel through which American ideas naturally flowed into Japan. A mind endowed with faith can easily recognize a plan and purpose in the whole training of Manjiro, from the moment when he was driven from his country by what appeared to be only accident. It was a case of providential selection.
This chronicle will not attempt to detail the negotiations. They are recorded elsewhere and need not be repeated. I shall have fulfilled my commission if I keep within the range of personal reminiscence. While therefore the diplomats are at work on the vexed questions of the treaty, let us mingle with the curious throngs outside. The public sentiment of the hermit-nation was rapidly melting away before our neighborly advances. The people were glad of our coming. They flocked on board, and were received as friends. They admired our ships. They liked our dinners. It is not to be denied that some of them betrayed an especial weakness for our brandies and wines. On shore these courtesies were always reciprocated. During the discussions over the treaty many meetings were held; and on several of these occasions an entertainment was served by the Japanese in native style. Sidney Smith said of his countrymen, "An Englishman is like an oyster — you must get into him with a knife and fork." The same sentiment may be applied to our work in Japan. Diplomats who dine together will be likely to deliberate amicably. The treaty was the resultant of a good many dinners.
It was my good fortune to be present at one of these oriental banquets. It was the day when the Mikado's presents to our government were exhibited. They were not numerous, but they were fine specimens of the dainty art and exquisite skill of Japanese craft. Several pieces of cabinet lackerwork especially surpassed in beauty of design and finish anything of the kind we had then seen. The other presents were silks, crapes, silverware and furniture, together with samples of household utensils and artisans' tools. Many of my readers doubtless have seen them at the Patent Office in Washington, or at the National Museum, to which they were a few years ago transferred. When these samples of Japanese art had been sufficiently admired, our genial hosts led us to the banqueting hall and dinner was set before us. This was of course composed of native viands. served in native style, and eaten with native chopsticks. If you have not learned to eat in that particular method I would not advise you to begin. At least when you are hungry. The results are meagre, and feasting settles down into fasting. The dinner was abundant. To such Saxon sea- appetites as ours it was toothsome; and what with chopsticks, fingers, and our own penknives, we wrestled with it in masterly fashion. First they seated us in long rows around the hall on wooden benches, and then ranged similar benches before us, spread with scarlet tea-cloths. Upon these, in front of each guest, was set a small wooden lackered stand, perhaps a foot square, and protected by a rim which kept the dainty dishes from crowding each other off. Mine was filled with the most delicate porcelains, and I longed to appropriate the ceramics, rather than their contents. The viands consisted of soups, vegetables, oysters, crabs, boiled eggs, pickled fish, sea-weed jelly, and some other compounds which we were not quite sure we recognized, and so felt toward them that hesitating awe which the elder Mr. Weller experienced toward "weal pie." The drinks were saki, a strong liquor distilled from rice, like the samshu of China, and tea, served as always in the East without alloy of sugar and cream. To these edibles we applied ourselves with lively industry, and considering our disabilities with the chopsticks they proved remarkably evanescent. More saki and tea prepared us for a dessert of candied nuts, sugared fruit, sponge cake, and confectionery; and when this was done our funny hosts brought us each a sheet of brown paper to wrap and carry away what we had not eaten. Some of mine was still extant when I reached home seven months later.
This was a point of etiquette they observed themselves, and it occasionally developed droll results. One day at a dinner party on board the flag-ship a Japanese functionary fell in love with a fine frosted cake and a bottle of hock. According to custom he desired to take them home with him. But it was late, and his potations had already made him too unsteady to be a safe bearer of such freight; so the Commodore promised to send them by a special messenger in the morning. Morning came, but the cake was gone. Evasit, erupit. Some unhallowed tar had stowed it away inside for safe keeping. Here was a terrible dilemma. What if the negotiations themselves should be imperilled for lack of that cake! A sort of drum-head coroner's inquest was hastily summoned to. sit on the absent loaf. The verdict was, "Send the hock, but tell him that in America we present cake in the evening." The guest was perfectly satisfied, and by sundown another frosted loaf like the stolen one was concocted at the galley and sent on shore.
After the dinner our good-natured hosts conducted us to the beach. Among the presents was a large supply of rice for the fleet. This was put up in straw sacks or hurdles containing about one hundred and twenty-five pounds each. By the pile stood a company of athletes and gymnasts, chosen from the peasantry for their strength and size, and trained for the service and entertainment of the court. At a signal from their leader, who was himself a giant of muscle and fat, a sort of human Jumbo, they began transporting the rice to the boats. Some of them carried a hurdle on each hand above their heads, some would carry two laid crosswise on the shoulders and head, while others performed dexterous feats of tossing, catching, balancing them, or turning somersets with them. I saw one nimble Titan grasp a hurdle, fasten his talons in it, throw it down on the sand still keeping his hold, turn a somerset over it, throw it over him as he revolved, and come down sitting on the beach with the hurdle in his lap.
Later in the afternoon the same athletes entertained us with a wrestling match. A ring had been prepared in the area of the council-house, and the ground softened by the spade. The athletes came in, stripped to the usual loin-cloth and equipped with satin aprons gorgeously embroidered and fringed. Stationing themselves in a circle around the ring they performed with grave pomp a series of weird incantations and passes, then filed off to the rear and laid aside their satin finery for business. As their names were called by the master of ceremonies, a pair of them would advance, take their stand at opposite points of the ring, crouch on their heels, and repeat the passes. Then entering the ring and warily approaching each other, they again crouched, again gesticulated, and finally with a demoniac yell sprang at each other, for all the world like two monstrous frogs. They used the head, not the fist. They plunged into each other, capered about and dove into each other headlong, butted each other on the breast and shoulders with frantic violence. Some of them had raised large welts on their foreheads by frequent indulgence in this frisky pastime. They were soon exhausted, but very few thrown. An hour sufficed for these huge calisthenics; and when it was all over and the puffing giants had collapsed, the ring smoked with the dust of battle, and looked as if it had been trampled and torn by a herd of elephants.
A more agreeable spectacle that afternoon was the sight of the first railroading in Japan. Among the presents to the Mikado we carried a railroad; not to be sure a completely equipped railroad with mortgage bonds and preferred stock, but so much of the genuine article as is represented by its roadbed and rolling stock. To the rear of the council-house the mechanics of the squadron had laid the circular track, and thither we all repaired. There stood the locomotive and car, exquisite specimens of American workmanship, the engine already hissing and fuming, impatient to be off, the car as sumptuous as the richest woods and the finest art could make it. The whole was constructed on a scale of one-fourth size, and so nothing larger than a French doll or a Newfoundland dog could enter the dainty rosewood door. The engineer had to sit on the tender and stow his legs alongside the engine. And when a timid Japanese was finally induced to take a John Gilpin ride, he had to sit on the roof of the car, and bestow his feet on the tender. Yon can imagine how he clung to the eaves of the car, and how his robes fluttered and his teeth chattered, as he flashed around the circle. He thought he was going to be a 'dead-head,' and so, to be sure, he was. This miniature railroad was long kept as a sort of imperial toy. A large store-house was built for its safe-keeping; and every little while they would relay the track, and parties of princes and courtiers would go dashing around on a sort of circular picnic.
The telegraph was more of a puzzle to them than the steam engine. We carried them a line fifteen miles in length, of which half a mile was set up as a sample. They would go to one end, deliver a message, and then trot mystified to the other end, only to find their message safely arrived and waiting for them. It was just Yankee magic. But they have mastered it themselves now, and the Empire is interlacing itself all over with an ever increasing web of wires and rails. Another of our presents was a brass Dahlgren howitzer. While Mr. Townsend Harris was our representative at Yedo, they had already cast a thousand pieces like it, and had mounted them in their fortifications. Their salutes on Washington's birthday and the 4th of July were appropriately fired from these guns.
After many meetings and much elaborate discussion, the negotiations were finally completed. The Treaty was signed on Friday, March 31, 1854. Our ship, as the one which had been longest in commission, was selected to bring it away. The bearer of despatches, Capt. Adams, came on board; and on Tuesday, April 4, the Saratoga spread her white wings for home. At Honolulu Capt. Adams left us and brought the treaty home by way of Panama, reaching Washington some time in June. The Saratoga pursued her voyage, calling at beautiful Tahiti, rounding Cape Horn in a dashing gale the mid-day of winter, July 15, dropping in at Pernambuco for supplies, and reaching Charlestown Navy Yard in September-having been absent from the country just four years.
The marvelous transformations that have since revolutionized the island empire I need not recount. We felt our way into her harbors in the dark. Now, and for twenty years past, every headland and cape has been surmounted by a lighthouse, truthful token to the approaching mariner of the cordial welcome and help that await him. "Where cannon was cast to resist Perry now stands the Imperial Female Normal College. On the treaty grounds rises the spire of a Christian church."[4] The famous edict against Christianity is abolished. The first missionaries landed in 1859; now nearly two hundred are at work in different parts of the country. Some of them in the early days resided in Buddhist temples, rented to them by priests, who to give them accommodation moved out with all their idols. We may accept it as a happy omen of the vast educational and spiritual transformations which are even now cleansing those heathen shrines and illumining them with the radiance of the Cross. The great Island Kingdom of the Orient is in the golden dawn of her renewal; and now, more than ever, deserves to wear the diadem of her ancient title, "The Empire of the Rising Sun."
John S. Sewall.
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1. The author just quoted adds a supernatural element to the occasion; "For several years past unusual portents had been seen in the heavens, but that night a spectacle of singular majesty and awful interest appeared. At midnight the whole sky was overspread with a luminous blue and reddish tint, as though a flaming white dragon were shedding floods of violet sulphurous light on land and sea. Lasting nearly four hours, it suffused the whole atmosphere, and cast its spectral glare upon the foreign ships, making hull, rigging, and masts as frightfully bright as the Taira ghosts on the sea of Nagato. Men now living remember that night with awe, and not a few in their anxiety sat watching through the hours of darkness until, though the day was breaking, the landscape faded from view in the gathering mist." —Matthew Gaibraith Perry, pp. 320, 321.
2. A gentleman I never had the pleasure of meeting. I do not even know whether he is still living. But I never mention his name without a tribute of respect, for his sagacity, his common sense, and his unfailing patience and good nature in meeting the difficulties of his novel position.
3. The late learned S. Wells Williams, LL.D., then and for many years missionary at Canton, for the last few years of his life Professor of Chinese at Yale University; author of The Middle Kingdom. An admirable memoir has lately been published by his son.
4. Griffis. Matthew Calbraith Perry, 325.