People: Samuel Wells Williams
Samuel Wells Williams, the official interpreter of the Perry expedition, was born in Utica, New York on September 22, 1812 to a Puritan family of New England ancestry. He first sailed out to Asia in 1833 when he took charge of the printing press for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions located in Canton, China. He briefly returned to the United States in 1845 to work on The Middle Kingdom, a seminal American study of China and its people. Upon publication of the book in 1848, he again left for Canton, where he supervised printing and editing of a monthly periodical for Protestant missionaries called, "Chinese Repository." At this time, Williams also began working on a dictionary and a grammar book of the Cantonese dialect, which he published later in his life.
On April 9th, 1953, he received a request from Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry to accompany him to Japan as interpreter. Williams felt unsure about accepting the request, for he knew he was not qualified. A pre-eminent Sinologist, Williams knew very little about Japanese language or its culture. When he conversed with Perry in person a few weeks later in Canton, the situation became even less clear. Perry insisted that he had never requested Williams’ service; rather, Williams had been invited to join the expedition because someone had told the Commodore that Williams was interested. Despite all these uncertainties, Williams joined the expedition. Perry had recruited a Dutch-Japanese interpreter named Anton Portman, and the Americans hoped that the Japanese would provide interpreters of their own with enough knowledge of Dutch and Chinese to carry on negotiations.
The Perry Expedition was not Williams’ first journey to Japan. In 1837, he had tried to enter the country on the Morrison, an American ship attempting to return seven shipwrecked Japanese sailors to the Bay of Yedo. The Morrison had been captained by Charles W. King, an American merchant who had sought to open up trade with Japan using the return of the Japanese men picked up in Macau as an excuse. Upon approaching the Bay, the Morrison had been driven away by Japanese canons, according to The Edict to Repel Foreign Vessels passed by the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1825. The Edict had been repealed in 1842 and had opened up the opportunity for Perry to enter the Japanese waters.
Although Williams spent most of his time in Japan observing rather than translating due to the fact that Japanese preferred to negotiate in Dutch, the Sinologist was instrumental in finalization of the Treaty of Kanagawa. Since there was no way to directly translate between Japanese and English, both sides relied on Chinese and Dutch to communicate, and Williams, along with Portman, played a critical role in the negotiation process. The final drafts of the Treaty were in the four different languages, and each country presented copies of the Treaty in Dutch and Chinese as well as in their respective native languages. Williams and a Japanese-Chinese translator named Yenoske worked together until the two men produced almost identical copies of the Treaty in Chinese. The only difference between Williams’ and Yenoske’s copy were the words, "Our Lord Jesus Christ," which the Japanese omitted with the permission of Commodore Perry.
After the Perry Expedition, Williams was appointed Secretary to the United States Legation in China, where he served for twenty-two years before becoming chargé d’affiares for the United States in Beijing. In 1877, he returned to the United States and worked as a professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Yale University. He died on February 16, 1884.
After his death, Samuel Wells Williams’ son, Frederick, placed his journal of the Perry expedition at the disposal of the Asiatic Society in Japan. In 1910, a Japanese company printed the journal in English. The expedition account remained unpublished in the United States until 1973.