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The Black Ships [Scroll 2]

Heather Velez, Brown '05

"There was a crowd of people there, all stirred up and making guesses about the burning ships on the horizon. Then those ships came nearer and nearer, until the shape of them showed us they were not Japanese ships but foreign ones...," recalled an anonymous Japanese eyewitness.1 In 1854, Commodore Perry directed his small force of four steamers into the seas of Japan for the second time. As the ships drew nearer to the land and the fog lifted, the men of the expedition observed a number of Japanese villages set in between "deep ravines, green with rich verdure [that] opened into small expanses of alluvial land."2The sailors must have seen white forts along the water's edge, undoubtedly outfitted for defense, but the Americans were not intimidated.

A fleet of Japanese boats tried to stop the squadron but Commodore Perry pushed on. Bayard Taylor, the New Yorker Tribune correspondent reported from the Susquehanna, "[that] the sight of our two immense steamers- the first that ever entered Japanese waters- dashing along at the rate of nine knots an hour, must have struck the natives with the utmost astonishment."3

Near the city of Uraga on the western side, the squadron dropped their anchors. Not long after, the Japanese fired warning shots from the shore. The Japanese were hostile to any foreigners entering their waters and Japan maintained a strict policy of isolationism having negotiated stringent trade agreements with only the Dutch and Chinese. The Japanese kept close surveillance of the American vessels and approached the squadron for a second time.

This panel illustrated the first concrete contact made between the Americans and Japanese on the second expedition. The panel depicted the Japanese small sailing boats as they approached the formidable steamers. The American ships flew the American flag, symbolic of the young unified nation. The Japanese boats flew the Hinomaru, the flag of the rising sun. The Hinomaru was first used as a shrine flag but, in the sixteenth century, was designated as proper for Japanese vessels. In 1870, during the Mejii Restoration, the government ordered that every Japanese merchant ship should use Hinomaru as the national flag.

The Japanese called the American vessels the "Black Ships" because the hulls were black and the ships belched black smoke. The Americans' described the Japanese vessels as "trimly built, of pinewood, without a touch of paint, propelled over the water with great swiftness by a numerous crew of boatmen, who, standing to their oars at stern, sculled instead of rowing, the boat."4 Clearly there was a significant technological divide in shipbuilding between the two nations.

The artist seemed more familiar with the Japanese vessels than with the American steamers. While the American steamers appeared two dimensional and static, the Japanese boats were dynamic, full-bodied, and moving. The artist may not have understood the mechanics of the American vessels or this depiction could have been operating on an entirely different level, the artist portrayed the Americans as obstinate in their relations with Japanese and generally not fitting into the Japanese milieu.

 

References

1. Oliver Satler, The Black Ship Scroll: An Account of the Perry expedition at Shimoda in 1854 and the Lively Beginnings of People-to-People Relations between Japan & American Based on Contemporary Records, (Tokyo : Weatherhill, c1963), 8.
2. Robert Tomes, The Americans in Japan: An Abridgment of the Government Narrative of the U.S. Expedition
3. Satler, The Black Ship Scroll, 8.
4. Tomes, The Americans in Japan, 154.