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Chapter 6 A Magnanimous Gesture During the month of November 1643, the shogun and his advisers put the Breskens affair aside until Elserack, who had left Nagasaki on 8 November, would arrive in Edo. For the prisoners from Nambu this time of inaction and uncertainty about their fates must have been especially hard to bear, although the men from Inoue’s office seem to have gone out of their way to reassure and comfort them. On 29 November, for example, the interpreters Kichibei and Hachizaemon visited the Dutchmen. They urged them to write a secret note to Elserack, which they promised to give him when he arrived. After the two Japanese men had left, the men discussed their proposal. At last, they decided to trust the interpreters and to make use of this opportunity to write a letter with everything they had said during their interrogations. The next day, they were summoned to Hotta’s country mansion again. On their arrival, they had to wait a while, and then Schaep and Bijlvelt, accompanied by Tòzaemon and Magobei, were brought to “a large, open court yard with a pleasant garden in front of a splendid chamber and a wooden verandah of excellent workmanship (where the councilors were seated in extreme magnificence.)”1 Among the councilors was the shogun himself.2 Sakai Tadakatsu and Matsudaira Nobutsuna were not present, for they had left for Kyoto, as the shogun’s envoys, to attend the inauguration of the new emperor on 2 December. Apart from Inoue’s presence, then, this time the Dutchmen were facing a predominantly antiforeign faction of the bakufu: Iemitsu, Masamori, and the Abe cousins, Shigetsugu and Tadaaki. That both Masamori and Shigetsugu would commit suicide 106 A Magnanimous Gesture on Iemitsu’s death in 1651 testifies to their close involvement with the shogun’s obsessions.3 The interrogation started with threats of violence: “You, captain and merchant,” said the òmetsuke, “we order you unequivocally to speak nothing but the truth, for if we hear something else from Captain Elserack (who may arrive in Edo any day now), a terrible and heavy punishment awaits you.”4 The men answered that they would reply truthfully to the extent of their knowledge, just as they had done “continually” so far. This time the questions concentrated on the perceived threats to Japan’s security: ships had been appearing and disappearing off the coast of Japan all year long. The latest reports had reached Edo from Matsumae in the extreme north and from Kyushu in the south. The Castricom had been sighted and visited by a pelt trader on the south coast of Hokkaido.5 The man was brought to Edo to be interrogated, together with the articles he had acquired from the crew of the ship.6 Next, Akizuki Taneharu, a daimyo with a fief of 30,000 koku in Hyûga on Kyushu’s east coast, reported on 28 November that his lookouts had sighted two ships.7 Two and a half weeks earlier, by an amazing coincidence, the Castricom and Breskens had found each other again off the coast of Shikoku.8 Today, Schaep first had to answer questions about the Castricom. Why had the ship been heading east from Hokkaido? When was the right time to sail from Japan’s northern extremity to Java? And where did the two large ships, seen near Satsuma a few days earlier, come from? Of course, Schaep could not have known about the miraculous reunion of the two ships, but he answered that the ships sighted might have belonged to the fleet bound for Nagasaki this year. More evidence of a possible Dutch-Portuguese alliance had been supplied by the apostate fathers: “Did you know,” Inoue asked, “that Dutch soldiers and sailors have been sent by the Prince of Orange from Holland to assist the king of Portugal in his struggle with Spain? And that, some time ago, these soldiers had mutinied against that king over back pay, and had started a new war inside that country?”9 The men from the second Rubino group had departed from Manila sometime in April or May, months after the men from the Breskens had left Batavia, so they may have had more recent news from Europe. Schaep had to admit that he did not know about this. But the implication was clear: the Dutch were cooperating with the Portuguese, archenemies of Japan, on many different levels. From the dangerous topic of an alliance with Portugal, Inoue...

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