Prisoners from Nambu: Reality and Make-Believe in 17th-Century Japanese Diplomacy

Chapter 4. A Strict Investigation

Chapter 4 A Strict Investigation On the little fan-shaped island of Deshima, the two Dutch factors, Johan Van Elserack and Pieter Anthonisz Overtwater, and their subordinates were busy with the cargo brought by five Dutch ships from Batavia via Siam, Tonkin, and Taiwan. Elserack had arrived in Nagasaki from Batavia on 31 July to relieve his understudy Overtwater, who had run the Dutch trading post since the fall of the previous year. According to the new rules, the Dutch chief factor had to be replaced every year. Elserack was a man of experience, who had started out as an “assistant” and had now reached the rank of “president,” earning 130 guilders a month. The eight years he had spent in Japan had been the most profitable as well as the most difficult years for the Dutch East India Company there.1 Appointed chief factor in 1641, Elserack had made the first court journey to Edo under the new restrictive regulations , after the factory had been moved from Hirado to Nagasaki the year before. Overtwater had been hired by the company in 1640. He immediately began at the rank of senior merchant with a salary of 90 guilders a month, as a result of a company policy to upgrade its management level personnel.2 Since he had no previous trading experience, he must have had good connections inside the company. We know that he had been vice-principal of the Latin Grammar school at Hoorn, a town with a long maritime tradition, which looked out over Holland’s Inland Sea. The town was one of the principal investors in the Dutch East India Company, making up one of its six Chambers. The two chief factors seem to have gotten along well, for on his A Strict Investigation 71 return home Elserack wrote to his superiors, the Gentlemen XVII at Amsterdam, that Overtwater was a “sensible man with an even temper.”3 From this we may conclude that the educated Overtwater had taken care to flatter self-made Elserack by listening quietly to his superior’s lectures on the Dutch trade in Japan and the customs of the country. We will see later that the ex-schoolmaster was not nearly as sensible as Elserack had made him out to be. Two hours before sunset on 10 September 1643, the bugyò (governor ) of Nagasaki, Yamazaki Gompachirò, sent some interpreters to announce to Elserack that he had “at that very moment” received news from Edo “that a Dutch ship had anchored in the kingdom of Ockio or Massamone before the city of Nambo (which is at the furthest boundary of Japan).”4 This, the interpreters reported, had caused “consternation” among the inhabitants, who were unfamiliar with European nations and had taken the men to be “Castilians, Portuguese , or suchlike Christians.” Therefore, they had tried to bring all the men ashore to take them to Edo as prisoners, but the captain and merchant of the ship had negotiated so that, by surrendering themselves and eight other men to the authorities, the latter had agreed “to leave the ship and the rest of the crew in peace.” The ten hostages had then been brought all the way to Edo, “a long journey of at least ten days travel or about one hundred miles.”* The “Ockio” of this entry in the Daghregister, or chief factor’s journal, must be a miswriting for Òshû, the province of the Deep North, and “Massamone” is the given name of Date Masamune (1567–1636), the well-known father of the present daimyo of the Sendai domain, a fief to the south of Nambu. The Dutch on Deshima, then, were given extremely vague geographical indications by the Nagasaki authorities about the spot where the Breskens had anchored. This impression is reinforced by the expression “city of Nambo,” which strictly speaking did not even exist, for Nambu is a family name also used for the domain where the Nambu family had ruled since the twelfth century. That the captain and merchant would have agreed to become hostages for the rest of the crew and the ship was the Japanese way of explaining why only ten men had been caught, a solution that implied great flexibility and reasonableness on the part of the local authorities. Never mind that it bore only the faintest resemblance to the truth! *That is, Dutch nautical miles, or 555 km. 72 A Strict Investigation The bulk...