A True and Complete Account

of the Life of William Adams

The English Samurai

By Professor Richard Irving

Published by Richard T. A. Irving (2024)

Review by Nicolas Maclean

Published in the The Japan Society Review (2024)

Professor Richard Irving’s magnum opus deserves the highest praise. Its two volumes, containing over 800 pages, are a treasure trove for scholars and researchers but also a “rattling good yarn” for generalist lovers of history, adventure and heroic achievement. Professor Irving has been working on the book for 11 years. The timing of its publication coincides well with the remake of Shogun for television in Britain and Japan. I commend the book to all those who want to know the true story of William Adams and his times.

Born in Gillingham in Kent, William Adams received an excellent education in Kent and a rigorous apprenticeship as a mariner at sea with Nicholas Diggens, son of the well-known shipwright in Limehouse of the same name. He commanded a supply ship, the Richard Duffield, during the Spanish Armada of 1588, marrying Mary Hyn in St Dunstan’s, Stepney, the mariners’ church. Their daughter was christened Deliverance, a popular name after the failure of the Spanish invasion fleet.

In 1598, Adams was recruited as pilot of a Dutch ship, De Liefde, part of a flotilla aiming to pass through the Strait of Magellan just North of Cape Horn and reach the famed, but for the Dutch and English hitherto unknown, country of Japan. Some ships were wrecked, some turned back, and Adams’ own brother was killed in a skirmish with Araucanian natives in what is now Chile. Eventually De Liefde made landfall at Usuki in Southern Japan with the remains of its crew on their last legs. Their welcome from Spanish and Portuguese priests was the opposite of warm. This was a time of bitter religious wars, and the Catholics were loath to see “heretics” break their lucrative trade monopoly with Japan.

Taken from prison, astonishingly Adams made such a good impression on the great warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu, who would later become Shogun, that the lives of all the survivors from De Liefde were spared and after many years of loyal and effective service to Ieyasu, Adams was appointed a Hatamoto, or senior samurai, in the Shogun’s personal entourage.

As Adams was born in 1564, the same year as William Shakespeare, Professor Irving decided to structure his material in “Five Acts”, like a Shakespeare play. Volume One contains the first act, covering from Adams’ birth till his departure for Japan, the second, covering his voyage and first few months in Japan, and the third act, covering his growing role as Adviser to Ieyasu until his appointment as Hatamoto in 1610. Volume Two contains the fourth act covering his work with the Dutch and the arrival of the British on The Clove in June 1613 until its departure that December. The fifth act covers Adams’ final years in Japan until his burial in Hirado and recent archaeology at the site.

Professor Irving brings many skills to his task of writing a comprehensive history of Adams, first of all the doggedness and eye for detail of a detective, as many parts of the story are uncertain or confusing, and contemporary evidence is fragmentary. The author is aided by his ability to translate Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese into English and his readiness to work with multi-lingual sources. After over 25 years living and working in Japan, he also has a strong empathy for the Japanese and an understanding of potential cultural refraction.

In his Foreword, he warns the reader that the book’s title may be a misnomer since it is still possible that missing letters or sections of logbooks may yet come to light and allow future researchers new insights into Adams and his contemporaries. So his “True and Complete Account” may only be complete as at the time of publication. However, the book benefits from the author having delved into a mass of difficult and abstruse material, which he has distilled with great clarity.

The two volumes contain a few maps and photographs, a bibliography and a very thorough index, though non-specialists would have benefitted from a glossary and a comparative historical table. The book tells the story more or less chronologically and with many quotations from letters, logbooks or diaries highlighted in bold print. The reader may find some of these verbatim quotations a little challenging at first, as the original spellings and abbreviations predominate, and there are no translations of the early 17th century English. However, after a while, the reader will get into the rhythm of the words and the sense will become apparent. These many quotations help to give the book a really authentic feel.

On the other hand, the reader is greatly aided by the fact that footnotes are provided at the bottom of the relevant page rather than at the back of the book. So there is no need to keep going to and fro, as can become quite tedious with some scholarly books.

The detail provided by Professor Irving, if sometimes sustained with surmise or deduction, allows the reader to understand many of the complex interrelationships in the story. For instance, John Saris, commander of King James’s expedition to Japan to some extent looked down on Adams, as “a mere mariner” by profession, in his eyes inferior to him, an experienced East India Company merchant. He also seems to have feared that Adams “had gone native” after his 13 years in Japan and was no longer a reliable “true Englishman”. Moreover, he had concerns about Adams’ relations with other Westerners such as the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese, with whom Adams inevitably had regular contacts in his role as Adviser to Ieyasu and before the arrival of The Clove.

However, Saris recognized the invaluable role Adams played as an interpreter and appointed him as a paid Adviser to the East India Company in Japan. Regrettably he did not listen sufficiently to Adams’ well-founded advice. Two examples of the disastrous consequences of Saris returning to Britain with his pre-conceptions intact and something of a grudge against Adams were to undermine the effectiveness of the whole East India Company’s trading initiative in Japan. Most important was Saris’s determination to keep the East India Company’s Japanese headquarters in Hirado next to its competitors the Dutch rather than moving close to the new Shogunal capital in Edo at the port of Uraga as Ieyasu was urging.

That would have been close to the growing markets of the Kanto and far more convenient for diplomatic calls on Ieyasu in Sunpu and his son Hidetada in Edo, as well as their senior officials. Costs would also have been much lower and vital time saved, which was required for the sometimes hazardous journeys from Hirado, an island in Northern Kyushu to Central and Eastern Japan. Saris also failed to listen to Adams’ advice on the best products to export for Japanese customers and about the potential in third country trade with South-East Asia and indirectly China. The book also touches on hopes, never realised, for Adams to search for a North-East passage back to Britain around North-East Asia and Russia.

Professor Irving’s book paints a much warmer picture of Adams’ relations with the other key Englishman working for the East India Company, Richard Cocks, appointed Head of the English Factory in Japan. Cocks was gradually made privy to the existence of Adams’ Japanese wife and children, knowledge of whom Adams had withheld from Saris. Cocks and Adams became good friends, though Cocks’s hands were often tied by orders from his superiors in London and in the company’s regional base-Bantam, Indonesia. When Adams died in May 1620, Cocks was his main Executor and ensured that his last wishes were carried out, including the splitting of his fortune equally between Mary Hyn in Britain and his Japanese wife.

But storm-clouds were gathering. The Shogun was increasingly concerned about the threat to his authority from Catholic missionaries, and persecution became more intense and systematic, especially after the death of Ieyasu in 1616. For the last four years of his life Adams saw his influence with Hidetada waning, and even his attempts to deal courteously with the Spanish and Portuguese according to Hidetada’s instructions led to him falling under suspicion as a “priest-lover”.

Meanwhile, relations between his old friends the Dutch became very fraught when hostilities broke out between Britain and the Netherlands, at least in East Asia.

Professor Irving’s five act drama also includes interesting minor characters, such as Tempest Peacock, or the wily and villainous Richard Wickham, or Richard Hudson, son of the great explorer or North-Eastern America and Canada, Henry Hudson, after whom Hudson’s Bay is named. The risks for the British enterprise were extremely high, whether through disease or violent death in storms or by murder. After Adams’ death from illness and at quite an old age for those times, the British trading position in Japan deteriorated further, and the trading house was closed on Christmas Eve 1623. Sadly, Cocks died in the Indian Ocean during the voyage home, and only William Eaton and his half Japanese son, also called William or Uriemon, returned to Britain. It seems appropriate that Oxbridge alumni in Japan are proud of belonging to the Cambridge and Oxford Society, in that order, since young Uriemon Eaton went to Trinity College, Cambridge for his studies, the first ever Japanese to have done so.

William Adams was a trailblazer in a multitude of ways, and Professor Irving’s book is a worthy tribute to his many achievements in dark and dangerous times. Through his far-sightedness, shrewdness and cross-cultural empathy, Adams, or Miura Anjin to give him his Japanese name, sets an example for all who aim to build a partnership with Japan.

In the Service of The

Shogun The Real Story

of William Adams

By Frederick Cryns

Reaktion Books (2024) ISBN-13: 978-1789148640

Review by Trevor Skingle

Published in the The Japan Society Review (2024)

The new FX series Shogun, based on the homonymous 1975 novel by James Clavell was released in spring 2024 and heralded a renewed interest in feudal Japan. It also led to a renewed interest in the character of John Blackthorne, which is based on William Adams (1564-1620), the English ship’s pilot whose arrival in Japan on 19 April 1600 was destined to influence trade and the beginnings of the Tokugawa era (1603- 1868). The worldwide popularity and the fans of the series are likely to have prompted this new and timely publication by Frederick Cryns, Professor of Japanese History at the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. Prof Cryns is a longtime resident in Japan moving there from Antwerp, Belgium in 1989 and was also a historical consultant on the FX series.

Drawing on Dutch, English, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese sources, as well as new archival material from Jaques Specx (1585-1652), then head of the Dutch East India Company in Japan, the book places William Adams’ encounters in the wider geopolitical context of the political intrigues of the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English, the Western nations trading with Japan at the time.

The book begins with a potted history from around the time of Adams’ birth, setting the context for his upbringing and apprenticeship, and his subsequent involvement in the fight against the Spanish Armada. Apart from some new information, the story of his involvement with the Dutch and his departure for Japan as part of their fleet, and the story of the fleet’s encounters along the way, do not differ much from the accounts in other books. On the surviving crew’s experiences in Japan, there is some welcome newly published information on Jan Joosten van Lodensteijn, one of William Adam’s shipmates, a Dutch navigator and merchant. In other English- language publications, the details of Jan Joosten’s life in Japan aren’t developed as much, but here the narrative does justice to his story and legacy, which is almost on a par with that of William Adams.

In this regard, the book explains how the area around Tokyo station is named ‘Yaesu’ after Jan Joosten’s Japanese nickname (which was the name of the canal where his house was situated), and includes a substantial open-air memorial to him and his legacy, with a bust of him in the station grounds, and a statue of the ship on which they arrived in Japan, De Liefde, just outside the station. The area where Jan Joosten’s house was located, which is mentioned in the book, was between today’s Babasakimon Bridge and the edge of the moat of Wadakuramon Gate in front of the Imperial Palace, and can still be visited today.

The book also deals with an incident in Nagasaki when the Japanese attacked the merchant ship, the Madre de Deus, in revenge for an incident in Macau when 50 Japanese were killed on the orders of the ship’s captain, Andre Pessoa. The author claims that the ship was sunk by the Japanese. However, it was Pessoa who torched the magazine and sank the ship, not the Japanese. A small detail perhaps, but details matter when trying to construct a true narrative.

After writing about the arrival in 1613 of The Clove, the first English ship to land in Japan, there is a brief reference to the gifts given by Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) to the ship’s captain, John Saris (c. 1580- 1643) for King James I (1566-1625). According to Saris’s journal, in addition to ten folding screens (byobu), a katana long sword and a wakizashi short sword - all now lost -, there were (it is thought) the saddle and stirrups now in the Royal Collection, and two sets of samurai armour, one in the Tower of London Armoury Collection and the other in the Leeds Armoury. These details might have been mentioned not only for interest and to embellish the narrative, but also for serious fans who may want to follow the story on a physicaljourney.

There is some revealing new information about Adams’s contract with the Dutch and their payments on his behalf to his English wife, and about the British East India Company’s forgiveness of Saris’s misdemeanours, whose affairs in Japan that led to his initial disgrace are not revealed in quite as much detail as in other accounts. It might also have been worthwhile for avid followers of this epic story to mention, after giving the year of Saris’s death, 1643, that he is buried in All Saints Church in Fulham, London, where his tombstone can still be seen.

The latter part of the book skips over the stories of the confrontations with the Dutch, which are covered in some detail in other books. This leaves out an essential part of the story of Adams’ life, one that shows his extraordinary bravery, the rescue of three sailors prisoners of the Dutch. In September 1619 a Dutch ship, The Angel, sailed into Hirado with three prisoners on board; William Gordon (captain of the ship The Hound), Michael Payne (carpenter of the ship The Samson) and a Welshman called Hugh Williams. Cryns refers to the ship by its Dutch name Engel and states that it arrived on 21 September 1619, whereas other accounts (G. Milton/H. T. Rogers) give August 1619. However, William Eaton (a member of the British East India Company in Hirado, Japan) in his letter of 10 March 1620 to the East India Company confirms September as the month of arrival.

In his letter also dated 10 March 1620, Richard Cocks (1565–1624), head of the British East India Company’s factory in Japan, confirms the rescue of the sailors by William Adams. William Eaton also confirms the facts, stating that it was 25 September when the English sailors were rescued by William Adams, with Cocks confirming the rescue of the Welshman ‘the morrow’ (the day after). Cocks also reports the subsequent violence and threats from the Dutch, as well as reports of another escape of three English prisoners (John Moore, John Jones and Edward Curwin) from Dutch ships the previous Christmas.

However, Cryns reports that ‘the Engel brought several English prisoners of war to Hirado. When Adams heard of this he went straight to Specx and persuaded him to release them’. There is no reference for this in the book, but if this is fresh information from the newly discovered material of Jacques Specx, it would have been helpful to know the source, the context and any other directly related information to help clarify what happened. In the absence of this, it can only be assumed that if this was reported by Specx in this way, it was because he wanted a slightly more sympathetic historical view than that which might be given to William Adams for his bravery.

Occasionally, the book feels as if it has focused on context at the expense of biography. However, the latter part of the book lacks the detail that was underpinned in the earlier part by the extensive historical context. There is much to be said on the difficult commercial dynamics that Adams faced in the run-up to and immediately after Ieyasu’s Osaka campaign, immediately after Ieyasu’s death, and during the final years of Adams’ involvement in trade in Japan. Nevertheless, there is an almost rushed feel to it, especially where it jumps from the almost insignificant references to the Anglo-Dutch conflict in Hirado to Adams’ death.

On the other hand, while the subtitle ‘The Real Story of Williams Adams’ may indeed be a marketing reference to James Clavell’s Shogun, the fictionalised version of William Adams’ life, it also has an uncomfortable ring to it. “The Real Story”, accompanied by the publisher’s claim that this is the ‘authentic’ story of Adams’ life, almost implies that other memoirs of Adams might not meet the ‘standards’ required of a factual biography. And while it certainly has a wide range of sources it is hardly, as the publisher claims, the ‘first’ or a ‘complete biography’.

Moreover, in terms of the readers of the book, apart from scholars of Japanese history and serious aficionados of William Adams and his life, the other potential buyers of the book are likely to be fans of Shogun the novel and/or the TV series, who may not be aware of the connection between John Blackthorne and William Adams.

Unfortunately, for history buffs with some knowledge of the Treaty of Windsor (1386) who cannot understand why there was such a conflict between the English and Portuguese at the time, none of the publications on William Adams set the context by looking at the reasons behind it; that the pact of mutual support between England and Portugal established by that treaty was interrupted by the Iberian Union between 1580-1640, when Portugal was forced by Spain into hostilities against the English. As Cryns notes, but does not elaborate, ‘Ieyasu was well aware that the missionary work and imperialism of Spain and Portugal were working in tandem’.

Where this book fits into the milieu of publications on Adams is something that must be left to the reader. There are shortcomings on William Adams’ life that stand out in a similar way as those in some of the other books about Adams (for example, the occasional, or frequent depending on which book you are reading, instances where artistic licence has been taken to fill in the gaps in the narrative left by lack of evidence). However, despite the author’s assertions that this account is entirely based on fact, there are some occasional minimal conjectures, which can be excused by the limited range of factual narratives available. It is an admirable and as far as historical accounts allow, as true an account as can be given the passage of a very long period of time.

Although in places the context seems to have almost overtaken the biography, this is still a very readable account with very welcome additional, relevant, newly published information. In this reviewer’s estimation, this book is a refreshing addition to the hallowed halls of biographical accounts of the truly remarkable William Adams, his life and many adventures and misadventures and later misfortunes, rather than, as the publisher’s website states, ‘downfall’.