Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan by Giles Milton Read Free Book Online

Towerson’s expeditions to Guinea had discovered “wilde negroes” who chomped on raw flesh and lived in shacks made of mud. The more Englishmen saw of the world, the more they convinced themselves that faraway regions
were inhabited by primitive tribes who pranced around stark naked and showed off their “privy partes.” Much of this was wishful thinking or blind prejudice. The inhabitants of the extreme north of America had shown themselves to be effective hunter-gatherers who most certainly did not eat one another, yet the accounts describe them as “ravenous, bloudye and man-eating” and mock them for showing an appreciation for simple objects like “belles, looking glasses and other toys.” Even those living on the fringes of the British Isles were deemed primitive by the sophisticates of Elizabethan London. One group was held to be particularly backward—idolatrous, superstitious, and living in “barbarous ignorance.” They were the Welsh.
    from Arnoldus Montanus’s Atlas Japannensis, 1670 .
    Richard Hakluyt had heard rumors of the sophistication of the Japanese, especially noblemen (above). When Captains Pet and Jackman set sail, they took only the finest-quality goods.
    Hakluyt knew that Pet and Jackman’s voyage to the Far East would bring Englishmen into contact with altogether more cultured people, and he urged that only the finest-quality goods be taken on board. He insisted that the two captains take accurate scales and weights, which, he said, were used only by societies with “a certaine shew of wisdom.” He suggested that they take a little collection of silver coins bearing the noble head of Queen Elizabeth I, “to be showed to the governours … which is a thing that shall in silence speake to wise men more than you imagine.” He instructed them to take a map of England, but warned that it
should not be any map. It must be one that was “set out in faire colours … [and] of the biggest sort.” The men were also to take the finest examples of the work of England’s blacksmiths: “locks and keyes, hinges, bolts, haspes &c., great and small, of excellent workmanship.” They were to take spectacles (or “glazen eyes”) and fine glassware; hourglasses and “combes of ivorie”; looking glasses from Venice; knitted gloves, pewter bottles, and leather buttons. Wool, England’s chief export, was well represented: there were hand-knitted socks and gloves, as well as nightcaps and blankets. Other items stowed in the holds included seeds of sweet-smelling flowers, tinderboxes, bellows, and printed books. Every item was carefully selected to show that England was a rich, sophisticated, and highly cultured realm.
    The George and the William slipped away from Limehouse in the spring of 1580. After a brief pause at Harwich to take on extra food supplies, the ships pushed on into the North Sea. Shortly after their departure, Richard Hakluyt received a reply to a letter that he had written to the esteemed Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator. It offered important advice to Pet and Jackman, and it was most unfortunate that it arrived several weeks too late. Mercator warned that one of the chief hazards of sailing to the north was the wild inaccuracy of the compass in such regions. “The neerer you come unto it [the North Pole],” he wrote, “the more the needle of the compasse does vary from the north, sometimes to the west and sometimes to the east.” He said that compass variation was a cause of frequent disaster for Arctic explorers and informed Hakluyt that “if Master Arthur [Pet] be not well provided … or of such dexteritie that, perceiving the errour, he be not able to correct the same, I feare [that] he be overtaken with the ice.”
    Compass variation was not the only peril faced by Pet and Jackman. There was also the danger of icebergs whose underwater buttresses could easily puncture a hole in the fragile oak timbers of Elizabethan vessels. When Martin Frobisher had gone in