ABSTRACT

FIRST ANGLO-JAPANESE RELATIONS.-The English are not strangers to the Japanese. In 1600 a Kentishman named Will Adams came to Japan as pilot on a Dutch ship and was employed by Iyeyasu, the Shogun, as his foreign adviser, receiving treatment equal to that of a hatamoto. He resided in an imposing mansion at Hemmi, Sagami, and under the orders of Iyeyasu he built a vessel of eighty tons on a foreign model. In I61I the East India Company dispatched John Saris to Japan in the Globe, which, in 1613, arrived at Hirado, where an English trading station was established, only to be abandoned in 1620 on account of inability to compete with the Dutch. After that, for a prolonged period, the European trade was in the hands of the Dutch, and the Japanese came even to forget the existence of such a country as England, until May 1673, when the Return appeared at Nagasaki to negotiate for the East India Company the opening of trade, on the strength of a charter granted under the seal of Iyeyasu at Hirato fifty years before.