The Voyage of Captain John Saris to Japan, 1613 (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

In June 1613 the Clove dropped anchor off Hirado, in the Japanese archipelago, and Captain John Saris stepped ashore as the first English commander to negotiate trade directly with a Tokugawa shogun. The factory he opened survived only a decade, but the journal he kept survives whole: weather, latitudes, daily allowances of biscuit and sack, gifts laid before Ieyasu at Sumpu, the bond with the marooned English pilot Will Adams, and the dawning realization that English broadcloth would not warm a tropical sea. Sir Ernest Satow, the great Victorian Japanologist and diplomat, edited Saris's manuscript log from the India Office Records for the Hakluyt Society in 1900, supplying it from Samuel Purchas where the manuscript breaks off. The result is the founding document of Anglo-Japanese contact, presented with the seriousness it deserves. This facsimile reprint preserves Satow's text and apparatus; Frontier Model Bibliophile adds a contemporary frame, an annotated bibliography of influence, and a present-day editor's note. This is a sea captain's working logbook, transcribed and framed by one of the most accomplished European Japanologists of his generation. Saris's manuscript journal, preserved in the India Office Marine Records as volume xiv and running to one hundred and thirty-five folios in his own hand, recorded the daily business of commanding the Clove from Bantam through the Moluccas to Hirado in 1613, his three months ashore in Japan, and the return passage. It is not a memoir, not a polished narrative for publication, and not a contribution to ethnography in any organized sense. It is a working record: latitudes, winds, allowances of beer and biscuit, the death of seamen, the prices of cloves, the disposition of gifts to magistrates and to the Shogun himself, the gradual coalescence of a commercial judgment about whether English goods could be sold profitably in Japan. Its distinction is that it is the original captain's record of the first English commercial voyage to reach the country, and that the captain in question was a careful, literate, financially competent observer. As a genre object it sits between the public-facing voyage narrative of Hakluyt's late-Tudor compilation and the bureaucratic correspondence of the mature Company; it has the rhythm of the former and the contents of the latter. The world the journal came from was the early Jacobean East India Company, a joint-stock enterprise still finding its operational footing after its founding charter of 1600. The Dutch were ahead in the eastern seas under the consolidated Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie of 1602, the Portuguese were entrenched at Macao and Nagasaki, and the English were trying to identify markets where they might compete without head-on collision with either. Saris had served as a factor at Bantam between 1605 and 1609 under Edmund Scot and brought to the Japan voyage a real grasp of the regional trade in cloves, pepper, and Indian textiles, as well as a feel for the Dutch counterpart factors with whom he would have to coexist. The voyage was authorized by the Company in early 1611 and dispatched with detailed instructions to plant a factory if conditions warranted, especially in the wake of intelligence from Will Adams that the Tokugawa court welcomed European traders willing to come without missionary entanglements. The 1613 arrival at Hirado, the audience with Tokugawa Ieyasu at Sumpu in September of that year, and the privileges granted under the Shogun's seal are documented in this journal as they happened, with no retrospective varnish. For a present-day reader the experience this edition transmits is unlike a polished travel narrative. It is the granular weight of a long-distance commercial voyage: a sentence on the wind, a sentence on the cargo, a sentence on a dead crewman, a sentence on a Dutch competitor's behaviour at anchor.