Black Ships, Black Waters: William Adams and the Languages of Crossing - with Nandini Das

Date
Monday 20 July 2026

Time
6.45pm

Venue
The Swedenborg Society
20-21 Bloomsbury Way (Hall entrance on Barter St)
London WC1A 2TH
[Map]

Booking Details
Free- Booking essential

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William Adams is usually introduced with a flourish: the Englishman who became a samurai. What is less often asked is what happened when England, some years later, came knocking at his door. In 1613, the East India Company ship The Clove arrived at Hirado, the first English vessel to reach Japan, sent largely on the strength of Adams’s earlier promises of trade and silver. Its captain, John Saris, expected to find a countryman keen to shed his Japanese trappings and step back into English shoes. Instead, he encountered a man who lived as a Japanese noble, fluent in the language, married into the country, and apparently in no hurry whatsoever to rediscover English manners, English food, or English society.

This talk examines that uneasy meeting, drawing on Saris’s own journal, to explore how Adams, so valued by Japanese authorities, was judged far more harshly by his fellow Englishmen, who found him unsettlingly changed. In their response, we glimpse early modern anxieties about loyalty, identity, and the troubling possibility that one might go abroad, and return, if at all, as someone unrecognisable. This episode forms part of the wider argument of Nandini Das’ new book This Little World, which traces how mobility and encounter did not simply fracture identities, but made possible new forms of belonging that could no longer be measured by origin alone.

Nandini Das is Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Culture and Fellow of Exeter College at Oxford University. Her most recent book, Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire, was longlisted for the Cundill Prize, shortlisted for the Duff Cooper and Wolfson History Prizes, and won the British Academy Book Prize. It was also a Spectator, Prospect and History Today Book of the Year. This Little World will be published by Bloomsbury on 28 May 2026. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she regularly contributes to and presents television and radio programmes, including ‘Tales of Tudor Travel’ on BBC Four. 

If you have any questions, please call The Japan Society office on 020 3075 1996 or email events@japansociety.org.uk.

Images:  William Adams before shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (left); William Adams with a daimyo and their attendants (right) from William Adams: The first Englishman in Japan (Miura Anjin) (1866) by William Dalton, Overseas Images of Japan Database. 

Supported by the Toshiba International Foundation (TIFO)

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