A True and Complete Account of the Life of William Adams - The English Samurai
By Richard Irving
Independently published (2024)
ISBN-13: 979-8338435779 for Volume One / 979-8346079668 for Volume Two
Review by Nicolas Maclean
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.