At once I set about perfecting myself in certain practices which so far
had afforded me little more than idle amusement. The knack of holding
on a Japanese clog or the lighter sandal by gripping the thong that
passes between the great toe and its mate is not acquired at the first
trial or at many to follow. Still more difficult is the ability to sit
for hours, crouched on knees and heels, in the Japanese fashion. I
practised both feats with a patient endurance born of intense desire.
Yoritomo had suffered as great inconvenience while learning to wear
Occidental dress and to sit on chairs.
There were many other accomplishments, hardly less irksome, in which
I had to drill myself, that I might be prepared to play the rôle of
a Japanese gentleman. For recreation between times, I devoted my odd
hours to cutlass fencing with an expert _maître d’armes_ and to pistol
practice. For this last I purchased a brace of Lefaucheux revolvers,
which, though a trifle inferior to the Colt in accuracy, possessed
the advantage of the inventor’s water-proof metallic cartridges. The
convenience and superiority of this cartridge over the old style of
loading with loose charges of powder and ball only need be mentioned to
be realized.
Yoritomo was so desirous of witnessing the outcome of President
Bonaparte’s manipulation of politics that we lingered in Paris until
the _coup d’état_ which marked the fall of the French Republic and
the ascension of Bonaparte to the imperial throne as Napoleon III.
Confirmed by this event in his opinion of the instability, violence,
and chicanery of Occidental statesmanship, my friend announced his
readiness to leave Europe.
The American packets had already brought word of the sailing of
Commodore Perry from Newport News on November the twenty-fourth. As his
route to China lay around the Cape of Good Hope, there had been no need
to hurry away on our shorter passage by the Peninsular and Oriental
route across the Isthmus of Suez and down the Red Sea.
We sailed on January the third, 1853, and, confident of our advantage
of route, stopped twice on our way, that Yoritomo might study the
administration of the British East India Company in Ceylon and India
and the Dutch rule in Java. As a result, we did not reach Shanghai
until the end of April.
It is in point to mention that during the voyage I gave my friend
frequent lessons in Western swordsmanship and in turn received as many
from him in Japanese fence, using heavy, two-handed foils of bamboo.
Though the Japanese art is without thrusts, I was taught by many a
bruise that it possesses clever and powerful cuts.
At Shanghai, we found already assembled three ships of the American
squadron, including the huge steam frigate _Susquehanna_. The Commodore
was expected to arrive soon from Hong-kong in the _Mississippi_.
My plan had been to charter a small vessel, and run across to the
Japanese coast, where we hoped to be able to smuggle ourselves ashore,
and make our way to Yedo in the disguise of priests. Owing, however, to
the alarm of the foreign settlement over the victories of the Taiping
rebels in the vicinity of Shanghai, there were few vessels in port and
none open to charter.
We were already aware that, under the strict orders of the Navy
Department, we could not join the American expedition without
subjecting ourselves to the fetters of naval discipline. As a last
resort and in the hope of gaining the assent of the Commodore to land
us in disguise, we might have considered even this humiliating course.
But the very object of Yoritomo’s return to his native shores was to
reach Yedo and present his case to the Shogun’s government before the
arrival of the foreigners.
Fearful of delay, we hired a Chinese escort and rode south across
country to Cha-pu, on the Bay of Hang-Chow, the port from which the ten
annual Chinese junks sail to Nagasaki. Though our escort did not always
manage to prevent their bigoted countrymen from making the journey
disagreeable for the “foreign devils,” we reached our destination
without loss of life or limb.
The vile treatment of the Celestials was quickly forgotten in the
graciousness of our welcome by the little colony of Japanese exiles
whom we found located at Cha-pu. Careful as was Yoritomo to conceal his
identity from his countrymen, they at once divined that he was a man of
noble rank, and invariably knelt and bowed their foreheads to the dust
whenever they came into his presence.
The Cha-pu merchants were greatly impressed by such deference on the
part of the proud little men of Nippon, yet neither this nor my gold
enabled us to obtain passage on one of their clumsy junks. The five
vessels of the summer shipment to Nagasaki were not due to sail before
August, and the jabbering heathen refused point-blank to risk the
extinction of their Japanese trade either by advancing the date of
sailing or by chartering a separate junk. Their unvarying reply was
that no one could land anywhere in Japan without being detected by the
spies.
One merchant alone betrayed a slight hesitancy over refusing us
outright, and he, after dallying with my ultimate offer for a
fortnight, at last positively declined the risk. I next proposed to buy
a junk and man it with fishermen from the Japanese colony. But Yoritomo
soon found that not one of the exiles dared return to Dai Nippon, great
as was their longing.
Mid-May had now come and gone. Hopeless of obtaining aid from the
Chinese, we rode back overland to Shanghai, agreed that it would be
better to sail with Perry than after him. To our dismay, we discovered
that the American squadron had sailed for the Loo Choo Islands two days
before our arrival.
In this darkest hour of our enterprise we chanced upon our golden
opportunity. Shortly after our departure for Cha-pu a New Bedford
whaler, the _Nancy Briggs_, had put into Shanghai to replace a sprung
foremast. She was now about to sail for the Straits of Sangar, bound
for the whaling grounds east of the Kurile Islands. I met her skipper
upon the bund, and within the hour had closed a bargain with him to
land us on the Japanese coast within twenty miles of the Bay of Yedo.
For this I was to pay him a thousand dollars in gold, and pilot his
ship through Van Diemen Strait.
By nightfall Yoritomo and I were aboard the _Nancy Briggs_ with our
dunnage and had settled ourselves in the little stateroom vacated by
the first mate. We awoke at sunrise to find the ship under way down the
Whang-po to the Yang-tse-Kiang. Another sunrise found the whaler in
blue water, running before the monsoon out across the Eastern Sea.
Though far from a clipper, the _Nancy Briggs_ was no tub. We sighted
Kuro, the westernmost island of Van Diemen Strait, and its blazing
volcanic neighbor Iwogoshima, on June the second, eight days over a
year and nine months since the _Sea Flight_ bore me up the superb Bay
of Kagoshima. The interval had been crowded with events in our physical
and mental worlds scarcely less momentous to myself than to my friend.
But it was no time for me to indulge in retrospection. I had engaged to
navigate the _Nancy Briggs_ through the narrow waters of an uncharted
strait. The rainy season was well under way, with all the concomitants
of heavy squalls and dense fogs. As already mentioned, a lucky glimpse
of Kuro, soon confirmed as a landfall by the red glare of Iwogoshima,
enabled me to set our course to pass through the strait.
We ran in under reefed topsails, feeling our way blindly by compass
and log in true whaler fashion. The Yankees took the risk as a matter
of course, but I, between the difficulty of calculating the effects of
the capricious squalls on our headway and my ignorance of the set of
the powerful currents around this southern extremity of Japan, found
my responsibilities as pilot no light burden. I was correspondingly
relieved when a rift opened in the smothering masses of vapor which
shrouded all view of sea and land, and I saw looming up abeam the
well-remembered point of bold Cape Satanomi.
Once clear of the strait, out in the open waters of the Pacific, we
packed on all sail to outdrive the heavy following sea, and entered
upon the run of over five hundred miles along the southeast coasts
of Kiushiu, Shikoku, and Hondo, the main island. Though the weather
continued wet and foggy, we were favored by a half gale from the south
and by the drift of the Japan Current, which here flows little less
swiftly than does our Gulf Stream off Hatteras.
Regardless of the whales which we frequently sighted, our skipper, true
to his agreement, held on under full sail, night and day, until we made
a landfall of Cape Idzu, the southernmost point of the great promontory
which lies southwest of Yedo Bay. We could not have desired conditions
more favorable to enable us to approach the coast unobserved. Night
was coming on and the gale freshening, but there was no fog. Our
skipper shortened sail, and stood boldly in between the east coast of
Idzu and the chain of islands trending southward from the mouth of the
outer Bay of Yedo.
Had the gale fallen at sundown, I might have persuaded the skipper to
hold on across and land us on the west coast of Awa, off the mouth of
the inner bay. Unfortunately the wind moderated so little and the sky
became so overcast that he ran in under the lee of the great hulking
volcano laid down on the charts as Vries Island, but by Yoritomo called
Oshima.
We were here in the mouth of the outer bay, and the skipper stated that
he was prepared to fulfil his contract by landing us on the island.
When I protested against being thus marooned, he declared that he would
put us ashore on Vries Island or nowhere. At this I demanded that he
run up the outer bay and set us adrift in his gig. He declared that to
do so would be sheer murder, since no boat could outride the billows
in the open bay. However, an offer of half of Yoritomo’s Japanese gold
coins altered his opinion, and the appearance of the rising moon, which
began to glimmer at intervals through the scurrying clouds, enabled us
to persuade him that he could run up to within the southern point of
Awa and beat out again without endangering his ship.
The moment he ordered the ship brought about, Yoritomo and I hastened
to prepare ourselves for the landing by shifting into our _Yamabushi_,
or mountain-priest robes, which with other articles of costume we had
obtained from the Japanese at Cha-pu. We had been dressing each other’s
hair in the Japanese fashion and shaving clean ever since the passage
of Van Diemen Strait. Our dunnage was already lashed together in two
compact bundles, wrapped about with many thicknesses of waterproof
oiled paper.
To the outside of the bundles, I now tied my revolvers and Yoritomo his
sword and dirk, all alike wrapped in oil paper, together with two pairs
of straw sandals and black leggings and our deep-brimmed basket hats
of coarse-wove rattan. The night was far too wild for us to risk being
flung into the breakers with any unnecessary weight about us. That we
might not be hampered by our loose dress, we bound up our long sleeves
to our shoulders and tucked the skirts of the robes through the back of
our girdles.
When we went up on the deck with our dunnage, a gleam of moonlight
showed us the dim, smoking mass of Vries Island already a full two
leagues astern, while ahead, across eighteen miles or more of racing
foam-crested billows, loomed the mountainous coast of Awa. We made our
way along the pitching deck to where the skipper stood with a group of
sailors beside the gig. They were lashing down a number of empty water
breakers in the bow and stern and under the thwarts, and there was an
oil cask made fast to the bow with a five-fathom line.
“Ready, hey?” shouted the skipper, when I made our presence known by
touching his arm. “Well, it’s on your own head, sir. I’m doing my best
for you, as I’m a God-fearing Christian. But it’ll take a sight of
special providence to bear you safe into haven once you cut adrift.”
I pointed to the oil cask. “A drag?”
“Aye. Keep you from broaching. Best kind of drag. She’s three-quarters
full of oil, and the head riddled with gimlet holes. The oil will
spread and keep the waves from breaking over you.”
“I’ve heard of that whaler’s trick,” I replied, gripping his broad
hand. “And the gig is unsinkable with those breakers aboard. We’re
bound to win through. I’ll lash our dunnage in the sternsheets myself.”
The moon went behind a cloud, but one of the sailors raised the lantern
that he was holding beneath the bulwark and set it within the gig. Our
bundles were soon secured, and we had only to lean upon the bulwark and
gaze over the starboard bow towards the dim coast of Awa. Though under
shortened sail, the old _Nancy_ ran before the gale at so famous a rate
that within two hours the outpeeping moon showed us the furious surf
along the rocky coast, two miles on our starboard beam.
As agreed, the skipper now put the ship’s head to the northwest and
stood on across the mouth of the inner bay until we sighted the surf on
the western coast. Our time had come.