IF SKIPPER JENNINGS HAD NOT RESCUED CERTAIN SHIPWRECKED JAPANESE
Toward the end of the year 1850, Captain Jennings, of the American bark
_Auckland_, trading in Asiatic waters, picked up the shipwrecked crew of
a Japanese fishing vessel, somewhere off the coast of Japan. The captain
was then bound for the new port of San Francisco, which the California
gold-diggings had already made an important city. He continued on his
course, and in due time--that is to say, very early in the year
1851--landed at San Francisco with his party of refugees.
Here the bright little Orientals were more than a nine days' wonder.
Few Americans had ever before seen a Japanese. That country was at the
time more a "hermit nation" than Korea herself. Whalers and other
sailors who had been wrecked on the Japanese coast had been put to cruel
deaths. No white men except the Dutch had been permitted to trade with
any of the Japanese cities, and the Dutch trade had fallen into decay.
Japan seemed as far from our lives as is the planet Mars.
But the Japanese whom Captain Jennings had humanely rescued were kindly
treated by him, and on the homeward voyage they had endeared themselves
to him and his crew. He landed them at San Francisco with very favorable
reports of their character, conduct and intelligence. The free-handed
miners of that town wanted nothing better than somebody or something to
lionize. So for a considerable time the shipwrecked Japanese had the
best of everything in San Francisco, until an opportunity arose to send
them, fat and happy, back to their own country.
A full account of the incident and of the refugees was published in one
of the San Francisco papers. It fell into the hands of just one man who
was capable of perceiving the momentous possibilities that lay in the
occurrence. This man was a commodore in the United States navy; and his
name was not Perry, as the reader may at first surmise, but John H.
Aulick. He was a Virginian, then in his sixty-second year; he had had a
long and very honorable service, and was keen and statesmanlike in his
ideas.
What Commodore Aulick saw in the incident was this: The kind and
friendly reception of the Japanese waifs in America, contrasted with the
ordinary treatment of white refugees in Japan, might be taken advantage
of to open friendly relations with Japan. To effect this result, a
naval expedition should be sent to Japan. If properly conducted, the
expedition not only might secure friendly treatment of American whalers
on the Japanese coasts, but might open up trade relations with the
country which would be highly profitable.
Filled with his idea, which was really a great one, Commodore Aulick
obtained permission to lay it before the secretary of state, who was
none other than Daniel Webster. He had an interview with Mr. Webster at
Washington on the 9th day of May, 1851.
Webster saw the point at once. At his instance, President Fillmore
ordered the navy department to prepare a small expedition for the voyage
to Japan; and when the ships were ready--they were headed by the sloop
of war _Mississippi_--Commodore Aulick was put in command. He actually
sailed on the voyage; but he was entrusted with the task of taking the
Brazilian minister as far as Rio Janeiro on the way, and some trouble
having arisen with this functionary for which Commodore Aulick was
blamed, he was superseded in command of the expedition by Commodore
Matthew Calbraith Perry, in command of the _Hartford_.
It was Perry, therefore, who "opened up Japan." His name will be
associated, as long as the story of the two nations is told, with the
event. But it was Aulick's idea, not Perry's; and it all hung upon the
luck which those Japanese fishermen, waifs upon a boundless ocean, had
in being picked up by a generous Yankee skipper, and in finding their
way to so wholehearted and so hospitable a city toward "Mongolian"
wanderers as San Francisco was--then!
If this incident had not suggested and been followed by the Aulick-Perry
expedition, what then? Russian authorities have claimed that Russia was
preparing a similar expedition at the time when Secretary Webster--"too
zealous," according to their view--sent the United States ships on their
way. There is good reason to believe that the Russian government would
have been slow in making such an infinitely clever move as the Perry
expedition constituted. Yet if the United States had not taken the step,
Russia would have stood next in the line of logical inheritance to the
idea. And if Japan had been opened under Russian auspices, its doors,
instead of standing open toward the East, and consequently toward _our_
West, would have opened toward the Asiatic continental West, which would
have meant toward St. Petersburg.
If the Japanese had, under Russian initiative, adopted the material
adjuncts of western civilization, as they finally did under ours, that
civilization would have taken on a distinctly Muscovite color. The
Japanese would never, indeed, have been able, under such auspices, to
organize an effective resistance to Russian arms, for long before they
had acquired the requisite training they must have been held firmly in
the grip of the Russian military system.
That is to say, Japan would have been, step by step, annexed to the
Russian empire. The Russo-Japanese war would never have been, since
there would have been neither hope nor occasion for it. Most of the rich
fruits of Japanese art and industry would have drifted toward Russia.
The Russian empire would have been enormously enriched by the Japanese
trade, and the importance of that empire immensely magnified in the
history of our epoch. A reflex orientalizing influence would have rolled
over Russia itself, and the course of Russian internal development
altered in a degree now almost incalculable.
If Russia had not been reasonably prompt to take the step, the eyes of
British statesmen must sooner or later have been opened to the
opportunity. The method by which British intervention proceeds in
Asiatic countries is well known. It has always had but slight regard for
native sovereignty, no matter how high the state of social or artistic
or intellectual development on the part of the native races affected.
British administrators, or, if Japan had retained its nominal
sovereignty, British "residents" or agents, would really have governed
the country through the Tycoon or the Mikado, or both--preferably the
Tycoon, for he was a military ruler, and affairs could have been handled
more readily through him.
Events in Japan must have anticipated the subsequent history of Egypt,
on a much more magnificent scale. Again, though there would have been a
readier entrance for American and European trade than in the case of
Russian intervention, the best of everything Japanese would certainly
have gone to England. And once again, the free, independent, powerful,
masterful Japanese empire of the present day, thrilling with a new life
in which all the civilization of the Occident is made the handmaid of an
ancient and undaunted Asiatic people, would not have been.
In the unlikely event that the Japanese, in default of Perry's
expedition, had been left quite alone for another generation or two,
their case would not have been better in the long run. They would simply
have missed the chance they got. Left a "hermit nation," they would
sooner or later have fallen under the influence of one Western country
or another, and been so seriously retarded in the race of civilization
that they could never have caught up.
America was the only country that could have opened to them the
wonderful career that they have had. The high noon of the nineteenth
century was the golden moment for the commencement of their development
along the line of Western civilization. If the hour had not struck then
for them it would not have struck at all. Time, the helping hand, the
protecting influence of an unselfish friend among the nations, and the
golden gift of destiny, were all represented for Japan in the rescuing
sails of Skipper Jennings's bark, that lucky day in the wide Pacific.