Gulliver's Travels and Japan

The earliest interpretations of Japan by Englishmen are the letters and reports that Will Adams, Richard Cocks, and John Saris wrote to their homeland in the years between Adams' arrival in 1600 and the close of the English House at Hirado in 1623. Saris and Cocks arrived thirteen years after Adams, Cocks leaving soon after Adams died. Saris was there only a few months as director of the new branch of the East India Company, whose ill fate he sealed almost immediately on his arrival in 1613 when he disregarded Adams' advice on the place for the establishment of the Company's office. The fascinating reportage of the incredible new world these men entered in Japan survives in fragments of correspondence and log-books written in their own age-of-Shakespeare English and published in part in an early volume of Purchas His Pilgrimes. 6

In Swift's own library, the title page of Purchas describing the contents of these "Voyages and Peregrinations" made into "the remoter parts of the knowne World" (compare Swift's "Remote Nations of the World") suggests several parallels with Swift's, not least the position for the listing of "Japan" at the end of lines in titles for the Fourth Book of Purchas and the Third Part of Gulliver in the 1735 Faulkner edition. 7 There are other parallels in form between Gulliver's Travels and Purchas; comparison of the respective chapter heads appears to show close resemblance and might repay meticulous study, though similarities may be due to conventions they share with other contemporary writings. There are, more importantly, highly suggestive references scattered through the text, such as the note on North Japan appended (mistakenly?) to an account by John Saris of his trip home from Japan in 1614. This "Intelligence concerning Yedzo" (the island now called Hokkaido, which the Gulliver map spells "Iesso") deals with "Hairie people" (foreshadowing the more recent stereotype of the "hairy Ainu"!) and "People of low stature" as the margin glosses summarize. There may be few earlier foreshadowings of Yahoos and Lilliputians in travel literature. "Yedzo" (compare Swift's "Yahoos") are "hairie people". . . "white, and of good condition, but very hairy all their bodies over like Munkeyes . . . and have no apparrell, but what is brought them from Japan" (Purchas, I, p. 384 in the 1625 edition Swift owned; pp. 488-9 of Vol, III, in the Glasgow edition). The text adds - on the same page - that "further to the Northward on another island . . . are people of very low stature like Dwarfes."

But of much greater importance than the apparent parallels of such single if crucial particulars is the overwhelming figure of Will Adams (1554-1620), first Englishman known to have landed in Japan, whose shadow has fallen across the whole long history of East-West relations and whose writings first appeared in Purchas. 8

Adams reached Japan only after "a voyage unparalleled in all the records of sixteenth-century travel." 9 He had risen from poor Kentish apprentice seaman to become commander of a ship in Drake's fleet when they met the Armada; he closed his career with years of lordly life in the court of Japan's ruler, Tokugawa Ieyasu. His experience, not least his last years in the land of smaller people, comprises one of the most Gulliver-like real lives imaginable. At the height of his powers he felt himself to be adviser to the ruler Ieyasu on everything from mathematics, ship-building, and the use of artillery to the arts of government and the ways of Western religion and women. He wrote that not a request of his was turned down except his occasional pleas, in his earlier days in Japan, to be allowed to go home to England. When even that door was opened to him later, he - like Gulliver at the end of Part IV - no longer wished to return to his family and his native land! By that time other Westerners were forced to leave Japan, persona non grata like Gulliver in other "lands."

In his letters as published in Purchas, Will Adams tells the harrowing story of his trip to Japan. He arrived there (Kyushu) on April 19, 1600, as the least weak of five men still able to sit up in the party of 24 miserable survivors of the last ship of a five-unit Dutch fleet which began with 500 men. This ill-fated predecessor of the India Company group had left Holland in 1598 and subsequently was decimated by disease and fighting on islands off Africa, starved in crossing the South Atlantic during five months, completing its first year with almost six hellish months attempting to clear the Straits of Magellan over the winter. Within the next few months the ships were all separated, and Will's brother died with a 23-man scavenger party ambushed in Chile. The last months of his own ship's Pacific crossing-largely in his control though he was only Chief Pilot for the fleet-were the worst of all, with men eating the rotting leather around the ship's ropes in a nightmare trip that has been cited as one source for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

In Japan as in England, Adams had to begin from the bottom. As their Dutch ship reached what was to be his new homeland, "being in safetie, we let our Anchor fall about a league from a place, called Bungo. "10 When they landed in utter exhaustion, Adams and his group were imprisoned by Japanese officials and very nearly met death at the urging of the Spanish "Jesuites and Portugals," who in order to defend their trade and religious bases in Japan, encouraged the Japanese to kill Adams and the Dutch as pirates. But the "Emperor" mercifully intervened to spare the Englishman and his comrades (Purchas, II, 333). In a similar situation we see Gulliver reporting an almost identical experience:

...I added another Petition, that for the sake of my Patron the King of Luggnagg, his Majesty would condescend to excuse my perform ing the Ceremony imposed on my Countrymen, of trampling upon the Crucifix; because I had been thrown into His Kingdom by my Misfortunes, without any Intention of trading. When this latter Peti tion was interpreted to the Emperor, he seemed a little surprised; and said, he believed I was the first of my Countrymen who ever made any Scruple in this Point; and that he began to doubt whether I were a real Hollander or no; but rather suspected I must be a CHRISTIAN. However, for the Reasons I had offered, but chiefly to gratify the King of Luggnagg, by an uncommon Mark of his Fa vour, he would comply with the singularity of my Humour; but the Affair must be managed with Dexterity, and his Officers should be commanded to let me pass as it were by Forgetfulness. For he assured me, that if the Secret should be discovered by my Countrymen, the Dutch, they would cut my Throat in the Voyage. I returned my Thanks by the Interpreter for so unusual a Favour; and some Troops being at that Time on their March to Nangasac, the Commanding Officer had Orders to convey me safe thither, with particular Instruc tions about the Business of the Crucifix. 11

Having experienced the superior moral behavior of the Japanese in sharp contrast to the covetous cruelty of Europeans (cp. GT, Part III, chaps. 1, 11), Adams began his activities "to come where the Hollanders have their trade." Soon Adams becomes a confidant of Ieyasu. He builds a ship of "80 tuns" for the Shogun and "beeing in sych grace and favour, by reason I learned him some points of Geometry, and the Mathematickes, with other things: I pleased him so, that what I said could not be contradicted" (Purchas, II, 335).

As the years pass he gains greater and greater honor and responsibility (even including a Japanese wife) and after the British trading company under Captain Saris arrives in the summer of 1613 Adams loses his desire to associate with his own countrymen, to say nothing of risk a return home with them. Captain Saris shocked and disgusted him, expecting the kind of extra devotion for the cause of their motherland which Adamsnow controlling all foreign trade for Ieyasu-had set aside earlier to be a truly neutral adviser to his Shogun. Saris concluded "he is a naturalized Japonner" and began a policy of humiliating Adams that had most unfortunate consequences for the British trade goals, although originally Adams won them superior favors from the Shogun. 12 By the time of these encounters, Adams had built "an other ship for the King of 120 tunnes" which enabled Japan to enter her own trade in the East Indies, and had been rewarded with a fief: "Now for my service which I have done and daily doe, being employed in the Emperours service, he hath given me a living, like unto a Lordship in England, with eightie or ninetie husbandmen, who are as my servants and slaves: the like President (precedent) was never done to any stranger before. Thus God hath provided for mee after my great miserie; his name hath and have the prayse for ever, Amen" (Purchas, II, 337-8).

Religious persecution of Catholic followers of the Portuguese and Spanish priests was moving to a peak of violence in the period of Adams' advisory power, but he and others tended to blame the Dutch, who captured or counterfeited records which they claimed were Portuguese plans to conquer Japan politically after they had secured a beachhead of religious support. The count of Christians had indeed risen to amazing numbers (estimates run from 5% to 20% of the population; it has not been much above 100 in more recent times) and for a combination of reasons Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the Taiko ("secular ruler") before Ieyasu, had begun an anti-Christian movement that required the missionary priests to leave Japan and eventuated in bloody martyrdom. Adams died before the culmination of this persecution, which came with the elimination of 37,000 Christian sympathizers in Shimabara in 1638.13 It is clear that, although Adams served the cause of the newly-founded British trading center, he could not give English merchants his full loyalty and support. The "factory" closed in 1623 and, while there were sporadic contacts and even an armed clash, British-Japanese relations had to wait until 1854 to be re-established.

In many details, reports we find of Adams have parallels in the character of Gulliver, but there are points where we suggest that Swift himself - behind the mask of his ingenu - feels an even closer identification with "the first Englishman in Japan," particularly as he renounces England in his disgust with the lies and wars and avaricious greed for trade of Europeans. "The people of this Iland of Japan are good of nature, curteous above measure . . . their Justice is severely executed without any partialitie upon transgressors of the Law. They are governed in great civilitie, I thinke, no Land better governed in the world by Civill Policie" (Purchas, II, 339). The letters of Richard Cocks from the British factory in Hirado - printed in Purchas - support the views of Adams in this respect. On several occasions he shows how brutally cruel the "Hollanders" were, and how incomparably superior the Japanese leaders were in wisdom and kindness (Purchas, III, 530-2, 565).

Cocks gives some of the most brutal facts about the murderous infighting of Europeans in Japan; the Dutch, for example, rob and pillage Chinese ports with the colors and in the name of Englishmen (III, 562). He summarizes other abuses of the "Hollanders" but - in a footnote - enters into a balancing of accounts that sounds much like A Tale of a Tub (III, 564).

It may not be irrelevant that there was, in Saris' crew, a noteworthy man named Mendes, and Purchas notes that the Portuguese "discoverer" of Japan was Fernam Mendez Pinto; the name may be too common for the coincidence to mean much in relation to the figure of the good man of Gulliver, IV, Pedro de Mendez. Another possible coincidence is a place-name Adams mentions concerning his youth in the Stepney shipyard: "I am a man not unknown in Ratcliffe and Limehouse (Purchas II, 336), and Redriff is Lemuel Gulliver's domicile when he is in England. The third interesting coincidence is that the name of the ship on board which Adams sailed to Siam from Hirado on a trade mission was the "Sea Adventure" (Purchas, III, 550), whereas Gulliver embarked on his second voyage on the "Adventure."

More pertinent, perhaps, is the spelling for Nagasaki; Saris and Cocks consistently use "Langasaque" (and in one letter of Cocks, "Nangasaque") but their editor puts Nangasack" in the heading - closest parallel we find to Gulliver's spelling, "Nangasac." 14 For whatever whimsical reason, this city, which is the most important place in Japan for Gulliver's experiences there, is just "off the map" - the tiny corner cut off - which Swift's publisher printed in the text, Purchas gives Hondius' map of Japan, but it has no Nagasaki on it, while "Firando" seems to be floating on the ocean!

Adams, Saris, and Cocks at various points express their amazement and admiration over the size and elegance of Japan's cities, especially "Osaca," "Eddo," "Miaco," and "Surunga" (given on the Gulliver> map as "Osacca," "ledo," "Meaco," and "Surungo"). As they observe in their travels, one of the elements of Western life that was missing in Japan was the use of glass, especially for windows. There would be a suggestion here for Swift, who shows Gulliver's reactions to glass-less Lilliput, for example, where the natives took great interest in his watch with its "lucid Substance" of "transparent Metal" (GT, 35). Saris tells of his arrival at what is today's Tokyo - then the second largest city of Japan: "The fourteenth, we arrived at Eddo ("Yedo" in Gulliver text; "ledo" in the map), a Citie much greater than Surunga, farre fairer building, and made a glorious appearance unto us; the ridge-tiles and corner-tiles richly gilded, the posts of their doores gilded and varnished: Glasse-windowes they have none, but great windowes of board, opening in leaves, well set out with painting, as in Holland. . ." (Purchas, III, 463).

In Chapter IV of "A Voyage to Lilliput" Gulliver gives a great deal of similar data in his description of "Mildendo, the Metropolis" (GT, 47- 8). Then he undercuts the approach abruptly, saying:

But I shall not anticipate the Reader with farther Descriptions of this Kind, because I reserve them for a greater Work, which is now almost ready for the Press; containing a general Description of this Empire, from its first Erection, through a long Series of Princes, and with a particular Account of their Wars and Politicks, Laws, Learning, Religion; their Plants and Animals, their peculiar Manners and Customs, with other Matters very curious and useful; my chief Design at present being only to relate such Events and Transac tions as happened to the Publick, or to my self, during a Residence of about nine Months in that Empire.