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First Europeans in Japan: the accounts of the earliest witnesses

To medieval Europe, Japan was little more than a name: the Cipangu that Marco Polo described around 1298 without ever seeing it, an island roofed with gold that Christopher Columbus thought he had reached in 1492. The first Europeans to set foot there were Portuguese merchants, carried around 1543 to the island of Tanegashima aboard a Chinese junk. They left behind arquebuses, which Japanese smiths were copying within a few years.

In 1549 the Jesuit Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima. The missionaries found a country split into rival lordships, where the new faith was welcomed as readily as trade with Macao. Luís Fróis, who arrived in 1563, recorded everything he saw for more than thirty years, and in 1585 drew up a treatise of contrasts in which the Japanese do almost everything the opposite way from Europeans. In 1582 Alessandro Valignano sent four young Japanese Christians all the way to Rome, where the pope received them in 1585: for once, it was the Japanese who discovered Europe.

The tide turned quickly. Twenty-six Christians were crucified at Nagasaki in 1597. The Englishman William Adams, pilot of a Dutch ship wrecked in 1600, became an adviser to Tokugawa Ieyasu and ended his life a samurai. The shogunate banned Christianity in 1614, expelled the Portuguese in 1639 and confined the Dutch to Dejima, a man-made islet in Nagasaki harbor, which they left once a year to pay their respects to the shogun in Edo. For more than two centuries, most of what Europe knew about Japan came from the physicians of this trading post: Engelbert Kaempfer at the end of the seventeenth century, the Swede Carl Peter Thunberg in 1775-1776, and Philipp Franz von Siebold in the 1820s, who was expelled for smuggling out forbidden maps.

The Japanese, for their part, watched these foreigners they called the "southern barbarians", nanban, and painted on folding screens their great black carracks, their baggy breeches and their dogs. Later, the scholars of "Dutch learning" translated works on anatomy, medicine and astronomy, quietly preparing the country's opening.

When it came, it was forced: Commodore Perry's "black ships" sailed into Edo Bay in 1853 and a treaty was signed the following year. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, diplomats, scholars, photographers and travelers followed one another. Isabella Bird rode the northern roads as far as the Ainu country in 1878, and Lafcadio Hearn, who arrived in 1890, became a Japanese citizen.

This collection brings together our editions of eyewitness accounts and a directory of other early writings on Japan.

Our titles on this subject

The Star Raft

Fei Xin, 1409-1433

Half a century before Vasco da Gama, a soldier of Zheng He's fleet describes forty-four countries across Asia, the Indian Ocean, Arabia, and East Africa. A Chinese view of the fifteenth-century world.

In the early fifteenth century, Ming China sent the largest fleets of the age into the Indian Ocean. Fei Xin sailed with them as an ordinary soldier, neither envoy nor admiral, and he writes as a literate member of the crew. His forty-four entries, each closed by a poem, describe Malacca, Calicut and Hormuz as the Chinese empire saw them, before the Portuguese arrived to redraw the trade routes of the whole region.

The World Tour of Francesco Carletti

Francesco Carletti, 1594-1606

A Florentine merchant circles the globe out of curiosity, from Cape Verde to Japan and China, before losing everything at Saint Helena. A firsthand account, 1591-1606.

At the end of the sixteenth century, sailing round the world was still the business of the Iberian crowns and their fleets. Francesco Carletti, a Florentine merchant, travelled as a private man along Spain's routes to America and across the Pacific, then Portugal's routes through Asia, just when both empires answered to a single king. Dictated on his return for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, his account gives the rare view of an Italian with no official mission on this first global trade.

Description of the Arduous Voyage Made Around the Universe or Terrestrial Globe

Olivier van Noort, 1598-1601

248 men leave Rotterdam, 45 return: the deadliest Dutch voyage around the world.

Setting out from Rotterdam in 1598 with four ships, Olivier van Noort came home in 1601 with only one: this was the first Dutch voyage around the world and the fourth in history, after Magellan, Drake and Cavendish. His logbook, translated into French as early as 1602, tells of the Strait of Magellan, the plundering of the Chilean coast, the battle off Manila and Borneo, at the moment when Holland, at war with Spain, opened its own road to the Pacific.

An Account of a Voyage to the East Indies

Christian Burckhardt, 1674-1681

Back from the East Indies, Christian Burckhardt sketches them province by province.

A soldier and then a clerk of the Dutch East India Company from 1674 to 1681, Christian Burckhardt, from Halle, recounts the stop at the Cape, Batavia and above all five years in Ceylon, between Colombo, Sitawaka and the campaigns against the King of Kandy. He adds a memorial of the Indies, from Hormuz to Japan, and accounts of the siege of San Thomé and of the seven captive kings of Batavia: a humble employee's view of seventeenth-century Dutch Asia.

Thirty Years on the Seas of the Indies

Alexander Hamilton, 1688-1723

A Scottish merchant spends thirty-five years crossing the Indian Ocean, from the Cape to Basra and Bombay. Shipwrecks, trading posts, the court of the Great Mughal: up to the reckless war Aurangzeb wages against the English Com...

Around 1700 the western Indian Ocean was changing masters: the Omanis of Muscat drove the Portuguese from the Swahili coast, Safavid Persia collapsed before the Afghans, and the English Company risked its first war against Aurangzeb. Hamilton, an independent trader whom the companies regarded as an interloper, watched these upheavals from the coffee ports, the Persian Gulf and Gujarat. Free of any official tie, his testimony lights up the merchant side of a world being reshaped.

Volumes I II III

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

Marco Polo, Le Devisement du monde (1298)

On his way back from China, the Venetian sails along the Coromandel coast, stops at the tomb of Saint Thomas, describes the pearl fisheries, the naked kings covered in jewels, the widow-burning pyres and the kingdom of Ceylon with its sacred peak. All the marvels that Hamilton finds diminished or disputed, Marco Polo sees in their full brilliance, four centuries earlier. To read one after the other is to follow the slow transformation of the same shore, from medieval splendors to the fortified trading posts of the age of the companies.
Ibn Battuta, Voyages (1325-1354)

Three centuries before Hamilton, the great Moroccan traveler already sails along the Swahili coast of Mombasa and Kilwa, journeys up the Persian Gulf, reaches India, and serves the Sultan of Delhi. He sees these same Muslim ports at the height of their prosperity, before the Portuguese extort them and the Arabs of Muscat retake a few of them. His testimony provides the depth of time that the captain's account, hurried along by trade, lacks.
Ludovico di Varthema, Itinéraire (1510)

A Bolognese adventurer of the early sixteenth century, Varthema is one of the first Europeans to visit Mecca disguised as a pilgrim, then to sail down the Red Sea to Aden and reach India. He travels the Arabian coast that Hamilton will follow two centuries later, stops at the same coffee ports, and describes the same sheikhs greedy for tribute. His picaresque account illuminates, in advance, the Arab world that the captain will later observe with the colder eye of a merchant.
Antonio Pigafetta, Relation du premier voyage autour du monde (1519-1522)

Two centuries before Hamilton, the gentleman of Vicenza embarks with Magellan and survives the expedition that first crosses the Pacific. He touches at the Philippines, where the captain will meet his death, reaches Borneo and its splendid court, loads cloves from the Moluccas and sails along Timor, these same islands the Scottish merchant will visit two hundred years later. His wonder-struck journal shows the spice archipelago at the very moment Europe discovers it, when Hamilton will see nothing of it but the trading posts the companies fight over. To read one after the other is to follow the passage from the dream of spices to their ordinary trade.
Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, Histoire de l'expédition chrétienne au royaume de la Chine (1615)

The Jesuit Ricci, who entered China at the end of the sixteenth century, learns the language and the classics, wins the friendship of the scholars and makes his way to Peking. His account, set down by Trigault, reveals to Europe a refined civilization that the captain, a century later, will encounter only through the customs gate at Canton. Where Hamilton rages against the Hoppo and his extortions, Ricci describes the court from within, the examination of the mandarins and the wisdom of Confucius, and lends to the China of the merchants a learned depth that the trader's eye alone lacks.
Tomé Pires, Suma oriental (c. 1515)

A Portuguese apothecary and agent, Pires writes around 1515, from Malacca itself, the most complete description of the great Asian trade of his time, before dying a prisoner in China. He lists the cargoes, the routes and the nations that cross paths at the strait, that same chokepoint where Hamilton ends his second volume. His meticulous inventory shows Malacca at the height of its mercantile fortune, when the Scottish captain will see in it no more than a Dutch colony, still rich but fallen from its former glory.
Duarte Barbosa, Le Livre de Duarte Barbosa (c. 1516)

A Portuguese factor of the early sixteenth century, Barbosa describes the Indian Ocean at the moment his nation holds its keys, two centuries before Hamilton observes its decline. Cambay, Diu, Hormuz, Mombasa, Mozambique: every stronghold the Scottish captain finds fortified, besieged, or lost, Barbosa sees new, in the hands of the Crown of Portugal. Reading the two in succession is to measure the slow tide that draws Lusitanian power back from these shores.
Willem Schouten et Jacob Le Maire, Journal ou description du merveilleux voyage de Guillaume Schouten (1618)

To escape the monopoly of the Company, which alone may use the Strait of Magellan, merchants of Hoorn seek another passage. In 1616, Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten discover the strait that bears the former's name, then round a cape they christen Hoorn. They then cross the Pacific by islands that Van Noort never saw, the Tuamotus, Tonga, New Ireland, before arriving at Java, where the Company confiscates their ship. Read after the journal of 1598, this account shows how quickly Holland learns the Pacific: within twenty years, the sea that had nearly swallowed Van Noort becomes a known road.
Joris van Spilbergen, Speculum Orientalis Occidentalisque Indiae Navigationum (1619)

Fifteen years after Van Noort, Joris van Spilbergen takes up his route on behalf of the East India Company. Setting out in 1614 with six ships, he passes through the Strait of Magellan, follows the coast of Chile, crushes a Spanish squadron off Peru in 1615, ransoms Paita, negotiates at Acapulco, then crosses the Pacific to the Philippines and the Moluccas. His account, published in 1619 with that of Le Maire and Schouten, reads like a successful version of the first: same itinerary, same enemies, same ports, but a better-armed state fleet, which makes the South Sea a regular theater of the Dutch war against Spain.
Nicolas Sanson and the Cartographers of the Grand Siècle (1650-1700)

Before modern surveys, the Indian Ocean can be read on the maps of the king's geographers, where the coastlines Hamilton calls so poorly rendered gradually take shape. Following these maps, from the Ethiopic Sea to the mouths of the Indus, helps explain why the captain constantly complains of shoals and rocks missing from the charts: he sails through a world still only half guessed at, one that others, after him, would finish drawing.
Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East Indies (1659-1679)

Burckhardt knows the King of Kandy only through the Puqvoy embassy. The English sailor Robert Knox, for his part, lived nineteen years in his kingdom. Captured in 1659 with part of his crew by the troops of Raja Sinha II, he survives by knitting caps and lending grain, until his escape to the Dutch fort of Arippu, which sends him on to Batavia. Back in London in September 1680, he publishes his account in 1681, with the support of the Royal Society. Translated into German as early as 1689, it offers the exact reverse of Burckhardt's: Sinhalese Ceylon from the inside, seen by a captive, against the Ceylon of the Dutch coastal forts.
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Johan Nieuhof, L'Ambassade de la Compagnie orientale des Provinces-Unies vers l'empereur de la Chine (1665)

A member of the first great Dutch embassy to Peking, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Nieuhof travels up China from Canton to the capital and brings back hundreds of drawings that fix, for a long time to come, Europe's image of the country. He sees, fifty years before Hamilton, the same rivers, the same bridges and the same cities, but from the side of the pleading embassy rather than the deceived merchant. His book sheds light on the ceremony and the haughtiness of the imperial administration that the captain will suffer in his turn, without ever penetrating its ways.
Arnoldus Montanus, Ambassades mémorables vers les empereurs du Japon (1669)

A Dutch compiler of the seventeenth century, Montanus gathers the accounts of the Company's envoys to the Japan of the shoguns, that country closed upon itself which only the Dutch may still approach, through the narrow window of Nagasaki. His book, alive with processions and marvels, shows the closed empire that Hamilton only glimpses from afar, and tells in full the suppression of Christianity and the cunning of the merchants that the captain sums up in a few forceful pages. It is the great European picture of forbidden Japan, of which Hamilton gives only the sketch.
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages (1676)

Half a century after Carletti, this dealer in precious stones travels in turn through Persia and India, from the diamond mines to the courts of great kings. In him we find the same trader's eye for gems, currencies, and routes as in the Florentine, but Asia has already changed: the Dutch and English whom Carletti saw only beginning to appear at Goa are now installed there as masters of trade.
Engelbert Kaempfer, Histoire naturelle, civile et ecclésiastique du Japon (1690-1692)

A physician for the Dutch East India Company, Kaempfer lived in Japan at the close of the seventeenth century, in a country now closed to foreigners and purged of Christians. His book shows what became of the Japan that Carletti had reached while it was still open, before the crosses of Nagasaki announced the great closing. The same archipelago, a century later, locked shut.
Gemelli Careri, Le Tour du monde (1699-1700)

At the close of the seventeenth century, this Neapolitan magistrate retraces, as a well-off tourist, the circuit of the globe that Carletti had accomplished as a ruined merchant. Manila, Acapulco, Mexico City: he follows almost the same route and publishes an account that will meet with immense success. Reading Gemelli after Carletti is to measure the distance travelled between perilous adventure and pleasure travel.
Gemelli Careri, Voyage autour du monde (1699-1700)

At the end of the seventeenth century, the Neapolitan jurist travels around the world at his own expense. He crosses China, goes up to Peking, contemplates the Great Wall, then embarks at Manila on the galleon that links the Philippines to America. Almost a contemporary of Hamilton, he sails exactly the seas of this third volume, but as a free-roaming man of curiosity rather than a merchant. His testimony confirms, corrects or colors many a scene of the captain's, from the court of Canton to the streets of Manila, and gives a learned traveling companion to the crossing of the Malay Archipelago and the China seas.
Peter Kolben, The Present State of the Cape of Good-Hope (1705-1713)

Thirty years after Burckhardt's stop, the Franconian Peter Kolb lands at the Cape in 1705, sent by a Prussian councillor, Baron von Krosigk, to make astronomical observations there. He stays several years, until his eyesight fails, and takes a particular interest in the Dutch colony and the Khoikhoi, those Burckhardt calls the Hottentots. His great book appears in Nuremberg in 1719, followed by a French translation in 1741. Kolb breaks with the clichés of his predecessors, compares the beliefs of the Khoikhoi with those of Europeans and reports the armed raids of the settlers. To be reread alongside the chapter on the Cape, written by a passing soldier in a hurry to leave.
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Johann Wolfgang Heydt, Allerneuester Geographisch- und Topographischer Schau-Platz von Africa und Ost-Indien (1733-1740)

Half a century later, Johann Wolfgang Heydt follows in Burckhardt's footsteps: a German who entered the Company's service in 1733, he first spends two years in Ceylon before reaching Batavia, where in 1737 he becomes the Company's architect and draughtsman. Back in Europe in 1740 for reasons of health, he publishes in Nuremberg in 1744 a large album of more than a hundred plates engraved after his drawings, with a long text: the Cape, Colombo and its fortifications, Batavia, Malacca, the Moluccas, Dejima. There one sees, drawn, the places Burckhardt describes in words: the citadels, the streets, the gardens and the life of the European employees of the Indies.
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Richard Walter, A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1740-1744 by George Anson (1748)

A century and a half later, an English squadron retraces Van Noort's course with the same ambition: to plunder the Spanish coast of the Pacific and intercept the gold of Manila. The official account of George Anson's expedition tells of Cape Horn in the storm, scurvy killing hundreds of men, the stopover at Juan Fernandez, the sack of Paita, the crossing to Guam, then the capture of the Manila galleon off the Philippines in 1743. A single ship returns, laden with silver. The resemblances to the journal of 1598 are striking: same sea, same enemies, same slaughter, but this time plunder equal to the losses.
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Carl Peter Thunberg, Travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia (1770-1779)

A pupil of Linnaeus, the Swede Carl Peter Thunberg signs on in 1771 as a surgeon of the Dutch Company in order to collect plants in the Indies. He spends three years at the Cape, reaches Batavia in May 1775, stays at the Dejima trading post and in 1776 accompanies the Dutch embassy to Edo, then lives in Ceylon from July 1777 to February 1778, before returning by way of the Cape. His account appears in Uppsala from 1788. A hundred years later, he almost retraces the route of Burckhardt's memorial, from the Cape to closed Japan by way of Ceylon, but with a naturalist's eye: where the clerk reports marvels, Thunberg names, classifies and describes the plants.
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Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du Roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L'Étoile (1771)

The first official circumnavigation of the French navy, Bougainville's expedition spends nearly two months in the Strait of Magellan, from December 1767 to January 1768. His pages on the sheltered bays, the winds that rush in, the dark forests and the Fuegians met at the water's edge answer directly the weeks of waiting and storm that Van Noort relates. Then come Tahiti, the Moluccas and Batavia, where the Dutch now hold the empire that the fleet of 1598 was still seeking. Between the two books the tone has changed: the plundering adventurer has given way to the scholar and the philosopher, but the strait itself has not changed.
James Bruce, Voyage aux sources du Nil (1790)

Half a century after Hamilton, the Scotsman James Bruce finally enters the Abyssinia his countryman had known only through the accounts of fleeing missionaries. He lives at the court of the ruler Europeans called Prester John, and sees with his own eyes the customs, the raw meat, and the salt currency that Hamilton had known only by hearsay. His account confirms, corrects, and extends the astonished pages the captain devotes to the Christian kingdom of the mountains.
Alexander von Humboldt, Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1799-1804)

Two centuries after Carletti, the Prussian scholar explores New Spain and Peru with the instruments of modern science. Where the merchant noted the prices of cacao and silver, Humboldt measures, classifies, and understands. The same lands, seen through an Enlightenment mind, shed light in return on the still-groping curiosity of the Florentine traveler.
Charles Darwin, Voyage d'un naturaliste autour du monde (1839)

Between 1832 and 1835 the Beagle follows almost the whole South American route of Van Noort. Darwin calls at Port Desire, the Port Desire where Captain Huydecoper was buried, goes up the Strait of Magellan, observes the Fuegians, then follows the coast of Chile from Chiloe to Valparaiso, feels the earthquake of 1835 at Valdivia and then discovers Concepcion in ruins. Where the Dutch journal saw only watering places, enemies and provisions to be taken, the naturalist reads marine terraces, fossils and birds. The same places, two centuries later, become the laboratory of an idea that will change biology.
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Ernst Haeckel, A Visit to Ceylon (1881-1882)

Two centuries after Burckhardt, another German discovers Ceylon with wonder. The zoologist Ernst Haeckel, a professor at Jena and a great champion of Darwin, lands in Colombo on 21 November 1881, after a voyage by way of Bombay, and stays on the island until March 1882. He sets up a laboratory at Belligemma, today's Weligama, on the south coast not far from Matara, where Burckhardt had capsized, visits Kandy and the Peradeniya garden and climbs the island's highest peak. His letters, collected under the title Indische Reisebriefe, celebrate the jungle, the sea and the wildlife, with the racial prejudices of their time.
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Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World (1900)

In 1895, a fifty-one-year-old American captain sets out alone, on an old eleven-metre sloop, the Spray, to sail around the world. Joshua Slocum passes the Strait of Magellan in early 1896, struggles for weeks against gusts that throw him back, and scatters tacks on his deck to guard against nocturnal visitors from Tierra del Fuego. He then crosses the Pacific to Australia and returns in 1898. His account, full of humor, is the exact opposite of Van Noort's journal: one man without a crew where four ships had lost almost all of theirs.
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First Europeans in Japan: the accounts of the earliest witnesses