A Samurai in Seville - by Lesley Downer

Hasekura in Rome. Portrait by Claude 
Deruet (1588-1660), with his galleon, 
the Date Maru, behind.

On October 28 1613 a samurai called Hasekura Tsunenaga set off on an epic voyage to an unexplored and little known part of the world - the land of the Southern Barbarians. He crossed the Pacific and travelled by way of Acapulco on a succession of magnificent galleons with gilded prows and billowing sails, and arrived in Spain on October 5th 1614. There he met King Phillip III, was baptised, and eight months later went on to Rome where he had an audience with Pope Paul V. All in all he was away for seven years.

The conquistadors and Japan

This was the era of the conquistadors, little more than a century after Columbus. The Spanish now ruled much of Central and South America, had colonised the Philippines and were eying up Japan.

But the Portuguese got there first. In 1543 they were already selling matchlock rifles to the warring Japanese clan lords. Shortly afterwards, in 1549, Francis Xavier and his Jesuit missionaries arrived and started converting sections of southern Japan. The Japanese realised that the Jesuits were the thin end of the wedge and that invading armies might follow, but they felt able to hold their own.

Portuguese with big hats enjoying very early female kabuki dancing
in Japan around 1603

In those days Spanish galleons plied the Pacific carrying Mexican silver to Manila where they loaded up with spices and goods from Asia to take back to Acapulco. In 1609 one of these galleons, the San Francisco, was wrecked on the coast of Japan near the booming city of Edo, present day Tokyo. The captain survived and went on to meet the retired shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and set up a trade treaty. The Englishman William Adams, model for James Clavell’s Shogun, had arrived 9 years earlier and become Ieyasu’s right hand man and the British East India Company had set up a factory (trading station) near Nagasaki.

Hasekura with his samurai sword as
depicted by Scipione Amati,
a German artist, in 1615

The One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu

Japan had recently come to the end of half a century of warfare and was now unified under the rule of Ieyasu but up north the formidable warlord Daté Masamune - the ‘One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu’ - had different ideas. He was interested in the Southern Barbarians and their Christianity and could see a way of using them to increase his own influence and perhaps escape from under the thumb of Ieyasu. So he decided to send a mission to the west. With Ieyasu’s approval he commissioned a splendid galleon, called the Daté Maru in Japanese and the San Juan Bautista in Spanish.

Hasekura’s adventure

Hasekura Tsunenaga was a samurai with a somewhat chequered background, but Daté decided he was the man for the job. He headed a delegation of thirty samurai plus 120 Japanese merchants, sailors and servants together with 40 Spanish and Portuguese. His brief was to negotiate trade treaties. This was Japan’s first official venture to Europe and he was the ambassador.

After three months at sea the galleon arrived at California then followed the coast to Acapulco where they stayed for two months. They were received with great splendour in Mexico City, then boarded another galleon, the San Jose, to cross the Atlantic and reached the port of Sanlùcar de Barrameda, at the mouth of the river Guadalquivir, in Spain, on October 5th 1614.

Seville in the 16th century with the river full of galleons and the cathedral
rising behind: Vista de Sevilla attrib. Alonso Sanchez Coello, d 1588

And so they arrived in Seville, the jewel in Spain’s crown. "The Japanese ambassador Hasekura Rokuemon, sent by Joate [Daté] Masamune, king of Boju [Oshu], entered Seville on Wednesday 23rd October 1614," reports a contemporary Spanish text. "He was accompanied by 30 Japanese with blades, their captain of the guard, and 12 bowmen and halberdiers with painted lances and blades of ceremony."

Seville, Seville

The Alcazar gardens with cathedral behind

Seville was the greatest and most glamorous city in Spain. It was the European port of departure for the Americas and had a monopoly on all Spanish trade with the new-found continent. Day and night galleons laden with American gold and silver and treasures from the Indies plied their way up the Guadalquivir, unloading their bullion at the Royal Docks. Seville was the hub of world trade, a cosmopolitan melting pot of money seekers, where merchants from across Europe flocked to acquire goods from the New World. Much of the bullion was spent on Seville’s glorious architecture and there was a huge flowering of the arts. Velazquez was starting his career, Cervantes was working on the second part of Don Quixote.

Gentleman in padded breeches -
Seville Cathedral

Hasekura must have enjoyed this magnificent city of golden stone, so different from the wooden and bamboo cities he knew with their towering white-plastered castles. He no doubt visited the cathedral, completed a hundred years earlier, and marvelled at the ornate carving of the spire. Such a high-ranking envoy was probably invited to the Real Alcázar, Philip III’s residence in Seville, and must have admired the gold ceiling and intricate stone fretwork of the Salón de Embajadores and the lavish gardens, so different from the gardens of Japan. He also must have enjoyed the orange trees, which perhaps reminded him of the orange groves of Shikoku, and the streets crowded with fashionable ladies in ruffs and enormous bell-shaped skirts and gentlemen in doublets, padded breeches and hose.

Homecoming

Hasekura went on to Madrid where he met King Philip III on 30 January 1615 and delivered a letter from Daté Masamune proposing a trade treaty. He was baptised on Feb 17 1615 by the king’s personal chaplain.

In all he and his colleagues spent eight months in Spain, being treated with all the honour due to visiting dignitaries.

Hasekura meets the Pope in Rome, 17th century Japanese painting

Then they sailed on. They were forced by the weather to make a three day stop in Saint Tropez, where they caused quite a sensation. From there they went on to Italy where Hasekura had an audience with Pope Paul V, just as Galileo was formulating his theory that the earth circled the sun, not the sun the earth.

In April 1616 they were back in Spain and in June 1616 left Seville for New Spain (Mexico) on the first leg of their journey home. Six samurai stayed behind and in the little town of Coria del Río, just outside Seville, seven hundred of the 25,000 inhabitants now bear the surname Japón, marking them as descendants of the expedition.

Seville orange tree

But when Hasekura and his colleagues got back to Japan after seven years away, like Urashima Taro, the Japanese Rip van Winkle, they discovered everything had changed. The retired shogun Ieyasu had died and his son, the shogun, had decided to eradicate Christianity and persecute Christians. The treaties Hasekura had worked so hard to negotiate were useless.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale of nineteenth century Japan and is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

Old pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. New pics author's holiday snaps.

Great Exploration

By Katherine Webb

Since my latest novel THE ENGLISH GIRL comes out in just a few days’ time, this month I thought I’d write about a few of the real-life historical figures that inspired my characters, and the particular relationship between two of them that inspired the whole story. 

THE ENGLISH GIRL tells the story of Joan Seabrook, a young woman who goes to Arabia in 1958 in search of adventure, and gets a good deal more of it than she bargained for thanks to her involvement with Maude Vickery, an early pioneer of desert exploration and idol of Joan’s, now living in retirement in Muscat. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone with an interest in the history of exploration that the woman who inspired the character of Maude was Gertrude Bell. I first discovered her when I read Janet Wallach’s excellent biography of her about eighteen years ago, and I remember being bothered that I hadn’t heard of her before, when she had done such amazing things. 

Janet Wallach's excellent biography of Gertrude Bell, my first introduction to this remarkable woman

Born in 1868 to an aristocratic family in the north of England, Gertrude took her position of wealth and privilege, and, perhaps rarely for a woman at that time, did something with it. Fiercely intelligent, she studied History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, and took first class honours (though women were not actually awarded degrees at that time). Her education didn’t stop there — she was a tremendous autodidact, and continued to study and learn however she could, teaching herself latin because she was so frustrated by the ‘blank wall of my ignorance of it’. She began to travel; to study archeology and classical civilisation; to write, and she never stopped — she didn’t marry, but devoted her life to travel and discovery.

Gertrude developed a deep love of the Middle East early in her career, and spent more of the remainder of her life there than ‘at home’ in England — her letters record her delight each time she returned to ‘my east.’ She travelled extensively in Egypt, the Levant, Syria and Mesopotamia, becoming fluent in Arabic, writing books and articles on the remains of ancient civilisations she visited, and on the structure of modern life there. She became ‘a personage’ to the sheiks there — no small feat for a woman, and a European infidel to boot. By the time of the First World War, no westerner knew the area, or its people and politics, better than Gertrude Bell.

Gertrude Bell

Gertrude first met Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), later known as Lawrence of Arabia, when he was a young man in his twenties, on an archeological dig. She commented in a letter that he would ‘make a traveller one day.’ Despite being twenty years his senior, and notoriously irascible, the two became lifelong friends and rivals. They didn’t always see eye to eye, but had a great deal of affection and respect for one another. Later, when Lawrence led the Arab Revolts of 1916-18, his success relied heavily on Gertrude’s knowledge and writings of the tribes and their internal politics, though she was given little credit outside of the Political Office in Baghdad. After the war, they were both involved in the discussions that led to the re-drawing of the political map of the area, with the creation of the modern countries of Palestine and Iraq. Gertrude foresaw but could do nothing to mitigate the problems these new countries would suffer by being drawn along geographical and political rather than tribal and sectarian lines. 

Thomas Edward Lawrence

Gertrude found self-promotion and the idea of fame both repugnant and vulgar, and however pleased she was to have some renown amongst the Arabs, she certainly wouldn’t have wanted the fame or ‘myth-making’ that surrounded Lawrence. They even met for lunch to discuss the matter, and she counselled him to write The Seven Pillars of Wisdom to help counter the hyperbole. Still, however unbothered Gertrude was at this injustice, it bothered me! Short of leading men into battle, she did everything Lawrence did and more — and given that she did it earlier, and on her own, it’s fair to say that she did it backwards in high heels to boot. Their relationship got me wondering — what if they hadn’t got on? What if they’d fallen in love — and then out of love? What if their rivalry had turned bitter, and led to acts of underhandedness, and betrayal? This was the germ of the idea of the story at the heart of THE ENGLISH GIRL.

Gertrude Bell on one of her many journeys

The male counterpoint to my character of Maude is Nathaniel Elliot, her childhood sweetheart. The inspiration for his life and travels came from Wilfred Thesiger (1910 - 2003), known as the last of the great explorers, and the man who explored the Empty Quarter of Arabia more comprehensively than anybody during five years in the 1940s. From a less wealthy background than Gertrude Bell (though still educated at Eton and Oxford), Thesiger was forced to explore on the sly, when he was sent there by what would later become the UN’s Food and Agricultural Association, to look for the breeding sites of Africa’s great locust swarms. Rather than travelling with a European team or equipment, Thesiger ‘went native’. Abhorring all modern technology, he travelled with Bedouin guides, and lived as one of them, with all the inherent privations and hardships that that entailed. Thesiger was a man in love with the solitude and beauty of the desert, even when it almost killed him — an attitude I tried to embed into each of my characters. He once said that even the celibacy of the desert hadn’t bothered him at all, and that marriage ‘would certainly have been a crippling handicap.’ 

Wilfred Thesiger in his Arabian Bedouin garb

By the time he wrote his wonderful book about the Empty Quarter, Arabian Sands, in 1959, Thesiger was already lamenting the end of the era of exploration. Cars, roads, aeroplanes — he loathed them all, and the way they made the planet smaller, running roughshod over its mysteries. One wonders what he would have made of satellite phones and GPS. It was indeed the end of an era — none of us will ever be able to take ourselves as far from civilisation as he did, and even though I am probably not the type to take on such journeys in any case, I can’t help feeling a little sad that they are no longer possible; that all that remains to us now are the ghosts of adventure, loitering along well-trodden routes. It’s this strange nostalgia for adventures never to be had that leads my character, Joan, into an extraordinary situation…

One of Thesiger's photographs of the Empty Quarter in the 1940s