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.

Of Ships and Suns - by Katherine Langrish

In all kinds of mythologies there are stories about sailing across the sea to a mystical land.  Maybe peoples of all races and all times have this in their blood: anyone who’s ever stood at the seashore and seen the sun rising or setting over the ocean must have wondered, like young Peer Ulfsson in my historical fantasy ‘West of the Moon’, what it would be like to find the lands beyond the sun:

He clambered across the cargo and up the curve of the ship into the stern, where he stood for a moment holding the tiller and gazing out westwards.  The sun was low, laying a bright track over the water: a road studded with glittering cobblestones.  It stung his heart and dazzled his eyes.

He felt a surge of longing.  Life was a tangle that tied him to the shore.  What would it be like to cut free, shake off the land, and go gliding away into the very heart of the sun?

That ships and suns go together can be seen from the Egyptian sun god Re with his two boats: the sun boat or Mandjet (Boat of Millions of Years) which carried him from east to west across the sky accompanied by various other deities and personifications, and the night boat, the Mesesket, on which the god travelled through the perilous underworld from west to east, to rise again in the morning.  

How old is Re?  Well, judging by the dates of temples dedicated to his worship, his cult rose to its zenith in the 5^th Dynasty, beginning approximately 2500 BCE.  The dead were expected to spend eternity travelling with him across the sky. (Later his cult was superseded by the resurrection cult of Osiris.)  The photo above this paragraph shows the full-size Egyptian ship known as the Khufu ship, 143 feet long and built of Lebanon cedar, which was sealed into a pit at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza: the remains of many other solar boats have been found in different locations in Egypt.

Rock engravings in Scandinavia, dated to the Bronze Age any time between 1500 and 400 BCE show the same correspondence between ships and suns.  Here are some examples, reproduced in ‘The Chariot of the Sun and other Rites and Symbols of the Northern Bronze Age' by Peter Gelling and Hilda Ellis Davidson, showing ships embellished with sun discs and spirals. 

But people have been heading out to sea for literally hundreds of thousands of years.  Here’s a link to an article which seems to show that even before we were modern humans, hominids such as homo erectus ‘used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from Northern Africa to Europe’ – island-hopping as they went and leaving stone hand axes on Crete dating to at least 130,000 BCE.   How amazing – how utterly mind-blowing is that?  Modern humans crossed to Australia 60,000 years ago, and to North America earlier than 13,000 BCE. 

Whatever drove them to make these discoveries?  A nomadic hunter-gathering lifestyle is one thing: but setting off in a boat or on a raft on a one-way trip into an unknown ocean is quite another, especially with no population pressure pushing you on.  I can’t help but wonder if there was maybe a religious, a mystical element to these early voyages of discovery.  Maybe, standing on the sea shore, gazing at the sun rising or setting (depending which side of which continent they were), early peoples believed themselves to be embarking on journeys to follow the sun to the land of gods and the happy dead?  

And those left behind, watching them depart, must have felt a huge sense of awe, wonder and mystery about what befell the seafarers. As it says in ‘Beowulf’, when the dead king Scyld Scefing is set adrift in his ship-funeral:

Then they set up / the standard of gold

High over head: / let the sea bear him:

Gave him to the flood / with sad hearts

And mourning minds.  / Men cannot

Say for certain, / neither court-counsellors

Nor heroes under heaven, / who received that cargo.  

Who received that cargo?  By the time the Beowulf poem was written down, England was Christian.  But the poem leaves us in doubt as to the eventual supernatural landfall of a pagan king: it was an age which could still hold Christian and pagan beliefs in relatively comfortable simultaneity – an age which, maybe, knew it didn’t have all the answers.

And people down the centuries have been buried in ships, like the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo ship, dating from the early 7^th century AD, and the Oseberg ship, circa 800 AD,  which carried the bodies of two women, priestesses or queens, and the Gokstad ship, built of oak felled around 890 AD, sheltering the body of a man, perhaps a king.  The 10^th century Muslim traveller Ibn Fadlan wrote an eyewitness account of a Viking ship-funeral in Russia: a chieftain interred in his ship along with many grave goods and sacrifices, including that of a slave girl who ‘saw’ into the land of the dead in a kind of drugged trance, after which she was strangled and stabbed and laid beside him to accompany him on his mystical voyage.  According to Ibn Fadlan’s account, she had voluntarily offered herself as the sacrifice, and we needn’t be too sceptical.  In all probability she utterly believed she would be accompanying her lord to the Otherworld.  He was her passport to immortality.  

So ships and suns and voyages into the west have been part of the human imagination for many thousands of years.  After Re the sun god, there came Odysseus, Jason, Maelduine, Brendan, Oisin and many a nameless adventurer with them.  There came the Christian hermits who sailed out to remote islets in the Atlantic, and the saints who founded monasteries on Holy Islands like Iona and Lindisfarne. 

So let’s set sail for the western isles, the land of the gods, the land of the dead, the land of the ever-young.  Bid farewell to Middle-Earth.  This way to Aeaea, Avalon, Tir na n’Og, Valinor, Eldamar, the Hesperides and Hy Brasil.  Hush! Can you hear the seagulls crying?