The Memoirs of Admiral Lord Beresford
Captain Bligh adrift in an open boat, with the nineteen men who stayed
by him, and a small stock of provisions. The captain and his men made
an astonishing voyage of nearly 4000 miles, and fetched up at the
island of Timor, south of the Malaccas, in the following June. Some of
the mutineers were subsequently {88} brought to justice in the year
1792. Six of them were condemned and three were executed. In 1814 it
was discovered that ten among the mutineers had colonised Pitcairn
Island.
We in the _Galatea_ stayed at Tahiti as long as we possibly could, and
enjoyed every moment of the time. One of our amusements was to float
down a narrow and swift stream and shoot the waterfall. At a point
some little distance from the coast, the stream ran deep and rapid
between banks which were about three feet apart. The natives, boys and
girls, used to drop into the stream and let themselves be carried down
feet foremost to a waterfall, which descended some 40 or 50 feet in a
wide pool; and it occurred to me that what they could do, I could
accomplish. I watched these intrepid children very carefully, and I
observed that they always came to the surface some distance away from
the fall. In spite of some dissuasion, I determined to attempt the
enterprise. I floated down the stream feet foremost, shot the fall,
and the moment I reached the foot of it I struck out under water. I
was amazed to find that the water was just like air, or an enormous
cauldron of soda water, buoying one up, and I came to the surface
without the slightest difficulty. Afterwards I went down head first.
The only thing to remember was not to come up under the fall itself.
Shooting the waterfall became a popular amusement.
Another of our diversions was surf-playing. This enchanting exercise
is performed with the aid of a long board shaped like a wedge. The
swimmer takes his board, pushes it before him over the breakers, while
he dives through them, then turns, and, leaning on the board, rides
back on the crest of the surf. The speed, whatever it may be, feels
like sixty miles an hour. It is one of the most exhilarating pastimes
in the world.
I remember that we all went to church on Sunday. During the service,
the Queen of Tahiti suddenly clapped her hands, whereupon the clergyman
desisted from his {89} ministrations, while her Majesty distributed
tobacco among the congregation. When it was well alight the Queen
again clapped her hands, and the clergyman went on with the service.
We left Tahiti with profound regret, receiving and giving many presents
on parting. From Tahiti we proceeded to the Sandwich Islands, where I
met many old friends, made during my sojourn four years previously.
The American population had quite forgiven and forgotten my boyish
freak, which had so agitated them at the time. Our old friend Queen
Emma, whom we had taken to Panama on her way to England to see the
Queen, had returned. I went to call upon her, driving tandem, as
already related. Turning in at the gate, I took the corner too
sharply, the wheels locked, and the buggy capsized. In the meantime
the Queen, having heard the jingling of the Canadian sleigh bells
attached to the harness, came out to find her visitor sitting on the
grass at her feet. The horses galloped on and wrecked the vehicle and
also themselves. Altogether it was a very expensive drive.
{90}
CHAPTER X
THE CRUISE OF H.M.S. _GALATEA_
IV. OLD JAPAN
NOTE
When Lord Charles Beresford visited Nippon (from the Chinese Jih Pun,
the place or rising of the sun, changed by English pronunciation to
Japan), it was the old Japan that he saw; the Japan of centuries of
isolation, inviolate save for the intrusion of the Jesuit missionaries
in the sixteenth century, and the little wedge of Dutch traders. It
had been the Japan of the Mikado, who was as a god; of the Tycoon, his
temporal representative, who, like a man walking the tight-rope above a
wood of transfixing swords, maintained a delicate equipoise of power
among the feudal seigneuralty, the great Daimios, each lord of his
domain and master of life and death over thousands of retainers. It
was the Japan of the Samurai, the two-sworded rufflers; of the Ronins,
the masterless men, the outlaws, who roved the country in bands,
patriotic, ferocious and pitiless. It was still the Japan in which the
common people, men and women and maidens, walked naked and unashamed;
in which the warriors went to battle clad in armour wrought of
tortoise-shell and silk, girt with swords and carrying bows and arrows;
in which the life of a barbarian foreigner was never safe from hour to
hour, so that he must be guarded by the two-sworded Yaconins, the
Government officers, who, knowing the hatred of the Government towards
their charges, seldom drew sword in {91} their defence until it was
just one blood-stained second too late; in which a fault in honour was
instantly expiated by hara-kiri, the fatal cross-cut upon the belly,
performed in the public eye, which was justly offended if the incision
were so clumsily executed that the entrails protruded. Such, at least,
is the ceremonial theory. In practice, the dagger is driven in below
the ribs, drawn horizontally across the belly, and up the other side;
an operation requiring inconceivable courage.
It is the land of tea-houses and temples, of running footmen and
palanquins; where houses and string and handkerchiefs are made of
paper; where the people wash themselves every day and their clothes
never; where the oldest profession in the world is counted honourable
service, and the pictures of courtesans adorn the temples in which the
bonzes intone prayers in the midst of games and dances: where the
writing is done from top to bottom, from right to left, and keys are
turned from left to right, and carpenters draw their planes towards
them, and the houses are built from the roof downwards, and horses are
mounted on the off-side, and ladies black their teeth. It was a land
of immense processional pageants: the processions of the high Daimios,
who once a year quitted their ancestral homes with a great train to
dwell in Yedo, the capital of the Tycoon, for six months; and returned
again, leaving as hostages for their loyalty their wives and children
for another six months. The two-sworded Samurai march in front, crying
"Shitanirio!" and all the spectators drop upon their knees and hide
behind their legs while the long procession ambles by, spearmen and
banners and baggage-carriers and palanquins; the norimons, which are
the palanquins of the notable, and the cangos, which are the palanquins
of the humble.
When the foreigner rode abroad in state, he was attended by the
Ward-guards, who marched in front, striking the earth at every step
with their long staves whereon loose iron rings were strung, so that
their jingling warned the populace to make way.
{92}
At night, festivals were celebrated by immense processions filling the
streets, in which everyone carried a lighted lantern swaying upon the
end of a flexible bamboo, and the lanterns were painted with bats and
dragons, and the people wore horrible masks, distended with the
monstrous rictus of the devil-gods. In the Yoshiwara, where the women,
painted and gilded, sashed and bedecked, sit in a double row, each with
her price placarded upon her knee, there were the great priapic
processions, concerning which the English works upon Japan preserve a
shocked reticence.
In old Japan, the common ideal of the ruling classes was that their
country should maintain for ever intact its immemorial laws, traditions
and customs; an ideal whose attainment the entrance of the foreigner
would render impossible. As for the common people, they had no
aspirations beyond the day's work. Japan, in her own view, was
complete, self-sufficient and wholly satisfied with a civilisation
compared with which the politics of the Occident were of yesterday.
The Islands of Nippon were ensphered in holy crystal, whose flawless
preservation was the highest duty of a patriot.
Into that rare atmosphere, surcharged with perilous elements, sailed
Commodore Perry of the United States Navy in the year 1853. Some fifty
years later, Pierre Loti entered Japanese waters in a French warship.
"Et nous entrions maintenant dans une espèce de couloir ombreux, entre
deux rangées de très hautes montagnes, qui se succédaient avec une
bizarrerie symétrique--comme les 'portants' d'un décor tout en
profondeur, extrêmement beau, mais pas assez naturel--on eut dit que ce
Japon s'ouvrait devant nous, en une déchirure enchantée, pour nous
laisser pénétrer dans son cceur même" (_Madame Chrysanthème_).
It was Commodore Perry who rent open the heart of Old Japan, and her
blood flowed. The gallant commodore, anchoring off Cape Idzu on 8th
July, 1853, with two steam frigates and two sloops of war, demanded no
more than a treaty securing help and proper treatment to sailors
shipwrecked {93} on the coasts of Japan. The Japanese Government said
neither yes nor no; whereupon Perry gave them a year to consider the
matter, promising to return at the end of it with a "larger fleet."
And on 12th February, 1854, there was Commodore Perry in the Bay of
Yedo with three steam frigates and four sloops of war. After long
negotiations, a treaty of amity was signed, including a promise to
succour ships in distress, and (above all) opening two new ports. From
that moment the isolation of Japan was ended. The door opened but a
crack; but into that crack the wedge of commerce, driven by the lust of
gain, was thrust by America (1854), Russia (1857), England and France
(1858).
In 1859, Mr. (afterwards Sir) Rutherford Alcock, British representative
of H.B.M. Government in China was appointed her Majesty's Envoy
Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary in Japan. His book, _The
Capital of the Tycoon_ (London, 1863. Longman, 2 vols.), gives one of
the first authoritative accounts of Old Japan presented to the British
public. During his three years in that country he was constantly in
peril of assassination. In August, 1859, an officer and a sailor from
one of the Russian ships lying in the harbour were cut down and slashed
to pieces in the streets of Yedo, and a steward was severely wounded.
In the following year the Japanese linguist attached the British
Legation was stabbed to death, and two Dutch ship-captains were cut to
pieces in Yokohama. The next demonstration of the hatred of foreigners
was the murder of the Gotairo, the Regent, Iko-mono-no-kami. His
escort was suddenly attacked as it was leaving his castle by some
twenty swordsmen, wielding the terrible Japanese two-handed weapon.
The hands of the bearers of his norimon were severed on the pole and
the Regent himself decapitated, his head being carried away as a trophy.
In 1861, Mr. Heuskin, attached to the American Legation, was murdered.
Soon afterwards, one of the Governors (or Under-Secretaries) of Foreign
Affairs, {94} Oribeno-no-Kami, who had been especially friendly in his
intercourse with the Legations, "died," in the Japanese phrase,
"without the effects of medicine." To be more precise, he had
committed hara-kiri.
In July, 1861, the British Legation at Yedo was attacked at night by a
band of swordsmen, who passed the guards and rushed the building. Mr.
Oliphant, who had recently been appointed Secretary to the Legation,
was severely wounded. One of the guards, a porter, and a groom, and
two of the assailants, were killed outright. One of the assailants was
severely wounded, to six of the Legation party who were severely
wounded and eleven slightly wounded.
Such were the beginnings of Western influence in Japan. Sir Rutherford
Alcock's voluminous account of his three years' ministry reveals a