THE
NEEDLE-
WATCHER
THE
NEEDLE-WATCHER
The Will Adams Story
British Samurai
by
RICHARD BLACKER
CHARLES E. TUTTLE COMPANY
Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan
Representatives
Continental Europe: BOXERBOOKS, INC., Zurich
British Isles: PRENTICE-HALL INTERNATIONAL, INC., London
Australasia: BOOK WISE (AUSTRALIA) PTY. LTD.
104-108 Sussex Street, Sydney 2000
Published by the Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc.
of Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan
with editorial offices at
Osaki Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141-0032
© 1973 by Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc.
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 72-89743
International Standard Book No. 978-1-4629-0409-9 (ebook)
First edition, 1932 by
William Heinemann Ltd., London
First Tuttle edition, 1973
Eighth printing, 1987
PRINTED IN JAPAN
To
ROY E. B. BOWER
who also lies abroad for his country
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PUBLISHER'S FOREWORD page ix
PART I 1600 page 1
PART II SAMURAI page 253
PART III 1613 AND AFTER page 259
PUBLISHER'S FOREWORD
The Needle-Watcher was first published in 1932 and quickly attracted the attention of discerning critics, who commended it not only for the excellence of its writing but also for its remarkable re-creation of early-seventeenth-century Japan, which was then little known to the West. It seems only fair that this fascinating novel should once again be made available to the general reader, particularly in a time when interest in Japan has become world-wide.
The book reconstructs the story of Will Adams, a native of Gillingham, in Kent, England, who voyaged to Japan at the beginning of the seventeenth century. His knowledge of seafaring vessels at the time causes him to be taken into the favor of the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu, and eventually to become recognized as the founder of the Japanese navy. It is a thoroughly absorbing tale, perhaps sometimes incredible but always true to the known historical facts.
Adams was one of the most picturesque and daring of Britain's maritime traders, and this depiction of him as the first Englishman to settle in what was then a hostile land is written not only with distinction but also with an imaginative grasp that takes it right out of the class of the ordinary historical novel. It is an epic tale of strange adventures, and it creates an atmosphere of rare and haunting quality. In its understanding of the Japanese mind it is hardly less than superb.
Will Adams died in Japan in 1620 and is buried at Yokosuka. Every year a ceremony is still held to commemorate the anniversary of his death. There is also a memorial to him at Ito, in Shizuoka Prefecture, as well as one at his birthplace in England.
It is a pleasure indeed to bring this splendid novel once again to the attention of discriminating readers—especially to readers with an intelligent interest in Japan and its history.
PART I
1600
CHAPTER I
To the fourteen men who beheld it, the scene presented neither beauty nor any other thrill. The eyes of a dozen of them were dulled by habitude, for they were natives—four soldiers and the eight coolies who had carried the visitors over the ten miles of road from Sakai to Osaka.
The two visitors themselves looked upon the sight as they would have looked upon any sight in that world of glare and shadow; or upon no sight at all. Their wits were still astray with fever, their skins broken with sores, their sinews all slack. Rocks of granite hewn into giant ingots and piled into a crag that was a castle meant nothing to them; of no great interest for men so weary were the low battlements encircling the crag, and the glimmer, before the battlements, of the great moat with its rafts of tangled lotus.
A new and peculiar avenue began to flank the road some distance ahead of them. It was of trees that appeared to be not trees at all, but timbers stuck in the ground. They were leafless and branchless, yet with other timbers projecting from them, and upon the projecting cross-timbers were lesser projections and lumps and small festoons. Over them there circled, and upon them squatted, birds.
The visitors took their seats again upon the woven reeds slung to bamboo poles; and the coolies, still chewing morsels of their sudden snack, shouldered them.
A soldier nodded his canopy of straw hat and the procession took the road again.
The stomachs within the visitors still had a sensibility in their haggard emptiness; for it was the movement of their stomachs that led their eyes to discover that the avenue, now on either hand of them, was of squat wooden crosses. Their design was unfamiliar to eyes accustomed to the Holy Pictures of Europe, for they were like the letter H turned on its side and raised a little above the ground on a single stump. Arms and fragments of arms were still held to the upper transverse timbers by lappings of festering cord; upon the lower ones were smears and gobbets of feet once small and shapely.
The Englishman in the hammock on one pole and the Dutchman in the hammock behind him said no word. Their grunts were weary oaths addressed nowhere, produced by the retching of their stomachs as much as by any movement of their brains.
Their bearers, shoulders hunched to the poles whereon their meagre hammocks were slung, spat and trotted on.
A grunt was all that the scene and the stench of it could produce in the throat of Adams, from Gillingham in Kent, on that afternoon of April in the year 1600. For he knew that an end, of one sort or another, was due. He was an old man, spent and infirm; his age was thirty-six.
The Dutchman, as jaded and as broken as himself, was ten years younger.
It was but two years before that they had been young and lusty seamen. For the English seaman of those days—unless he was, happily, the champion-elect of financiers—the only living to be picked up was on coasting-freighters or on privateersmen in the Narrow Seas on the look-out for Hollanders with grain for Lisbon.
For Hollanders the profession was in better sort, since the Flemish seaman in those years had not the Englishman's dearth of sea. As the underling of Spain he had sailed both east and west. Then if he settled down to a quieter life as mariner or master, he came to the Thames with grain car-gezoned to London; or as a prisoner with the prize of grain cargezoned to Lisbon. He had, in either event, told his yarns and made his friends in the taverns of Rotherhithe and Deptford. Desertions from his crew would give him room for an Englishman or two on board his carrack for the return, and would leave polyglot loafers to brag or grumble among the loafers of the Thames and Medway.
The