serve as a counterpoise
to the influence of the Jesuits. For he must have known that the
Franciscans opened their mission in Yedo by "declaiming with violence
against the fathers of the Company of Jesus," and he must have
understood that the Spanish monks assumed towards the Jesuits in
Japan the same intolerent and abusive tone that the Jesuits
themselves had previously assumed towards Buddhism.

ENGRAVING: ANJIN-ZUKA, NEAR YOKOSUKA, THE TOMB OF WILL ADAMS

WILL ADAMS

At about this time a Dutch merchant ship named the Liefde arrived in
Japan. In 1598, a squadron of five ships sailed from Holland to
exploit the sources of Portuguese commerce in the Orient, and of the
five vessels only one, the Liefde, was ever heard of again. She
reached Japan in the spring of 1600, with only four and twenty
survivors of her original crew, numbering 110. Towed into the harbour
of Funai, she was visited by Jesuits, who, on discovering her
nationality, denounced her to the local authorities as a pirate. On
board the Liefde, serving in the capacity of pilot major was an
Englishman, Will Adams, of Gillingham in Kent. Ieyasu summoned him to
Osaka, and between the rough English sailor and the Tokugawa chief
there commenced a curiously friendly intercourse which was not
interrupted until the death of Adams, twenty years later.

"The Englishman became master-shipbuilder to the Yedo Government; was
employed as diplomatic agent when other traders from his own country
and from Holland arrived in Japan, received in perpetual gift a
substantial estate, and from first to last possessed the implicit
confidence of the shogun. Ieyasu quickly discerned the man's honesty;
perceived that whatever benefits foreign commerce might confer would
be increased by encouraging competition among the foreigners, and
realized that English and Dutch trade presented the wholesome feature
of complete dissociation from religious propagandism. On the other
hand, he showed no intolerance to either Spaniards or Portuguese. He
issued (1601) two official patents sanctioning the residence of the
fathers in Kyoto, Osaka, and Nagasaki; he employed Father Rodriguez
as interpreter at the Court in Yedo, and, in 1603 he gave munificent
succour to the Jesuits who were reduced to dire straits owing to the
capture of the great ship from Macao by the Dutch and the consequent
loss of several years' supplies for the mission in Japan."*

*Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition; articl