Ieyasu died, but his son and successor carried out the terrible
programme with heartless thoroughness. It has never been surpassed for
cruelty and brutality on the part of the persecutors, or for courage and
constancy on the part of those who suffered. The letters of the Jesuit
fathers are full of descriptions of the shocking trials to which the
Christians were subjected. The tortures inflicted are almost beyond
belief. Mr. Gubbins, in the paper(212) to which reference has already been
made, says: "We read of Christians being executed in a barbarous manner in
sight of each other, of their being hurled from the tops of precipices, of
their being buried alive, of their being torn asunder by oxen, of their
being tied up in rice-bags, which were heaped up together, and of the pile
thus formed being set on fire. Others were tortured before death by the
insertion of sharp spikes under the nails of their hands and feet, while
some poor wretches by a refinement of horrid cruelty were shut up in cages
and there left to starve with food before their eyes. Let it not be
supposed that we have drawn on the Jesuit accounts solely for this
information. An examination of the Japanese records will show that the
case is not overstated."(213)

The region around Nagasaki was most fully impregnated with the new
doctrine, and it was here that the persecution was by far the most severe.
This was now an imperial city, governed directly by officers from the
government of Yedo. The governor is called Kanwaytsdo by Warenius, relying
on Caron and Guysbert, but I have been unable to identify him by his true
Japanese name. Beginning from 1616 there was a continuous succession of
persecutions. In 1622 one hundred and thirty men, women, and children were
put to death, among whom were two Spanish priests, and Spinola an Italian.
The next year one hundred more were put to death. The heroism of these
martyrs awakened the greatest enthusiasm among the Christians. In the
darkness of the night following the execution many of them crept to the
place where their friends had been burnt and tenderly plucked some charred
fragments of their bodies, which they carried away and cherished as
precious relics. To prevent the recurrence of such practices the officers
directed that the bodies of those burnt should be completely consumed and
the ashes thrown into the sea. Guysbert in his account mentions that among
those executed at Hirado was a man who had been in the em