of England would prevent the Hollanders from robbing
and spoiling their junks? Which question was rather doubtful to me, yet
I answered that his majesty would take measures to prevent the
Hollanders from injuring them.

We have lately had news that a tuffon or tempest has done vast injury at
Jedo, a city of Japan as large as London, where the Japanese nobility
have very beautiful houses, now mostly destroyed or greatly injured. The
whole city was inundated, and the inhabitants forced to take shelter in
the hills; a thing never before heard of. The palace of the king, which
is a stately building in a new fortress, has had all its gilded tiles
carried away by a whirlwind, so that none of them could be found. The
pagans attribute this calamity to some charms or conjurations of the
Jesuits, who were lately banished: but the Japanese converts to popery
ascribe it to the vengeance of God, as a punishment for having banished
these holy men.

We have lately had a great disaster in Cochin-China, to which place we
sent a quantity of goods and money, to the value of L730, as it cost in
England, under the care of Mr Tempest Peacock and Mr Walter Carwarden,
who went as merchants in a Japanese junk, carrying our king's letters
and a handsome present for the king of Cochin-China. They arrived at the
port called _Quinham_,[59] delivered his majesty's letters and present,
and were entertained with kind words and fair promises. The Hollanders,
seeing that we adventured to that country, would needs do the same, and
were at first kindly entertained; but in the end, Mr Peacock and the
chief Dutch merchant going ashore one day in the same boat, to receive
payment from the king for broad-cloth and other commodities they had
sold him, they were treacherously assailed on the water, their boat
overset, and both were killed in the water with harpoons, as if they had
been fishes, together with their interpreters and other attendants, who
were Japanese. Mr Carwarden being aboard our junk escaped sharing in
this massacre, and came away, but neither he nor the junk have ever been
since heard of, so that we fear he has been cast away.

[Footnote 59: _Turon_ is the port of Cochin-China in the present time,
and _Quinham_ is unknown in modern geography; perhaps the old name of
some island or village at the port or bay of Turon.--E.]

It is commonly reported here, both among the Chinese and Japanese, that
this was done by order of the king of Cochin-C