with four hundred native Christians.
These had been tied, bundled, and numbered like so many sticks of
firewood, and carried northward to the mountain-crater prisons of
Kaga.

Many of these prisoners I afterwards saw. When in Boston I used to
talk with Mr. Coffin about Japanese history and politics, and of the
honored Guido F. Verbeck, one of the finest of scholars, noblest of
missionaries, and best friends of Japan. No one was more amused than
Carleton over that mistake, in his letter and book, from hearsay,
about "Mr. Verbeck, a Dutchman who is trading there" (Nagasaki).

They passed safely through the straits of Shimonoseki, admiring the
caves, the surf, the multitudes of sea-fowl, the silver streams
falling down from the heights of Kokura, on the opposite side of
Choshiu, and from mountains four thousand feet high, and made
beautiful with terraces and shrubbery. Through the narrow strait where
the water ran like a mill-race, the steamer ploughed her way. They
passed heights not then, as a few years before, dotted numerously with
the black muzzles of protruding cannon, nor fortified as they are now
with steel domes, heavy masonry, and modern artillery. Here in this
strait, in 1863, the gallant David McDougall, in the U. S. corvette
_Wyoming_, performed what was perhaps the most gallant act ever
wrought by a single commander in a single ship, in the annals of our
navy. Here, in 1864, the United States, in alliance with three
European Powers, went to war with one Parrott gun under Lieutenant
Pierson on the _Ta-Kiang_.

Like nearly all other first gazers upon the splendid panorama of the
Inland Sea, Carleton was enthralled with the ever changing beauty,
while interested in the busy marine life. At one time he counted five
hundred white wings of the Old Japan's bird of commerce, the junk. At
the new city of Hiogo, with the pretty little settlement of Kobe yet
in embryo, they spent a happy day, having Dr. W. A. P. Martin to read
for them the inscriptions in the Chinese characters on the Shinto
temple stones and tablets.

The ship then moved northward, through that wonder river in the ocean,
the Kuro-Shiwo, or Black Current, the Gulf Stream of the Pacific,
first discovered and described by the American captain, Silas Bent.
The great landmarks were clearly visible,--Idzu, with its mountains
and port of Shimoda, where Townsend Harris had won the diplomatic
victory which opened Japan to foreign residence and commerce;
w