flying start.
Mitchell is credited with building the first European ship ever constructed in Japan. The launch of the Phantom attracted wide attention, with the newly started and short-lived local English-language newspaper reporting:
The fact of it being the first appears to have led others beside ourselves to attach an importance to it which would otherwise have not been the case of the launching of a small schooner yacht, for on winding our way to the Aberdeen Yard, the premises of Mr J. Mitchell, the energetic builder, we found we were far from being alone, although it was barely six o’ clock, indeed it was evident that a considerable number must have risen with the sun that morning . . . we hope . . . Mr Mitchell, the builder, may bring his skill and energy to bear among us.
At 38 tons and with an overall length of 60 feet, the Phantom was launched into the waters of the harbour where, a little over a century later, tankers of several hundred thousand tons would be launched and serviced regularly.
The yacht was built for William Alt, a friend and fellow member with Glover on the Chamber of Commerce. The wife of Captain Pederson named the ship. The Aberdeen Yard was bedecked with scores of flags and pennants for the occasion and the guests at the launch adjourned to a breakfast laid on by Alt. Glover certainly was present at this launch and at the celebrations after it and it would seem likely that the two Aberdeen men – Glover and Mitchell – would have discussed Nagasaki’s future as a shipbuilding centre. There are indications, too, that Glover provided financial help for Mitchell’s shipyard project.
Yet there were other, more ominous, matters to concern all the foreigners resident in Japan that summer. Violence had erupted in the capital and the launch of the Phantom soon would have been out of the news.
Forty armed fanatics had attacked the British Legation in Edo (Tokyo) and ‘several of the English party had received wounds’. George Morrison, Nagasaki’s British Consul then on a visit to the Legation, was in the building at the time of the attack and shot and killed one of the assassins. Laurence Oliphant, secretary at the Legation, was one of the wounded British.
The news of the attack was greeted with disbelief. It was simply not thought possible that in the mid-nineteenth century fanatical samurai would attempt to murder British diplomats in Japan. The Legation had been housed in part of a temple in the Edo suburb of Shinagawa. It was separated from the sea by a road on one side and protected by a large gateway and a 300-yard-long avenue on the other. Behind this, a second gateway and a force of 150 samurai, many of these mounted, guarded the building and its occupants. The shogun was well aware of the need to protect the British representatives, and the potential consequences from the then most powerful nation in the world if he did not.
On the night of the attack in July 1861, Oliphant was wakened by a noise coming from the corridor outside his room in the Legation. He grabbed the only weapon he could find – a leather hunting whip – and made his way out of the room to investigate. In the narrow and dimly lit passageway he came across a Japanese advancing on him with sword raised above his head, held two-handed in the classical Japanese style. Trying to defend himself with the riding whip, Oliphant was aware of the Japanese slashing at him, time after time bringing his sword crashing over his head but somehow, miraculously in the dark, missing his target. He then felt a blast from a handgun at the side of his face and he was more than relieved when Morrison briskly leaned over him and shot the intruder. The attacker was chainmailed and masked and had managed to badly wound the British secretary on the wrist during their struggle.
Later Oliphant discovered that it was the low beam in the unlit temple passageway the Japanese had struck as he repeatedly swung his razor-sharp katana over his head. He realised the beam had saved his life when he examined it the following morning and found it covered in hacks. Morrison shot and killed another of the attackers in the continuing fracas.
At last organised, the samurai guarding the British Legation established control of the situation, killing one more of the attackers. The rest apparently escaped.
In a gory finish to his account of the night, Oliphant tells of returning to his darkened room exhausted and feeling in the blood beneath his feet a human eye. A body lay in the centre of his room, headless. Oliphant later discovered the missing head beneath his sideboard.
The attack on the British Legation was sensational and the news spread quickly through the Treaty ports, sending a shock wave through Nagasaki’s foreign settlement. The British residents in particular were now casting nervous glances over their shoulders. If not even the heavily guarded British Legation was safe from attack, what chance had the traders in far-off Nagasaki?
Nagasaki’s newspaper had the standard answer of the day to the problems. Gunboat diplomacy was required to bring the Japanese into line: ‘quick, sharp, decisive measures can no longer be abstained from’. This may well have been true but it was also perhaps the reaction the hotheads were hoping to provoke.
The British Consul in Yokohama tried to cool things down. F. Howard Vyse, in an official notification to British subjects in Japan the day following the attack, wrote:
The undersigned requests that British subjects will be careful, how they walk about during the next week, . . . and to endeavour to remain at home during the evening.
Vyse in his note went on to plead for calm and added that a Royal Navy warship, HMS Ringdove, was on its way.
The upheavals and dangers in the north did not appear to unduly upset Glover. The majority of the British traders in Nagasaki were young – seven out of the ten registered at the Consulate were under twenty-five in mid-1861 – and they seem to have carried on with their businesses regardless.
A real community was forming in the Japanese port. Japan’s first municipal council was elected in Nagasaki that year and two Britons, William Alt and John Major, served on it with the American, Franklin Field. A sailing regatta was scheduled for the late summer and there were organised picnics and amateur dramatics as well as the inevitable British Club. A church and hospital were also planned for the foreigners now numbering around one hundred. Their enclave clinging to the eastern edge of Nagasaki harbour was as near a Western village as could be managed in the circumstances.
Yet perhaps the tensions of living in Nagasaki did surface at times – import returns indicated that plenty of drinking went on. There was the mandatory four or five hours’ daily slog in the heat of the office for Glover, trying to keep his employers in Shanghai happy and at the same time keep up the perpetual search for the big breakthrough of his own. Politics in Japan were a powder keg, ready to blow up at any time, and if civil war erupted the foreigners were unwillingly in the front line. It would have been easy to unwind with a couple of drinks in the Club on the way home, perhaps attend a dinner party at a friend’s where a few more could be sunk and, occasionally, finish the evening by crossing the bridges into a certain house in Maruyama.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONTACT WITH RENEGADES
Glover’s first independent business venture had been in the export of Japanese tea. Tea, silk and, later, coal would be Japan’s major money-earners in its early years after opening. Tom became involved in all three.
Using experienced Chinese supervisors he had established his own tea business by August 1861. Japan exported almost 4500 tons of tea in the 1861 season and although half of this amount went through Nagasaki, it was not quite the lucrative trade Glover had imagined.
Tea was planted on the hillsides of Japan’s interior on land unsuitable for rice and the work of planting and picking was done mostly by the women and children of the farms. It was a part-time occupation and the
