centuries before.
The deep, natural and protected harbour of Nagasaki with its narrow entrance was the port’s main asset. Thick woods of lush greenery pushed down the steep hillsides and surrounded the town which crouched round the harbour’s edge. Nagasaki’s disadvantages to the West were its size – a population of only around 50,000 – and its distance from the seat of government and the heavily populated areas of Japan far away to the north-east in central Honshu. Many of the incoming Westerners thought that they could establish themselves in Nagasaki until the really rich pickings – in Osaka and Kobe and Edo itself – were available. The treaties signed with the British, Americans, Russians and Dutch in 1858 contained agreements to open several more ports in the coming years.
But the disadvantages of Nagasaki to the traders were seen as major pluses by the shogun – this was a place where the ‘barbarians’ could be kept at bay, remote from his capital and stronghold of Edo. Of course, Yokohama, too, was opening and this swampy fishing village was close to Edo, but it was hoped that this new settlement could be cut off as effectively as Nagasaki. The third port, Hakodate in the northern island of Hokkaido, was naturally isolated by weather and surroundings. It was then of little importance to the shogun. He was attempting to buy time.
At one time an entirely Christian town where no Buddhist temple was even allowed to be built, Nagasaki had long since been under the direct control of the shogun. A daimyo could not be trusted apparently to hold this still strategic port which was close to the lands of the powerful Satsuma and Hizen clans. It was the natural melting pot for agents of the various factions then beginning to form in Japan, pro- and anti-foreign.
Young Tom Glover had been in China for just over a year when the first Western traders began to leave for Japan, to the Chinese the land of the ‘Rising Sun’.
CHAPTER THREE
MACKENZIE’S PARTNER
The official opening date of the Treaty ports of Nagasaki, Hakodate and Yokohama was 1 July 1859. But there were many adventurers among the China-based traders who could not wait until that date and were willing to risk the dangers of working in unknown Japan without any legal protection. Several were operating in Nagasaki by the end of 1858. Kenneth Ross MacKenzie, who had been born in Edinburgh, was one of these. Sent out by Jardine, Matheson’s Shanghai office in the autumn of 1858, he was reasonably well established by the end of the year.
MacKenzie was well aware that his presence in Japan was illegal before the beginning of July. It is unlikely this technicality caused him any concern. He had been running a tea business in China at Hankow – 600 miles upriver from Shanghai and an area not scheduled to be opened to foreigners until 1861 – an equally illegal operation. MacKenzie was in his fifties and highly experienced in trade in the Far East, an understandable choice of agent by Jardine, Matheson & Co. to establish their giant trading concern in newly opened Nagasaki. It says much for MacKenzie’s courage that by the turn of the year he was arranging his first cargoes to the company’s base in Shanghai.
The first arrivals were well rewarded for their efforts. MacKenzie made a small fortune on the export of seaweed to China and silk to Europe, both ventures arranged through Jardine, Matheson & Co., in the spring of 1859; the trading giant traditionally gave its agents a lot of freedom to work on their own account. MacKenzie, exporting 300 bales of Japanese silk in early 1859, took a third interest in these shipments, investing $26,632 of his own, which netted him a profit of $9536. This amount, earned by MacKenzie in three months, was around twenty times the annual salary of £100 of Glover’s father in Aberdeen at that time.
There were real dangers to contend with in Japan. Anti-foreign fanatics were on the loose and a very nervous British captain carrying a load of 200 tons of Jardine, Matheson’s sugar into Nagasaki in February 1859 recalled:
On my left there was a strong fort bristling with brass guns glittering in the sun; not a soul was to be seen. I was in some doubt to whether they might fire upon me, and send the mast over the side; but no, I was allowed to proceed up the harbour unchallenged.
MacKenzie had found premises to operate from and was well established by the time the first British Consul General to Japan, Rutherford Alcock, stopped off at Nagasaki in June 1859. Alcock was on his way to Edo to establish the British Legation there and noted that weeks still before the official opening date, a dozen Britons were trading in Nagasaki and that fifteen foreign ships were lying at anchor in the harbour.
With Alcock was the first acting British Consul in Nagasaki, C. Pemberton Hodgson. Hodgson was accompanied by his wife and two daughters and his wife’s reminiscences of those days, particularly her first trip ashore, show her dislike of the posting in particular and Japan in general. The Japanese were overcome with curiousity at the female ‘barbarian’ and her children who found themselves surrounded by jostling locals:
I believe I was the first lady who had been seen in the town . . . So the curiosity was excessive and eventually distressing. We got so far that we really did not know what to do, and tried to get into a shop, as I was almost frightened to death . . . poor Eva began crying: but the brutes only laughed the more . . .
The lucky few traders in Nagasaki who had struck it rich tried to keep confidential the profits they were making – 100 to 400 per cent was common – but the secret was soon out. Many adventurers decided to move from the China coast to Japan to cash in.
The new arrivals in the main were disappointed. After the official opening date, trade and profits slumped. The rules of the Treaty were now in force. This meant the arrival of new Treasury Guild officials from Edo. The Guild was a shogun-appointed body with power to control trade. Restrictions on the exchange of money were enforced and the highly profitable barter trade of early 1859 stopped.
Yet there was still enough potential in Japan for MacKenzie to be joined by Glover, then aged twenty-one, on 19 September 1859. The most likely explanation for his arrival in Nagasaki is that Jardine, Matheson sent him from Shanghai to assist MacKenzie. It is possible, too, that MacKenzie had come across him while in China, had been impressed and had later sent for him. Whatever the case, Glover would register himself at the newly established British Consulate in Nagasaki the following month as ‘Clerk etc’ to MacKenzie.
MacKenzie would surely have greeted his young assistant as he disembarked, taking his first steps on the soil of Japan and looking up as so many have done at the lush green hillsides cascading into the ship-filled, bustling harbour. Many of the Westerners arriving in Nagasaki around this time commented on the freshness of the air – especially sweet after the stench of Shanghai. Later Tom would learn that the Japanese collected the town’s sewage nightly and brought it to their farms for fertilising their crops. The two Scots would have walked along the waterfront towards MacKenzie’s Oura office, past the stalls of the yelling fishmongers on which were displayed conger eels and mackerel and all kinds of shellfish. And on past the warehouses stacked with and smelling of tea and rice and soya sauce – Tom would have noted, like so many others, the near-nakedness of the Japanese labourers. Yet it would be wrong to think of Nagasaki at the time as some kind of primitive community. On the contrary, the Japanese houses and buildings, in general, were perfectly adequate. Inside they were spotlessly clean. The people appeared well fed and there was little or no abject poverty to be seen in what appeared to be a well-ordered society.
Already Western-style buildings could be seen when Glover arrived – one was being used by a Dutch engineer, Hendrik Hardes, who had begun to teach the Japanese the rudiments of the shipbuilding trades some years before. There were, too, the Dutch buildings and houses on Dejima, then still a separate artificial island at the north end of the harbour. The foreign settlement at Oura on the south-eastern side of the harbour was beginning to rise, these buildings alien to those of the surrounding Japanese.
Glover
