to look round his new base. Nagasaki’s opening had turned the town into a giant market place – a very hot and sticky one, even in mid-September. The port was already known for its pretty girls and their giggling curiosity at the appearance of the tall and fair young Scotsman no doubt attracted Glover.
The streets of the native town were narrow and unpaved and the low-roofed wooden houses unpainted. But like many others, Glover would have been struck by the cleanliness of the people, their houses and their clothing. He would have noticed, too, the complete absence of beggars.
In the back alleys were the stalls of the scissor-grinders and lantern-makers and he would have found umbrellas, ink, incense and spectacles for sale. In the countryside surrounding the town he saw village Japan, where on his approach the children scattered, signalling with their fingers in a circle in front of their eyes. They had been well warned by their mothers to keep clear of the round-eyed ketojin — ‘barbarian’ – who would take them away if they were bad. Late September in Nagasaki is a glorious time of year – the sky is a daily sapphire blue and the breeze blowing in from the bay is cooled by the sea and becomes an almost sensual pleasure as it touches the skin. The land round the town he would have noted was rich in produce. There was rice, maize and millet crowding the small fields and orchards full of apples and oranges and persimmon as well as vineyards heavy with grapes. Among the shrubs there were patches of thistle, recalling for him the countryside surrounding his family home in Scotland.
To escape from the autumn heat he could have climbed the well-worn path to the coolness of the peak of Mount Inasa on the west side of the bay and from there viewed the panorama of Nagasaki below. Far off to the south and west it was just possible to see Takashima among the scattering of other volcanic islands guarding the entrance to the harbour. But before long Glover would have had to get down to work. As MacKenzie’s assistant he wrote his first communication to Jardine, Matheson’s Shanghai office on 22 September 1859, three days after his arrival in Nagasaki.
Glover moved into a house in the Dutch settlement at Dejima on the northern end of the harbour. This fan-shaped island had been built by the Japanese on the waterfront of Nagasaki as a place where select ‘barbarians’ could be observed yet kept under tight control during the centuries of exclusion. Dejima had a single street with Dutch houses on one side and a Dutch ‘factory’ – warehouses – on the other. A sea wall surrounded the island. Glover occupied the second floor of one of the Dutch houses while he looked for a place of his own.
By the time of his arrival, the original bonanza in trade had ended. In the six months following the July opening, MacKenzie could invest only one-third as much of Jardine, Matheson’s funds as he did in the previous four months. There were all kinds of problems for the new MacKenzie/Glover team.
The main problems were bakufu inspired – they were doing all they could to hamper trade and discourage foreigners. Within weeks of his arrival Glover could have begun to develop a resentment against the shogun, the recognised leader of the government. The Treasury Guild officials sent from Edo had made it difficult for Westerners to obtain local currency. In the beginning the only money available was a kind of note made from a slab of bamboo with a Japanese figure on one side and an equivalent in Dutch florins on the other. These slabs were withdrawn and replaced regularly. The foreigners could not always get their hands on the bamboo money to buy the silk and other goods they could export profitably. The Japanese traders were not allowed to accept the only international currency of the day in the Far East – Mexican silver dollars. The purity of the Mexican silver dollar was recognised and unquestioned all over the world, but when approached to exchange their bamboo money the Japanese made hand signs to indicate their heads being cut off or of being whipped by a split bamboo – standard and well-used forms of punishment on the China coast.
Another early problem for the Scotsmen was communication with the locals – Dutch was virtually the only foreign language spoken by the Japanese. When the first British Consul in Nagasaki was negotiating with Japanese officials for land in June 1859 he required a Dutch interpreter.
Dispatching the goods they could buy was not easy and they had to push hard to organise shipments. The Nagasaki tides allowed only three hours a day for loading and unloading cargo. The goods were moved in open boats which often overturned or were soaked in rainstorms. Much was lost through stealing. MacKenzie was experienced and shrewd enough to recoup some of these losses by claiming against the Japanese Treasury Guild.
Most serious of all was the problem of the anti-foreign fanatics. Following the murders of two Russian seamen in the same month of Glover’s arrival, the safety of foreigners in Japan became a major issue. On 6 November a British national was attacked and killed by samurai outside Jardine, Matheson’s office doorway in Yokohama. A lantern had been pushed into the face of the victim while he was run through from behind.
Yokohama’s British Consul, F. Howard Vyse, in reaction to this killing notified all British subjects to remain armed. But the Consul-General, Alcock, now based in his Edo Legation, withdrew this notice as being over-reaction. He told Vyse that the Japanese were surprisingly tolerant in the face of foreign provocation.
Alcock’s view may well have been true of the vast majority of Japanese – but it was certainly not true of some of the samurai who were not hiding their feelings towards the newcomers.
Perhaps Alcock quickly regretted his own advice. Soon after he was jostled by some samurai while out riding, forcing him to write to London and plead for, among other things, a Royal Navy warship to be assigned to protect the British citizens resident in Japan.
The residents of Yokohama were taking the brunt of the anti-foreign feeling but Nagasaki did not escape entirely. The British Consul, George Morrison, complained in December 1859 of the destruction by fire of two foreign-owned warehouses. The Japanese had offered no help to put out these fires but had saved, it was claimed, the adjacent property owned by a Japanese clan lord. It was the third fire of that year in the foreign quarter.
Yet despite all these difficulties and dangers, more than fifty British cargo ships alone had arrived in Nagasaki in 1859 and Jardine, Matheson, and others, were convinced that Japan would prove profitable in the end. MacKenzie and Glover wanted to develop, in particular, the export of high-quality silk. This was potentially a very big money-spinner but was desperately slow to pick up after MacKenzie’s bonanza of the early months. Most of their problems came from the constant interference in trade of an increasingly unhappy bakufu.
Perhaps the Japanese had good reason to be suspicious of the newly arrived ketojin. With the sudden influx of hundreds of foreign seamen in Nagasaki – and these seamen would have been the roughest in the business – trouble was inevitable. They roamed the streets of Maruyama looking for women and in many cases also for an excuse to fight with the locals.
The British and Americans had both established Consulates in Nagasaki in 1859. The British employed a full-time career diplomat, George Morrison, who had taken over when C. Pemberton Hodgson and his acerbic wife moved to Hokkaido in the late summer of that year. The American Consul was a part-time job, filled normally by an American citizen/trader in the port. John G. Walsh was Nagasaki’s first US Consul. Incredibly it would seem, Kenneth Ross MacKenzie was temporarily serving as Nagasaki’s French Consul at this time. The story behind MacKenzie’s appointment is not known. Certainly it was not uncommon for a trader to act as Consul for his own country. But for a major power such as France to appoint a Scot as Consul was not usual, even as a temporary measure. The Consuls of the various nations had to deal with many of the cases of violence involving sailors on leave in the port as well as normal diplomatic business.
Very early in 1860 the American Consul, Walsh, was writing to his Secretary of State in Washington regarding compensation for an injury done to a Japanese by a petty officer from the US steamer Mississippi. Walsh was aware that it was not normal for the Consulate to pay such expenses but that he had examined the case and felt it
