Directory_and_Chronicle_1841 — Page 99

82

Notices of Japan, No. VI.

FEB.

An instance of the quick talent and ingenuity ́evinced by the least educated portion of the community, akin to this sort of wit, occurs in the history of the transactions at Dezima during the long administration of president Doeff; but, upon the occasion in question, these qualities were directed towards a more useful purpose than nicknaming a sovereign. An American ship, hired by the Dutch at Batavia to carry on their permitted trade with Japan, whilst the Eng- lish cruizers rendered the service too hazardous for their own vessels, or for any but neutrals, as she set sail in the night, laden with her return cargo of copper and camphor, struck upon a rock, filled, and sunk. The crew got on shore in boats, and the problem that engrossed the attention alike of the American cap. tain, the Dutch factory, and the constituted authorities at Nagasaki, was how to raise the vessel.

"The first idea was to employ Japanese divers to fetch up the copper; but the influx of water had melted the camphor, and the suffocating effluvia thus disengaged cost two divers their lives. The attempt to lighten her was neces. sarily abandoned, and every effort to raise, without unloading her, had proved equally vain, when a simple fisherman, nanied Kiyemon, of the principality of Fizen, promised to effect it, provided his mere expenses were defrayed; if he fail ed, he asked nothing. People laughed at the man, who now, perhaps, for the first time in his life, ever saw an European ship; but he was not to be diverted from his purpose. He fastened on either side of the vessel under water fifteen or seventeen boats, such as those by which our ships are towed in, and connected them all with each other by props and stays. Then, when, a high spring-tide favored him, he came himself in a Japanese trading-vessel, which he similarly attached to the stern of the sunken ship, and at the moment the tide was at the highest, set every sail of every boat. Uprose the heavy-laden, deep-sunken mer. chantman, disengaged herself from the rock, and was towed by the active fisher- men to the level strand, where she could be conveniently discharged and repaired. Kiyemon not only had his expenses repaid to him, but the prince of Fizen gave him permission to wear two swords, and to wear as his arms a Dutch hat and two Lutch tobacco-pipes!

躯

"

Without making any remark upon either the extraordinary coat-of-arms assign. ed to the fisherman, or the yet more extraordinary want of liberality evinced in the payment, or rather the apparent non-payment, of his successful exertions-for no hint is given that either the American captain, or the Dutch president made him any pecuniary recompense-it may be observed, that the permission to wear among the Chinese, and we should infer from this instance, and from others relat- ed by differen: authors, that it is also common in Japan. One, more allied to a pun than anything else, we give, which was made on the present siogoun, Tenpo, by taking the elements of his title, and making a sentence out of it. The two

characters Ten po are made into the following sent-nce: - 大人

ichi dar shtono kuchi hōzo, which means that "people's mouths are not well supplied" by the monarch. This was made of him in consequence of a famine that occurred about ten years ago, in 1831. The point of it is, that these five characters, when combined, make the imperial title; and their meaning when read is an imputation upon his want of goodness and carefulness, by which the people suffer from hunger. The last character does not mean wood, as it usu- ally does in Chinese, but is the Japanese word ho, to nourish, which is written in this way.]

* Doeff