12   Ships, seafaring and dogus1

1. Among us, there are naos, galleons, caravels, galleys, fustas, catures, brigantines, etc.; in Japan they have absolutely none of these.

Frois was a proud son of Portugal and had difficulty acknowledging Japanese ships and seafaring, which admittedly were not on a par with the Portuguese maritime tradition. At the time Frois wrote, his native land boasted more than a century of excellence at sea (Henry the Navigator died in 1460). By leading the way in the age of exploration, Portugal and Spain not only gained the prestige that the United States received for making it to the moon, but enormous wealth that made them the envy of Europe.² Well over 1,000 ships sailed to and from Portugal and Asia during the sixteenth century.³

Frois here mentions a handful of the many types of Portuguese ships that plied the seas during his lifetime.⁴ The nao (today spelled nau) was the Airbus A-380 or Boeing 747 of sixteenth century shipping. This three or four-mast ship had three or four decks and a capacity ranging from an ideal of 450 to over 1,000 tons. The nao was Portugal’s mainstay ferrying people and goods back and forth between Portugal and Asia. The Nossa Senhora dos Mártires that sailed from India and sank in sight of Lisbon in 1606 was carrying 450 people and 250 tons of peppercorns, not to mention a host of other commodities.⁵ From the Japanese perspective, the nao was the typical “southern barbarian boat.” It was lightly armed compared to its look-like, the galleon, but still outgunned anything in the East (see #9 below). The closest Japanese analog to the nao was the bezaisen or kitamae-bune—a cargo ship with a capacity of only ninety-eight tons that had a flat keel and a single mast (hardly an ocean-going vessel) that plied the Inland Sea and occasionally the Sea of Japan.⁶

A galleon’s guns were legend. In De Missione Legatorum Iaponen (Dialogue 14) one of the Japanese ambassadors to Europe commented that it had “one large cannon for every day of the year.” Another of the ambassadors noted that the Republic of Venice could boast a galleon with 500 large cannon. By contrast, the Japanese warship, or atake-bune, was relatively small (20–65 feet in length), propelled by two-dozen oarsmen, and featured a wooden tower at the stern, whence bowman and later harquebusiers fired volleys of arrows and shot, respectively.

The lateen-sail caravel was what got the West around the world. Lateen sails were found on small boats in the Mediterranean for centuries (maybe a millennium).⁷ Triangular, they let a boat tack into the wind. The three-mast caravel was light, strongly built, and streamlined because the cabins were put fore and aft and the central deck was low and clear. In 1520 King Manuel of Portugal made it a crime to sell a caravel to a foreign country or to go abroad for the purposes of building a caravel.⁸

During the second half of the fourteenth century the Portuguese Crown made a significant investment in building, equipping, and maintaining squadrons of galleys,⁹ which were powered by multiple rows of oarsman (mostly slaves, criminals, or prisoners of war), who sat on benches and worked oars of varying length (from thirty to fifty feet). Galleys were mostly used in the Mediterranean, not infrequently for ramming in war, but equipped with sails, they also served for North Africa trade. Over 400 galleys took part in the famous naval battle of Lepanto (1571), when a combined European force under Don Juan of Austria defeated an Ottoman armada lead by Ali Pasha.¹⁰

Fustas and caturs were smaller vessels built by the Portuguese in India, principally at their shipyard in Goa. Both were powered by oars and sails. The brigantine was likewise a smaller, two-masted ship that got its name (brigand’s ship) from the fact that it was a favorite of pirates in the Mediterranean.

2. Our ships have ribs and decks; Japanese ships do not.

Then what, one wonders, did Japanese boats have if not ribs and decks? Okada, citing Ishii Kenji’s Nihon-no Fune (“the Japanese boat”) goes into great technical detail, but suffice it to say that Japanese boats were more like an insect—all shell—while more seaworthy European vessels had shell-based hulls reinforced with posts and frames.¹¹ For this reason, the size of Japanese ships was severely limited. However, lest “we” get uppity, it should be pointed out that the Chinese seagoing junks of the fifteenth century—the largest of which were over 400 feet in length and 165 feet wide—dwarfed Western ships from the age of exploration.¹² The ships, which regularly sailed to east Africa and possibly around the world, were not only large, but were also technical marvels, with water-tight bulwark compartments (something the West “invented” in the late eighteenth century), prows that handled heavy seas, and a balanced rudder.¹³

3. Many of our vessels are powered only by sail; all Japanese boats are powered with oars.

Generally speaking, the Japanese did not rely on sails as much as Europeans. Japanese boats, while they may have had a sail, were relatively small and poor at going into the wind. Moreover, the Japanese often operated near convoluted, rocky coasts and islands, with fickle winds; most of the time they very wisely relied on manpower.

4. Ours ships are treated on the outside with tar or pitch to keep them from taking on water; the Japanese use no pitch at all, relying solely on the tight fit of their wooden boards.

When Commodore Perry’s four ships sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853, insisting that Japan have relations with the West for the first time in two centuries, the Japanese disparagingly hailed the arrival of “the black ships” (kurofune). As was the case in Frois’ day, the ships’ hulls were black with tar; at least two of the four ships, which were steamers, also belched black smoke.

According to Okada, the Japanese did use caulking to stop a leak; they just did not treat the whole bottom of the boat with tar or pitch. If anything, the Japanese were likely to have imitated the Chinese in accentuating the natural look of the wood by applying dammar or some other oil.¹⁴ As Frois indicates, the precision of Japanese workmanship ruled out significant shrinkage and a need for filling cracks with thick coatings. The straight lines of Japanese naval architecture also helped:

The body of the ship is not built roundish, as our European ones, but that part which stands below the surface of the water, runs almost in a straight line towards the keel.¹⁵

5. Our small vessels are high in the stern and low in the bow; those of the Japanese are high in the bow and low in the stern.

The high stern (or poop) on European boats of all sizes from the sixteenth century is striking (consider the traditional Venetian gondola or Columbus’ ship the Santa Maria). Large Japanese vessels also had high sterns, although their poop deck was more of an extension out over the stern (in the traditional Chinese manner) than the top of a multi-deck aft cabin, as was the case with European sailing ships.

A high bow on a small ship or boat (e.g. a “Boston whaler”) is ideal for navigating choppy, coastal waters as it allows the boat to slice through waves without taking on excessive water. And, lacking true decks and bilges, the Japanese would want to keep water completely out, rather than taking it on and having it run out the scruppers (deck-level drains on the side or rear of a boat).

6. Ours ships have cloth sails; all theirs have straw sails.

Frois apparently is still referring to small vessels, which, in the case of the Japanese, probably still relied in 1585 on straw-mat sails. According to Okada, at this time many or most Japanese ships (i.e. bezaisen) were using sails of cotton cloth.

7. Our ship’s rigging is made from hemp, palm fiber, or coconut fiber; theirs is made from straw.

Frois is comparing the most common type of rope used for rigging. The Japanese may have relied heavily on straw, but they also used rope made from ichibii (Indian mallow, for which one of the Chinese characters is ‘hemp’), bark from the hinoki tree (a type of cypress), and an unknown plant that was denoted with the Chinese characters for silk grass and hemp.

8. Our anchors are made of iron; theirs of wood.

Wooden anchors may sound strange, but they sank because they had stones tied to them and a cross-bar that helped keep the single barb pointing down. There were probably some four-fluke (Chinese-style) iron anchors, too. A hundred years after Frois, Kaempfer wrote that “the anchors are of iron, and the cables twisted of straw, and stronger than one would imagine.” So wood turned to metal but straw remained king.

9. Our ships’ prows have either a ram or a bowsprit; the Japanese funes¹⁶ have open bows and are not very well suited for battle.

Going to sea and going to war went hand in hand for Europeans.¹⁷ And if real naval battles were not enough, Europeans enjoyed making believe. As part of his wedding festivities in 1589, Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici flooded the courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence to stage a spectacular mock sea battle.

European ships were built with a bowsprit (a pole-like projection that served as a bridge for boarding other ships) and sometimes—particularly in the case of the galley—a ram for puncturing and then sinking enemy vessels (the ram was at the waterline or slightly lower). Prior to the loss of the Spanish armada in 1588—a loss attributed in significant part to British use of long-range culverins—conventional naval warfare was a matter of ramming, boarding, and hand-to-hand combat.¹⁸

The unsuitability of Japanese ships for any kind of warfare is legend. Japan had one famous ancient naval battle (Da no-ura) in 1185 that sent the whole Heikei clan to the bottom of the sea, where legend has it the warriors left their faces on the shell of the crab called heikei-gani. Otherwise, the Sea of Japan generally was for fishing and trade, not fighting.

Frois in his Historia recounts an occasion in 1586 when the mighty Hideyoshi asked the Jesuit Vice Provincial Gaspar Coelho for help securing two Portuguese warships to lead Hideyoshi’s own Japanese fleet in an invasion of Korea. Although nothing came of the request, it is doubtful that two ships would have made a difference. In 1592 Korean Admiral Yi Sun, in one of the greatest feats of naval warfare, sank the Japanese fleet with a squadron of his newly invented, heavily-armored “turtle-boats”—a whole fleet of ships that anticipated the Monitors and Merrimacs of the American Civil War.

10. Our sailors, as they row, remain seated and quiet; Japanese sailors row standing and almost always singing.

Frois obviously was not thinking of the gondolieri of Venice who still today row while standing (and some sing as well). Frois presumably had in mind the “ordinary” European galley (gallia sotil), which was propelled by upwards of 100 or more seated oarsmen who were divided into groups of four men per oar; usually only one of the four was a free man and the other three were slaves.¹⁹ It is no wonder these galleys were without song.

With respect to Japan, it already has been noted that Japanese boats generally were smaller than European watercraft. Captain Sarris, in 1613, observed something that perhaps only a captain might observe, namely that by performing “their worke standing as ours doe sitting … they take lesse roome.”²⁰ Kaempfer seconded Frois on the singing aspect of Japanese rowing: “They row according to the air of a song, or the tune of some words, or other noise, which serves at the same time to direct and regulate their work and to encourage one another.” Japanese seamen were not the only ones who “sang,” as both Elizabeth Bird and Eliza Scidmore were struck by the singing of the men who pulled carts. Eliza Scidmore wrote, rather unsympathetically:

Those coolies who pull and push heavily loaded carts or drays keep up a hoarse chant, which corresponds to the chorus of sailors when hauling ropes. “Hilda! Hoida!” they seem to be crying, as they brace their feet for a hard pull, and the very sound of it exhausts the listener. In the old days, people were nearly deafened with these street choruses, but their use is another of the hereditary customs that is fast dying out.²¹

11. Our oars are made as a single piece of wood; Japanese oars are made as two pieces.

The long oars used on European galleys and galleasses (galleys with sails) were mostly made from ash, beech, and pine; these are all relatively strong, lightweight woods. According to Kaempfer, the long oars used on Japanese ships were “… not at all streight, like our European oars, but somewhat bent, with a moveable joint in the middle, which yielding to the violent pression of the water, facilitates the taking of them up. The timber pieces and boards are fasten’d together in their joints and extremities, with hooks and bands of copper.”²² Eliza Scidmore gave us a picture in words of these oars in action:

… voluble boatmen keep up a steady bzz, bzz, whizz, whizz, to the strokes of their crooked, wobbling oars as they scull in and out.²³

12. Our oars have a wide, detachable blade; Japanese oars are made of a single piece of wood and the blade is narrow.

The shape of an oar’s blade, including its width, affects an oar’s performance (i.e. a sea-going oar blade is narrower than an oar blade used on a river). Detachable blades also were an answer to the problem of frequently damaged or broken oar blades. If you chose to use one oar and most of your rowing is in the coastal waters of Japan, a narrow oar makes sense (an oar with a wide blade would be tiring in choppy water).

13. When our sailors row, they lift their oars out of the water; the Japanese row with their oars continually under the water.

Chamberlain²⁴ devoted almost two pages to debating the pros and cons of the different ways of rowing. He noted that the constant use of the entire body, and the fact that the oars were always submerged, meant that the Japanese oarsman never got to rest. However, rowing with such a large stroke—like using a low gear on a bicycle—can be more efficient and easier than sculling very fast (in the “Western way”).²⁵ Morse wrote: “Our man … began sculling at ten o’clock at night and kept it up with one or two intermissions until four o’clock the next afternoon, with no sleep and apparently no fatigue.”²⁶

14. On our boats, we are very cautious about fire; even though Japanese boats are all straw, there is no precaution taken for fire.

Sailors who were with Columbus apparently introduced snuff (ground tobacco that was snorted) to Europe during the closing decade of the sixteenth century. We might now understand why snuff became so popular, so quickly: Sailors obviously were discouraged from smoking aboard ship. (Apparently the “smoking lamp” came into being during the early sixteenth century to essentially restrict smoking to the area near the galley.)²⁷

The Japanese were less concerned with fire and even had a boat (yu-bune) that was a floating public bath, which was supplied with warm water from a wood-burning fire aboard ship.²⁸ Perhaps because the Japanese tended to stay near shore, they felt comparatively safe with fire.

15. Among us, respected individuals always ride astern; in Japan the nobility ride on the bow, where at times they get soaked.

One reason for the high poop in Western vessels is for the steersman (or watch) to better see over the bow. Here we learn of another good reason: The smoothest and driest ride generally is at the back of a ship, up high. Unlike Japanese nobles, however, European nobles were not the first to arrive where they were going.

16. Our boats have rounded masts; the masts on the funes are squared.

A square mast is perhaps yet another reflection that the Japanese rowed more than they sailed, as suggested by other distiches in this chapter.

17. We never lower the sails on our boats; they do so the minute they start rowing.

“Never” is a bit of an exaggeration, because in bad storms Europeans not only lowered their sails but sometimes cut down the mast, as the violent swaying of a heavy mast can cause a ship to capsize.

18. Our boats have topsails, mizzen-sails, and foresails; Japanese fune have none of these.

As noted, European ocean-going vessels (e.g. the nao, the galleon and the caravel) generally had three masts. The mizzen mast was at the rear or aft of the ship and usually had a lateen-shaped sail, which not only helped propel the ship forward but acted as a giant wind rudder. At the front of the ship was a square foresail, which, in combination with the main sail (also square), generated more propulsion than the sum of each sail on its own. Often above the main sail was yet another, smaller topsail, which also was square.

Japanese ships, including the largest vessels (bezaisen or kitamae-bune), had one mast with a square sail.

19. Our boats can travel by day or night; Japanese ships put into port at night and travel only by day.

At the time Frois wrote Japanese ships were trading as far away as the Philippines. This shipping, as well as illegal trade with China, clearly required nights spent at sea. One wonders if most of this long-distance sea travel by the Japanese actually was done in Chinese ships or ships modeled after the very seaworthy Chinese junk. Kwan-wai So cites a sixteenth-century document to the effect that most of the alleged Wako pirates were using ships with a “sharp bottom” that was introduced by “traitorous people of the Fukien seaboard.”²⁹ The same document notes that the seagoing vessels of Japan had flat bottoms and sails that required favorable winds; it purportedly took Japanese ships a month to cross seas that Chinese boats crossed in days.

Whatever the reality with respect to Japanese long-distance trade, the vast majority of Japanese ships were seemingly built for fishing or coastal shipping, which apparently was conducted strictly by day. (At night, ships put into the nearest harbor.) The irony here is that a half-century after Frois wrote this (beginning in 1633 with the sakoku or isolation policy of the Togukawa shogunate), it became illegal for the Japanese to construct any seaworthy ships³⁰

20. Our ships often sail regardless of rain; Japanese ships are not to sail unless the weather is clear.

According to Kaempfer, the deck on a Japanese ship “… is built so loose that it will let the [rain] water run through before the mast hath been taken down and the ship cover’d, partly with mats, partly with sails.” Knowing this, Kaempfer writes, “We can’t accuse the Japanese captains of ‘fear and cowardice’ for the manner in which they repair to the nearest harbour—available on every inhabited island, and there were many—at the slightest pretext.”³¹ So, if Frois exaggerates the contrast, he doesn’t exaggerate much.

21. Among us, when you hire a small boat, the cost of the crew is included; in Japan, you must pay the same for the fune as you do for a sailor.

This contrast would seem to reflect nothing more than the Japanese having made explicit what is true to both contractual arrangements: When you rent a boat you are also renting its crew (in neither culture did you simply rent a boat and supply your own crew).

22. Among us, a ship’s capacity is determined by the size of its hull; in Japan, it is determined by the number of sections in the sail.

Frois is evidently talking about classes of ship rather than capacity per se, which was measured in tonnage in the West and in “stones” of rice in Japan (thought of as a numerical quantity, rather than a weight). Estates were also ranked for prestige and taxes according to this same unit, representing the output of the harvest. Japanese sails were not measured in their equivalent to our square feet or yards, but in units of a given area, namely woven mats, so you have the ten-mat sail class, the twenty-mat sail class, and so on.

23. Among us, each ship has a designated carpenter; the officers aboard Japanese funes are nearly all carpenters.

The naus that sailed to and from Lisbon and India had crews of over 100 (mostly sailors and cabin boys) that included various officers charged with maintaining the ship: a carpenter and his assistant; a caulker and his assistant, and a cooper, who was expected to make or repair just about everything aboard ship.³² As Okada has pointed out, Rodrigues’ Japanese-Portuguese dictionary, which appeared less than twenty years after Frois wrote the Tratado, includes funa-daiku (ship’s carpenter), suggesting that there were in fact Japanese specialists in shipbuilding. As often is the case, perhaps Frois exaggerated to make a larger point, namely that an officer aboard a Japanese ship was expected to know how to keep it afloat, whereas officers on a European ship were more specialized.

24. Among us, the person who receives cargo onto a boat provides a bill of lading to the owner, who remains on land; in Japan, the man handing over the cargo also provides a bill of lading to the carrier.

At the time Frois wrote Hideyoshi was using his military forces as well as control of trade to successfully reign in many of Japan’s regional elites. A Japanese ship’s captain had to be careful about what he carried and where he carried it. Having a bill of lading on board made sense.

25. Our ships’ flags are squared; theirs are a long strip of cloth strung on a bamboo pole.

Square nautical flags with different designs and symbols were flown by European ships to identify themselves as well as communicate between ships. Japanese ship “flags” served the same purposes and came in two basic types. The one Frois mentions might better be called a banner and is identical to what one often sees in American cities and towns on light poles on main thoroughfares, announcing local events of interest. This type of Japanese ship flag may have fluttered but it did not move in the breeze, so they served well for purposes of identification. The other major variety of Japanese nautical flag was shaped like a pennant, but tended to have longer tails. Fastened at one end, they dangled in the doldrums or moved about dragon-like when the wind blew.

26. Nothing taken aboard our boats is considered to be an omen;³³ the Japanese have a great fear of transporting bells from Buddhist temples.³⁴

Frois wrote at the height of the counter-Reformation when Protestants were damning Catholics as superstitious idolaters. He may therefore have found it difficult to acknowledge that Iberians ships sailed with one or more devotional images as well as rosaries, belonging to the crew. Europeans in general embraced superstitions such as the idea that having women on board was bad luck.

According to Okada, large bells were considered dangerous cargo in the Far East because they were popular with the Dragon King living at the bottom of the sea, who would capsize boats to get the bells.

27. We consider all stories regarding mermaids and mermen to be nonsense; the Japanese believe there is an undersea kingdom of lizards that are rational and defend themselves.

Frois again casts Europeans as entirely rational, yet a decade or so before he was born, in 1520, the Bishop of Nidros in Norway wrote a letter to Pope Leo X in which he recounted how he said mass on the back of a sea monster, in apparent imitation of Saint Brendan. The late Middle Ages and early modern period are replete with reports of “bishop-fish,” “monk-fish,” the “sea-knight,” and a host of other anthropomorphic sea creatures, which many Europeans took seriously.³⁵

At the time Frois wrote many Japanese fishermen continued to supplicate their age-old sea gods, which were a Dragon King and a Dragon Princess who were indeed “rational” in the sense that they were benign unless angered, in which case they were a likely source of a typhoon.

28. On our boats we always carry a supply of water sufficient for an extended period of time; the Japanese funes re-supply their water stores almost every two days.

This contrast is a variation on #19 above. Again, the Japanese were more “day sailors” than “cruisers.”

29. If one of our sails is ripped, it is repaired immediately; in Japan they leave their sails ripped or unrepaired and this is not a matter for concern.

Japanese straw sails were made in sections of the size mentioned in #22 above, so a stitch in time would not make much difference. Moreover, it is probable that some of the “rips” or openings were (unknown to Frois) deliberate. After changing to cotton, it was common for the sails on Japanese ships to be made of long, narrow strips of thin cloth laced together, leaving a space of three or four inches in between. According to Morse, these openings in the sail worked like “reefing” to help keep Japanese sailboats from capsizing in a strong wind.³⁶

30. On our fustas and catures, you embark and disembark at the bow; on Japanese vessels, the stern is quickly swung around toward land and one embarks and disembarks from there.

Fustas and caturs were smaller vessels with no deck, more like a boat than a ship (see #1 above). Chamberlain offers a similar observation of this contrast: In Japan, “Boats are hauled up on the beach stern first.”³⁷ This also is what “proper people” do with their shoes when they remove them at the portico in Japan: They leave them facing outwards so as to be ready for the next trip.

1  Frois presumably used the Japanese word dogu (meaning tool, equipment, implement, apparatus, etc.) to refer here to a ship’s outfitting because he was struck by the distinctiveness of Japanese anchors, ropes, sails, etc.

2  Francis Dutra, “The Social and Economic World of Portugal’s Elite Seafarers, 1481–1600,” Mediterranean Studies XIV (2005): 95–105; K.M Mathew, The History of Portuguese Navigation in India, 1497–1600 (Delhi, India: Mittal Publications, 1988), 275–278; John Francis Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the 16th Century. Rev ed. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003); Roger C. Smith, Vanguard of Empire, Ships of Exploration in the Age of Columbus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Filipe Vieira de Castro, The Pepper Wreck: A Portuguese Indiaman at The Mouth of the Tagus River (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2005).

3  T. Bentley Duncan,“Navigation Between Portugal and Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In Asia and the West: Encounters and Exchanges from the Age of Explorations, Essays in Honor of Donald F. Lach, ed. C.K. Pullapilly and E.J. Van Kley, pp. 3–26 (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1986), 22.

4  Mathew, History of Portuguese Navigation, 276–277.

5  Vieira de Castro, The Pepper Wreck. See also T.R. de Souza, “Goa-based Portuguese Seaborne Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century.” In The Indian Economic and Social History Review 12(1975): 433–443.

6  William E. Deal, Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 333–338.

7  George D. Winius, Studies On Portuguese Asia, 1495–1689 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), XVII, 8.

8  Mathew, History of Portuguese Navigation, 283.

9  A.R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 142.

10  Angus Kostam, Lepanto 1571: The Greatest Naval Battle of the Renaissance (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2003), 18–20; Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, 209–268.

11  See Vieira de Castro, The Pepper Wreck, 34–35.

12  Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

13  During the fifteenth-century Chinese rulers did an “about-face” and decided their ocean-going fleet was not only unnecessary, but a potential source of trouble. See Jared Diamond for a more essentialist argument: Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997).

14  H. Warington Smyth, Mast and Sail in Europe and Asia (London: John Murray, 1906), 396–425.

15  Englebert Kaempfer, The History of Japan, Together with a Description of the Kingdom of Siam, 1690–92. 3 Vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1906[1690–92]), II, 300.

16  This is the first time the term fune is used in this chapter; it is the generic Japanese term for ship, similar to the Frois’ Portuguese term navio.

17  Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys.

18  Ibid., 75–101. Note that Guilmartin, Gunpowder & Galleys, 73–100, persuasively has argued that Mediterranean warfare “at sea” was in reality “amphibious warfare.”

19  Konstam, Lepanto 1571, 19; Guilmartin, Gunpowder & Galleys, 78.

20  Quoted in Douglas Sladen and Norma Lorimer, More Queer Things About Japan (London: Anthony Treherne & Company, 1905), 287.

21  Jinrikisha Days in Japan (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897), 10.

22  Kaempfer, The History of Japan, II, 302.

23  Jinrikisha Days in Japan, 4.

24  Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese, Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected With Japan. Fourth edition (London: John Murray, 1902), 408.

25  The “Western way” of rowing, which emphasizes great bursts of speed, may have a lot to do with the realities of Mediterranean warfare using galleys. See Guilmartin, Gunpowder & Galleys, 209–215.

26  Edward Sylvester Morse, Japan Day By Day, 1877, 1878–1879, 1882–1883. 2 Vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), I, 113.

27  Charles Gibowicz, Mess Night Traditions (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2007), 174–175.

28  Deal, Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan, 338.

29  Kwan-wai So, Japanese Piracy in Ming China during the Sixteenth Century (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1975); Jurgis Elisonas, “The inseparable trinity: Japan’s relations with China and Korea.” In The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 4, Early Modern Japan, ed. John W. Hall, pp. 235–301 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 250. See also Nancy Yaw Davis, The Zuni Enigma (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 97.

30  Kaempfer, The History of Japan, II, 300–301.

31  Ibid., 298.

32  Vieira De Castro, The Pepper Wreck, 62–63. See also Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea, trans. Carla Rahn Phillips (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 80.

33  Augúrio, a terms that does not necessarily mean bad luck. In fact, in his Spanish edition of Frois, De la Fuente Ballesteros translates this term as good luck. The more general sense, however, is that of an omen.

34  Das varelas. In Indochina, China and Japan, a Buddhist pagoda and monastery.

35  Fletcher S. Bassett, Legends and Superstitions of the Sea and of Sailors in All Lands (Chicago: Belford, Clarke and Company, 1885), 209.

36  Japan Day By Day, I, 113.

37  Things Japanese, 476.