Japan and the Japanese

202 JAPAN. A. D. 1620-1707.
shore, made them prisoners, bound them and sent them off to Nai jbu,
near by. They were permitted to communicate with the ship, and
to obtain their baggage, but at first were treated with much rigor
on suspicion of being Spaniards or Portuguese. It being found,
however, that they paid no respect to the sign of the cross or to
pictures of the Virgin, it was concluded that they were Hollanders,
and they were treated with less severity. At Nambu they were
splendidly entertained, and in their twenty days' journey thence to
Jedo, in which they passed through a hundred well-built villages,
they had nothing to complain of except the inconvenience of the
crowds that flocked to see them. In every village they saw rewards
posted up for the discovery of Christians. Not being willing to
reveal the true object of their voyage, they stated themselves to
have been driven to the north inan attempt to reach Nagasaki.
It was plain, however, that their story about having come from
Batavia, and being in the service of the East India Company, was
not believed. It was suspected that they had come from Macao or
Manilla for the purpose of landing missionaries, and they were sub-
jected in consequence to numerous fatiguing cross-examinations, in
which a bonze assisted, who spoke Spanish, Portuguese, English
and Flemish, and whom they conjectured to be some apostate Euro-
pean. What increased the suspicions of the Japanese was, that five
Jesuits from Manilla had recently, in an attempt to reach Japan,
been arrested at the Lew Chew Islands, and sent thence to Jcdo.
The Dutchmen were confronted with these Jesuits, to their great
alarm. They also feared, if the true object of the voyage came
out, being exposed to punishment not only for undertaking un-
authorized explorations, but for falsehood in concealing and mis-
representing their object ;
but when the Japanese had learned from
Nagasaki that two Dutch ships had been sent on a voyage for the
exploration of Tartary, of which the factors represented theirs as
probably one, they excused their silence on that subject on the
ground of not having been properly understood and interpreted.
The factors at Nagasaki had been not less careful than themselves
to say nothing about the search for mines.
New intsrpreters were brought from Nagasaki, among them
another apostate, whom there are grounds for supposing was the
"X-provincial Ferreyra, between whom and the Jesuit prisoners they