Japan and the Japanese

236 JAPAN. A. D. K90.
we know of them is, that we must pay them well for their trouble.
In order to make it beneficial to the whole town, the Ottona of each
street keeps a list of what people in his street are willing or able to
serve as kulis, that in their turn they may be sent over to Deshna.
"The treasury officers are a company of thirty-six persons,
superior and inferior, who receive the money for the goods we have
disposed of, change it into kobangs of gold, and deliver them to our
interpreters, who count them before us. These treasurers retain
one per cent, for their trouble, and fifteen per cent, or more for
the benefit of the town, according to the yearly value of the kobang,
which varies from fifty-five to fifty-nine mas in silver, besides which,
the director of this Company receives a hundred tacls a year salary
from the Dutch, and the rest of the number fifty taels.
" Our commissioners for victualling are a company of about
seventeen house-keepers of Nagasaki with their families. Their
business is to provide our island with victuals, drink, household
goods, and what else we want, or have leave to buy, of this kind.
Nobody but the members of this corporation is permitted to sell us
any victuals or goods, though they exact so much upon us that they
make us pay at least twice or thrice as much as things are sold for
at the market. They also furnish our people, on demand, with
courtesans ; and, truly, our young sailors, unacquainted as they
commonly are with the virtue of temperance, are not ashamed to
spend five rix dollars for one night's pleasure, and with such
wenches, too, as a native of Nagasaki might have for two or three
mas, they being none of the best and handsomest ; nor do the
masters of the women get more than a tael. The rest is laid up in
the cash of this Company for their own private use, or, as they
pretend, to hire proper servants to conduct the damsels over to our
island.
" The officers of the kitchen consist of three cooks, who serve by
turns, each a month, of two grooms of the kitchen, an apprentice or
two, who are generally the cook's own sons, and likely to succeed
their fathers in time, lastly of some laborers to carry water. This
i the reason that our table is so very expensive, since the best part
of the year, the time of our sale only excepted, there are actually
more cooks than people to provide victuals for. And yet we havo
Btrict commands from the governors of the town, not in the least to