Japan and the Japanese

448 JAPAN. A. D. 1792 1817.
passengers escaping barely with their lives ;
after which, he allowed
near fifteen years more to pass before he drew upon his memory for
the materials of his book, which was only published at length to
correct some misapprehensions, upon matters personal to himtelf,
likely to arise, as he feared, from publications which preceded his
own. His book, indeed, is mainly devoted to the defence of the
Dutch nation and the affairs of the factory, against the strict .ires
of Raffles and others, throwing only some incidental light upon the
Japanese, the knowledge of whom, so far as it is accessible to residents
at Desiina, had indeed been pretty well exhausted by previous
writers.
Captain Stewart, refusing to wait for the'other ship, set sail at
once ; but he did not arrive at Batavia. He rciippeared, however,
the next year at Nagasaki, representing himself as having been ship-
wrecked, with the loss of everything ; but as having found a friend
at Manilla, who had enabled him to buy and lade the brig in which
he had now come back, for the purpose, as he said, of discharging,
out of the sale of her cargo, his debt due to the factory for the ad-
vances made for the repairs of his lost vessel. Heer Wadenaar, the
director, saw, however, or thought he saw, in this proceeding, a
scheme for gaining a commercial footing at Nagasaki, independent
of the regular trade from Batavia. He caused the goods to be sold
and applied to the discharge of Stewart's debt ; but he declined to
furnish any return car