Samurai William: The Adventurer Who Unlocked Japan - Hardcover

Milton, Giles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340794674 ISBN 13: 9780340794678

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002

Synopsis

In the winter of 1611, a mysterious letter was received by the London merchants of the East India Company. The fact that it came from Japan, a forbidden and unknown land, was a cause of wonder, but even more remarkable was that the writer was an Englishman by the name of William Adams.

Adams had sailed to the East in 1598, but most of his company had died by the time their ship was washed up unexpectedly in Japan. He fell in love with the barbaric splendour of the country and decided to settle. He soon forged a close friendship with the ruthless Shogun Ieyasu, took a Japanese wife and sired a new, mixed-blood family.

However his homesick letter to London inspired the merchants to plan an expedition to the Far East, wishing to trade with the Japanese through Adams' good offices.

SAMURAI WILLIAM illuminates a Jacobean world whose horizons were rapidly expanding, and a Japan that was still unknown to the world.

About this title

Review:

Other writers have produced biographies of the great adventurers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age--Drake, Raleigh and their peers--but in Samurai William, as he has done previously, Giles Milton has specialised in rescuing someone who has slipped through the net of history into anonymity. In Nathaniel's Nutmeg and Big Chief Elizabeth he drew attention to minor, but intriguing, figures in the story of England's earliest expansion both eastwards and westwards, bringing them out of dusty archives and into the light of day. In Samurai William he has done the same for William Adams of Limehouse and the book is just as gripping as its predecessors.

Fate carried William Adams a long way from the East London docks amid which he grew up. He joined a voyage to the East, which went disastrously wrong and, in 1600, he was washed up on the shores of Japan, one of the few survivors of the journey and the first Englishman to set foot in the country. Adams was clearly a remarkable man. In a few years he had progressed from shipwrecked castaway to honorary samurai and close advisor to the Shogun, the effective ruler of Japan. When the East India Company, alerted by a letter Adams managed to send, despatched merchants to trade with the Japanese, it was the English samurai who made their mission possible. Adams never returned to England and died in Japan in 1620.

This is an extraordinary story and Milton tells it well. His great gift is that he knows how to highlight those details from the archives that bring both Adams and the long-dead merchant venturers back to life. The secret of Adams's survival was that he adapted readily to Japanese life; the traders did not, as Milton shows us. He records their responses to the wonders of the new civilisation they were encountering but he also quotes the laddish jokes about Japanese women they swapped in letters, the details of their epic boozing and their increasingly desperate attempts to make enough money to keep afloat. It is little wonder that the trading station could not survive without Adams and folded less than three years after his death. Japan was to be a country closed to Europeans for the next two hundred years. The story of Adams and the first contact between England and Japan was forgotten for centuries but, as told in Samurai William, it's one well worth recovering from oblivion. --Nick Rennison

Review:

Giles Milton is a man who can take an event from history and make it come alive. Milton's book delivers that most precious of commodities - fun. He has a genius for lively prose, and an appreciation for historical credibility. With Samurai William he has crafted an inspiration for those of us who believe that history can be exciting and entertaining. (Matthew Redhead, Times Play)

Milton's account of this remarkable life is rich in historical detail. It's a page-turner of a book, a good read, an accessible, well-crafted piece of popularised history. (Allan Spence, The Scotsman)

Giles Milton has once again shown himself to be a master of historical narrative. The story of William Adams is a gripping tale of Jacobean derring-do, a fizzing, real-life, Boys' Own adventure underpinned by genuine scholarship. (Katie Hickman, The Sunday Times)

Milton makes the story a compelling one. Lovingly researched and strikingly written (Time Out)

Giles Milton has been assiduous in searching through all the published sources. This is an attractive book. If it brings more readers to the marvellous story of how West discovered East and East discovered West, that's good. (Anthony Thwaite, Sunday Telegraph)

The subject matter of Samurai William is fascinating. Milton can certainly write, and is at his best when imaging the details of say, London's Limehouse district where "in the half-light of dawn, the dockside looked like the skeletal frame of a wrecked galleon". (James Wood, Scotland on Sunday)

An intensely readable account of the first trading missions to Japan. Giles Milton has managed to provide a complex history lesson in the form of an engaging narrative. Anyone interested in the mysteries of the East or in the cultural make-up of the inscrutable Japanese will find this an engaging read. (Alex Meehan, Sunday Business Post (Dublin))

Milton bring his customary panache to his latest work. This is an author who cannot buckle his swash. The basic story needs little gilding from Milton. Milton, however, gives it added breadth and depth by playing his two major trump cards: research and a clear writing style. Samurai William is swash-buckling in its scale and execution but, like its hero, it has quieter, perhaps more substantial traits. (Hugh MacDonald, Glasgow Herald)

Giles Milton again expertly navigating the eastern seas (Economist)

Giles Milton is a great biographer for the unknown. After his well-liked NATHANIEL'S NUTMEG and BIG CHIEF ELIZABETH he turns his painstaking researcher's eye on William Adams. Milton makes the story a compelling one. Lovingly researched and strikingly written. (Time Out)

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0340794674
• ISBN 13: 9780340794678
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400