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CHAPTER FOUR

THE PHANTOM AND THE FANATICS

In an otherwise mundane business report to Shanghai from MacKenzie and Glover in January 1861, a very significant change in Japanese trade was noted. At the end of an account of a cotton-marine product barter, MacKenzie mentions that the Japanese Satsuma clan had bought the British steamer England. This fast, screw-driven ship of 1500 tons had been purchased in defiance of the shogun’s ban on such imports. Ostensibly it had been bought for carrying the clan’s products from the remote Satsuma capital of Kagoshima in the far south of Japan to the markets of the heavily populated north of the country. The England was not new but it was modern – at the time most transatlantic crossings were still being made by smaller paddle-steamers – and it was important because an example had been set for other potentially rebellious clans. There were some in the Satsuma clan who were not at all happy with the shogun’s impotence to prevent the foreign presence on the sacred soil of Japan. Others felt that much could be learned from the Westerners and wanted to encourage and promote trade with them – but they, too, resented the shogun. The divisions in the Satsuma clan were beginning to appear in the other powerful clans of south-west Japan. The general situation was one of confusion with the hotheaded anti-foreign fanatics the most dangerous faction of all.

Ships such as the England would be vital in the event of civil war breaking out among the rival factions in Japan. In a country with virtually no system of roads, transport of troops by sea would be crucial in a conflict. There was the chance, too, that guns could be mounted on the ship at a later date. Another major point to be taken from the purchase of the England by Satsuma was that the shogun’s monopoly of steamships then in Japan was over, another sign of the underlying weakness of the bakufu.

Glover shrewdly noted the price paid by Satsuma for the England — $128,000 – which included $8000 worth of bribes, presumably for the Nagasaki-based government or Customs officials not noticing that the shogun’s ban was being broken. This was potentially very big business indeed – equivalent to multi-million pound deals in the late twentieth century – and would have raised the hopes of the traders who were then ready to quit what they saw as a shogun-restricted, declining Nagasaki. Glover had strong shipping connections – his father a Coastguard commander, two brothers shipbrokers, a third now a ship’s captain. His interest was most certainly aroused.

Glover’s partnership with MacKenzie broke up in the early part of 1861. By May of that year the older Scot had decided to return to China after his stint of almost two years in Japan. MacKenzie was well regarded in Nagasaki. The announcement of his going had the British Consul, George Morrison, writing:

It is with much regret that I learn the hour of departure has arrived whereby I lose the valuable aid of your experienced Council and, in common with the rest of the community, an esteemed friend.

MacKenzie’s reasons for leaving are not clear – he may well have thought his prospects better in Hankow, where he had been operating before his move to Nagasaki. In any case his going gave Glover an opportunity the twenty-two-year-old quickly snatched. Before MacKenzie had even left Nagasaki, in May 1861, Glover officially declared himself as a general commission agent. He was now an independent merchant trading under the name of Thomas Blake Glover and was the sole agent in Nagasaki for Jardine, Matheson.

MacKenzie left for China on 18 June 1861, leaving $2300 of Jardine, Matheson’s money with Tom. Part of his last communication to the company, written on the day of his departure, reads:

. . . after great delay and much trouble I obtained a large and beautifully situated hill lot held upon very easy terms as to annual rent which Mr Glover will cause to be planted and will hereafter build a bungalow upon it at a cost of $800.

The day after MacKenzie’s departure, Glover was writing to Jardine, Matheson’s Shanghai office complaining of the depressed state of the market but optimistically reporting that the building of the company’s own premises was ‘all but completed’. These premises were a warehouse on the best Oura allotment of all: No. 2 on the waterfront. Glover had supervised the building and even lived for a while in the house above the warehouse. He was taking good care of his prestigious agency for Jardine, Matheson. The ‘bungalow’ on the ‘beautifully situated hill lot’ referred to by MacKenzie is the now-famous Glover House which was completed in 1863.

Glover had entered the tea business. By June 1861 he had already sent samples to the company in Shanghai which showed interest and offered to put up cash for more.

In the early summer of 1861 prospects were looking good for young Glover. Established as Jardine, Matheson’s agent, he was elected to Nagasaki’s first Chamber of Commerce as one of its three British representatives – the others being William Alt and Robert Arnold. At twenty-seven, Arnold was the oldest of the three and he and Alt were the best-known British merchants in the port. Not yet twenty-three and still requiring to prove himself in business, Glover’s election was most probably a reflection of his position as agent of the mighty Jardine, Matheson. Politically, things were quiet and there was money to be made in tea and silk if he could get things going properly and the shogun did not interfere too much. The foreign community in Nagasaki was settling well and becoming more organised.

According to the Consul, Morrison, there were around twenty-five British residents in the port in early 1861, ‘a very well-ordered community . . . giving no occasion for complaint on the part of the Japanese’.

By June that year a British Club had been founded and its members were looking for more land for a recreation ground. The site of the club, Lot 31, was at the extreme rear of the Oura concession and backed on to the native part of the town. The establishment of a Club was another sign to the Japanese hotheads that the foreigners were here to stay.

Tom Glover was not the only Aberdeen man busy in Nagasaki that summer of 1861. James Mitchell, formerly of the city’s Alexander Hall & Co. shipyard, had also established himself in the port. Mitchell was an associate of Glover, a master shipbuilder, and had arrived in Nagasaki at about the same time. He had founded a small shipyard at Lot 1 on the waterfront of the Sagarimatsu concession on the other side of the Oura river from Glover’s office. He called his establishment the ‘Aberdeen Yard’ and was off to a flying start.

Mitchell is credited with building the first European ship ever constructed in Japan. The launch of the Phantom attracted wide attention, with the newly started and short-lived local English-language newspaper reporting:

The fact of it being the first appears to have led others beside ourselves to attach an importance to it which would otherwise have not been the case of the launching of a small schooner yacht, for on winding our way to the Aberdeen Yard, the premises of Mr J. Mitchell, the energetic builder, we found we were far from being alone, although it was barely six o’ clock, indeed it was evident that a considerable number must have risen with the sun that morning . . . we hope . . . Mr Mitchell, the builder, may bring his skill and energy to bear among us.

At 38 tons and with an overall length of 60 feet, the Phantom was launched into the waters of the harbour where, a little over a century later, tankers of several hundred thousand tons would be launched and serviced regularly.

The yacht was built for William Alt, a friend and fellow member with Glover on the Chamber of Commerce. The wife of Captain Pederson named the ship. The Aberdeen Yard was bedecked with scores of flags and pennants for the occasion and the guests at the launch adjourned to a breakfast laid on by Alt. Glover certainly was present at this launch and at the celebrations after it and it would seem likely that the two Aberdeen men – Glover and Mitchell – would have discussed Nagasaki’s future as a shipbuilding centre. There are indications, too, that Glover provided financial help for Mitchell’s shipyard project.

Yet there were other, more ominous, matters to concern all the foreigners resident in Japan that summer. Violence had erupted in the capital and the launch of the Phantom soon would have been out of the news.

Forty armed fanatics had attacked the British Legation in Edo (Tokyo) and ‘several of the English party had received wounds’. George Morrison, Nagasaki’s British Consul then on a visit to the Legation, was in the building at the time of the attack and shot and killed one of the assassins. Laurence Oliphant, secretary at the Legation, was one of the wounded British.

The news of the attack was greeted with disbelief. It was simply not thought possible that in the mid-nineteenth century fanatical samurai would attempt to murder British diplomats in Japan. The Legation had been housed in part of a temple in the Edo suburb of Shinagawa. It was separated from the sea by a road on one side and protected by a large gateway and a 300-yard-long avenue on the other. Behind this, a second gateway and a force of 150 samurai, many of these mounted, guarded the building and its occupants. The shogun was well aware of the need to protect the British representatives, and the potential consequences from the then most powerful nation in the world if he did not.

On the night of the attack in July 1861, Oliphant was wakened by a noise coming from the corridor outside his room in the Legation. He grabbed the only weapon he could find – a leather hunting whip – and made his way out of the room to investigate. In the narrow and dimly lit passageway he came across a Japanese advancing on him with sword raised above his head, held two-handed in the classical Japanese style. Trying to defend himself with the riding whip, Oliphant was aware of the Japanese slashing at him, time after time bringing his sword crashing over his head but somehow, miraculously in the dark, missing his target. He then felt a blast from a handgun at the side of his face and he was more than relieved when Morrison briskly leaned over him and shot the intruder. The attacker was chainmailed and masked and had managed to badly wound the British secretary on the wrist during their struggle.

Later Oliphant discovered that it was the low beam in the unlit temple passageway the Japanese had struck as he repeatedly swung his razor-sharp katana over his head. He realised the beam had saved his life when he examined it the following morning and found it covered in hacks. Morrison shot and killed another of the attackers in the continuing fracas.

At last organised, the samurai guarding the British Legation established control of the situation, killing one more of the attackers. The rest apparently escaped.

In a gory finish to his account of the night, Oliphant tells of returning to his darkened room exhausted and feeling in the blood beneath his feet a human eye. A body lay in the centre of his room, headless. Oliphant later discovered the missing head beneath his sideboard.

The attack on the British Legation was sensational and the news spread quickly through the Treaty ports, sending a shock wave through Nagasaki’s foreign settlement. The British residents in particular were now casting nervous glances over their shoulders. If not even the heavily guarded British Legation was safe from attack, what chance had the traders in far-off Nagasaki?

Nagasaki’s newspaper had the standard answer of the day to the problems. Gunboat diplomacy was required to bring the Japanese into line: ‘quick, sharp, decisive measures can no longer be abstained from’. This may well have been true but it was also perhaps the reaction the hotheads were hoping to provoke.

The British Consul in Yokohama tried to cool things down. F. Howard Vyse, in an official notification to British subjects in Japan the day following the attack, wrote:

The undersigned requests that British subjects will be careful, how they walk about during the next week, . . . and to endeavour to remain at home during the evening.

Vyse in his note went on to plead for calm and added that a Royal Navy warship, HMS Ringdove, was on its way.

The upheavals and dangers in the north did not appear to unduly upset Glover. The majority of the British traders in Nagasaki were young – seven out of the ten registered at the Consulate were under twenty-five in mid-1861 – and they seem to have carried on with their businesses regardless.

A real community was forming in the Japanese port. Japan’s first municipal council was elected in Nagasaki that year and two Britons, William Alt and John Major, served on it with the American, Franklin Field. A sailing regatta was scheduled for the late summer and there were organised picnics and amateur dramatics as well as the inevitable British Club. A church and hospital were also planned for the foreigners now numbering around one hundred. Their enclave clinging to the eastern edge of Nagasaki harbour was as near a Western village as could be managed in the circumstances.

Yet perhaps the tensions of living in Nagasaki did surface at times – import returns indicated that plenty of drinking went on. There was the mandatory four or five hours’ daily slog in the heat of the office for Glover, trying to keep his employers in Shanghai happy and at the same time keep up the perpetual search for the big breakthrough of his own. Politics in Japan were a powder keg, ready to blow up at any time, and if civil war erupted the foreigners were unwillingly in the front line. It would have been easy to unwind with a couple of drinks in the Club on the way home, perhaps attend a dinner party at a friend’s where a few more could be sunk and, occasionally, finish the evening by crossing the bridges into a certain house in Maruyama.