next ships, to search all the neighboring coasts to see what trade might be had with any of them. The matter arranged, and having supplied the place of those of his crew who had died or deserted, by fifteen Japanese, and paid up a good many boarding-house and liquor-shop claims against his men, to be deducted out of their wages, Captain Saris sailed on the 5th of December for Bantam, where he arrived the 3d of January, 1614. Having taken in a cargo of pepper, he sailed for home on the 13th of February, anchored off the Cape of Good Hope on the 16th of May, and, on the 27th of September, arrived at Plymouth, having in the preceding six weeks experienced worse weather and encountered more danger than in the whole voyage beside[100]. CHAPTER XXIII _Ecclesiastical Retrospect—New Persecution—Edict of Banishment against the Missionaries—Civil War between Hideyori and Ōgosho-Sama—Triumph of Ōgosho-Sama—His death—Persecution more Violent than ever—Mutual Rancor of the Jesuits and the Friars—Progress of Martyrdom—The English and Dutch, A. D. 1613-1620._ Between the edict of Taikō-Sama against the Catholics, and those the issue of which by Ōgosho-Sama is briefly alluded to in the preceding chapter, sixteen years had elapsed, during the whole of which time the missionaries and the Catholic Japanese had been kept in a state of painful uncertainty. It is true that the new emperor had greatly relaxed from the hostility of his predecessor, and seemed at times decidedly favorable. In many parts of Japan the Catholic worship was carried on as openly as ever. Many new laborers, both Jesuits and other, had come into the field, and conversion still continued to be made among persons of the highest rank. There was scarcely any part of the empire in which converts were not to be found, and the missionaries occasionally penetrated into the most remote provinces. The general of the Jesuits had been encouraged to raise Japan to the dignity of a province, of which China and the neighboring regions had been made a part, and of which Father Valentine Carvilho was made provincial. Japan had also a resident bishop, or at least coadjutor, in the person of Father Louis Serqueyra, himself taken from the order of the Jesuits; and under the bishop, as we have seen, were a few secular clergy. By a brief of Pope Paul V., just published in Japan, that empire had been opened to the members of all the religious orders of the church, with liberty to proceed thither by way of Manila as well as of Macao. Yet, during these sixteen years, the Catholics of the different subordinate kingdoms had been more or less exposed to persecution, especially in the island of Shimo, where they were most numerous, and which, from being mainly ruled by converted princes, was now chiefly governed by apostates or infidels; nor could the favor of the emperor be at any time certainly relied upon.