“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, likely to succeed their fathers in time, lastly of some laborers to carry water. This is 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 have strict commands from the governors of the town, not in the least to alter this number, nor to get our victuals dressed by our own people. We are obliged to allow one hundred and fifty taels a year to the first, one hundred and thirty to the second, and one hundred to the third. There are, besides, some other people who now and then do some little service in and for our kitchen, such as a man to look after our cattle,—though but very few in number, and of very little use to us, the males being generally secretly poisoned, or their legs broken in the night, to prevent their multiplying too much, which, ’tis apprehended would turn to the disadvantage of the commissioners of victualling,—a gardener and some other menial servants. This being looked upon by the meaner sort of people at Nagasaki as a perquisite, which every one is glad to have a share of in his turn, these servants are relieved once a month, and others sent in their stead, to do their business, out of every street of Nagasaki. But the chief reason why they relieve them so often is because they apprehend a longer stay might make them too familiar with us, and perhaps too favorable for our interest.