The same vessel and captain returned again the next year; but in leaving the harbor for Batavia, loaded with camphor and copper, she struck a hidden rock, and sunk. The first scheme hit upon for raising the vessel was to send down divers to discharge the copper; but two of them lost their lives from the suffocating effect of the melting camphor, and this scheme had to be abandoned. Heavily laden as she was, every effort at raising her proved abortive, till at last the object was accomplished by a Japanese fisherman, who volunteered his services. He fastened to each side of the sunken vessel some fifteen of the Japanese boats used in towing, and a large Japanese coasting craft to the stern, and, taking advantage of a stiff breeze and a spring tide, dragged the sunken vessel from the rock, and towed her into a spot where, upon the ebbing of the tide, she could be discharged without difficulty. For this achievement the fisherman was raised, by the prince of Hizen, to which province he belonged, to the rank of a noble, being privileged to wear two swords, and to take as his insignia or arms a Dutch hat and two tobacco pipes. [Illustration: THE CULTIVATION OF GRAIN: THRESHING AND CLEANING GRAIN; COOLIES IN A RICE FIELD; WOMEN CARRYING RICE] When repaired and reloaded, the “Eliza” sailed again; but being dismasted in a storm, returned to refit, by reason of which she was detained so long, that the ship of 1799, also under American colors, and this time it would seem a real American, the “Franklin,” Captain Devereux, arrived at Nagasaki, and was nearly loaded before Captain Stewart was ready to sail. In this ship of 1799 came out, to be stationed as an officer at the factory, Heer Hendrick Doeff, who remained there for the next seventeen years, and to whose “Recollections of Japan,” written in Dutch, and published in Holland in 1835, we are greatly indebted for what we know of the occurrences in Japan during that period. It was, however, a very unfortunate circumstance, tending considerably to diminish the value of his book, that all his papers were lost by the foundering of the ship in which he sailed from Batavia for Holland, in 1819, the crew and 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 himself, 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 strictures 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 Deshima, had indeed been pretty well exhausted by previous writers.