Fortunately for the Japanese, they had a first-rate interpreter of English, though Perry knew it not. His name was Nakahama Manjiro. With his two companions, he had been picked up at sea in 1841, by an American captain, J. H. Whitfield, and brought by way of Honolulu to the United States, where he obtained a good school education. Returning to Hawaii in 1850, he resolved with his two companions to return to Japan. Furnished with a duly attested certificate of his American citizenship by the United States consul, Elisha Allen, afterwards minister to Washington, he built a whale-boat named _The Adventurer_, sailed to Riu Kiu in the _Sarah Boyd_, Captain Whitmore, and in January, 1851, landed. The three men proved their nationality to the natives of Riu Kiu not by their language, which they had forgotten, but by their deft manipulation of chopsticks, the use of which a Japanese baby learns before he can talk. After six months in Riu Kiu and thirty months in Nagasaki, the waifs reached their homes. On being brought to Yedo with his boat, Manjiro was made a samurai or wearer of two swords. As an official translator, he wrestled with Bowditch and logarithms, even to the partial bleaching of his hair. After several years of severe work, twenty manuscript copies of his book were made. His boat, now come to honor, was used as a model for others. The original was placed in a fire-proof storehouse as an honorable relic. On Saturday, the 11th of February, 1854 three days after the Russians had left Nagasaki, and on the ninth day of the Japanese New Year, the watchers on the hills of Idzu descried the American squadron approaching. The _Macedonian_ had grounded on the rocks a few miles from Kamakura, the medieval capital of the Minamoto Shō-guns, and near the spot over which Nitta Yoshisada, three hundred and twenty years before, had led his victorious hosts to overthrow the Hōjō usurpers. The powerful _Mississippi_, which had extricated and saved from utter loss during the Mexican war, the fine old frigate _Germantown_ from a similar peril, easily drew off the _Macedonian_ on Sunday, the 12th. On Monday, the 13th, amid all the lavish splendors of nature, for which the scenery of Adzuma, as poets call eastern Japan, is noted, the stately line of ships, the sailers towed by the steamers, moved up the bay, “With all their spars uplifted, Like crosses of some peaceful crusade.”