Moving his steamers up the bay to within sight of Yedo, the Commodore left on the 18th of April for Shimoda, having sent the sailing ships ahead for survey. For nine weeks he had held in leash his two thousand or more ship’s people, and had impressed the Japanese with the decency and dignity of the American sailor’s behavior. Grand as was the triumph he accomplished in diplomacy, his victory in discipline seems equally praiseworthy and remarkable. At Shimoda (now noted chiefly for the quarries which furnish stone for the modern government buildings in Tōkiō) the squadron remained until the end of the first week in May. One day late in April as Dr. S. Wells Williams and clerk J. W. Spalding were botanizing on land, Yoshida Shoin and his devoted companion, Ichiji Koda met them, and pressed into the clerk’s bosom a letter.[38] On the appearance of Japanese officers, they disappeared. Somewhat after midnight of the 25th the watch-officer on the _Mississippi_ heard the cry of “American, American!” With their delicate and blistered hands they implored in the language of gesture to be taken on board, that their boats be cast adrift, and they be secreted aboard. Their clothing was stuffed full of writing-paper and materials, on which they expected to note down what they saw in foreign countries. They were sent to the flag ship, and Perry, as he felt in honor and in conscience bound, despite his own sympathies and desires and their piteous appeals, sent them ashore. Further than this, he was unable to get at the real motive of the suppliants. “It might have been a stratagem to test American honor, and some believed it so to be,” yet Perry wrote in addition, with the prophecy of hope, “In this disposition of the people in Japan, what a field of speculation, and it may be added, what a prospect full of hope opens for the future of that interesting country.” The prisoners sent to Chôshiu, were kept incarcerated within the limits of their own clan for five years. Sakuma was punished as an accomplice, because his stanza of poetry was discovered in Yoshida’s baggage. Active in those events leading to the revolution of 1868, Yoshida (who altered the name to Toraijiro) suffered decapitation and political martyrdom in Yedo January 31st, 1859. He died thinking it “Better to be a crystal, though shattered, Than lie as a tile unbroken on the housetop.” His indomitable spirit possessed others, and his pupils rose to high office and power in the wave of revolution that floated the boy-mikado to supreme power and placed the national capitol in Yedo in 1868. The Commodore arrived at Hakodaté May 17 and remained in the waters of Yezo until June 28th, 1854. He little knew then that the beautiful harbor would fourteen years later be made famous by a naval battle between the Shō-gun’s force of Dutch and American-built wooden war steamers, and the Mikado’s iron-clad ram Adzuma Kan (Stonewall).