The story of Europe’s early intercourse with Japan in regard to the conduct of both the Spaniards and Portuguese contains much that is painful and humiliating. For a few years the priests in the propagation of the gospel, and the merchants in their trade, prospered equally well. By-and-by it became too glaringly apparent for even the simplest of the natives to mistake that they were being deceived and robbed by the strangers. The first serious mischief began in 1597. Xavier had left Japan for China, and his just and accomplished coadjutors had been succeeded by a host of Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustine and other friars who had flocked in from Goa, Malacca, Macao and other Portuguese settlements, all of whom commenced their career by setting the Japanese laws and usages at defiance. Speaking of the foreign traders, an old writer declares that they were by dishonest means rapidly draining away the golden marrow of Japan. And the progress made in proselytising is shown in the fact that within a few years of their arrival there were in Nagasaki alone no fewer than twelve parish churches and several monasteries, presided over by a bishop. Merited retribution, stern and swift, came in 1616 with the accession to the Shogunate of Hidetada, and eventually ended in 1637 in the total expulsion of the Portuguese and Spaniards from Japan. It is noteworthy that the Dutch residents sided with the Japanese and gave of their best and bravest during the prolonged sanguinary conflict. A gleam of brighter vision breaks upon the scene when we touch upon the period which brought the first Englishman to Japan. The story of the Elizabethan mariner, William Adams, in relation to the place and the people, does something to redeem Europe’s ill fame in that faraway land. He was a Kentish man, who, in his youth, had been apprenticed to a shipbuilder at Limehouse. At the end of the term he entered the Royal Navy as navigating officer. We next find him in his thirty-second year (1598) seized with an overmastering passion for foreign adventure. In the capacity of pilot-major he joined a Dutch merchant fleet of five vessels bound for the East Indies. Their course lay by way of Cape Horn, in rounding which stormy seas scattered the ships. Two were lost, two found their way back to Holland, the remaining one called the _Charity_ alone reached the far East. This latter was commanded by Adams. Tempest-tossed and worn-out, he, with his crew of twenty-four men were cast ashore on the Japanese island of Kiushiu, after a voyage which had lasted two years. He landed on Japanese soil on the 19th of April 1600, and in such a plight that out of a crew of twenty-four Adams, in one of his letters home, says, ‘There were no more than six besides myself that could stand upon their feet.’ They were taken to Osaka in order to give an account of themselves to the great Shogun, Iyeyasu. Adams speaks of the house in which the potentate dwelt as wonderful and costly, and gilded with