by Anthony Grey
A crisp knock on the door of his cabin interrupted Armstrong’s reading and when he rose to open it, he found Midshipman Harris standing stiffly to attention on the threshold.
‘Flag Lieutenant Rice presents his compliments, Mr. Armstrong,’ said the midshipman, saluting briskly. ‘And I’m to tell you that your request to visit Lieutenant Eden has been granted.’
‘Excellent!’ exclaimed the missionary in surprise. ‘Does that mean the lieutenant is out of danger?’
Harris shook his head quickly, his face serious. ‘I’m afraid not, sir. If anything he may be a little worse. The surgeons say his chances are something less than fifty-fifty
‘Is that why I’m being taken to him now?’ asked Armstrong quickly.
‘No, sir. I understand Lieutenant Eden himself has asked for you to make the visit.’
The missionary’s face clouded anew with anxiety ‘So when may I see him?’
‘I’m ordered to escort you there immediately, sir,’ replied the young midshipman. ‘Please follow me.’
50
THE SHIP’S INFIRMARY was located near the bows of the Susquehanna on the lower deck and when they reached it, Midshipman Harris motioned for Armstrong to wait while he spoke in an undertone with the armed sentries. When they nodded their approval, he opened the barred door into the specially partitioned section of the prison sickbay where Eden lay alone with his heavily bandaged head propped against several pillows. The midshipman motioned the missionary towards a stool which had been positioned beside the bed, then saluted smartly again.
‘You may stay five minutes, Mr. Armstrong, that’s all: he said crisply. ‘Those are the surgeon’s strictest orders.’
‘Thank you, Mr. Harris. I’m very grateful.’
When the door had closed, Armstrong sat in silence looking at Eden, who had not moved or opened his eyes. The bulkiness of the bed coverings suggested at least one of his legs was thickly bandaged, and a film of perspiration shone on his cheeks. When at last he did open his eyes, the missionary could see from the expression in them that the young officer knew better than anybody else that he was fighting for his life.
‘I’m very glad you asked to see me, Robert, because I wanted to tell you how much I admire your courage,’ said Armstrong, touching Eden’s shoulder gently in a warm gesture. ‘The US Navy; I’m afraid, won’t look at it my way. They’ll probably say you endangered the expedition by flouting their strictest orders. With some justification they’ll probably use words like “foolhardy” or “harebrained”...’
Eden turned his head slowly to look at Armstrong, but he did not speak.
‘But I understand the nobility of your motives. In God’s eyes - and mine - you’ve proved yourself a true man of peace.’
Eden’s expressionless face showed no sign of reaction but he continued to gaze steadily at the missionary.
‘I prayed many times, Robert, for your safe return,’ continued Armstrong quietly. ‘But I hardly dared hope my prayers would be answered. I’m overjoyed that you’ve been restored to the ship. Did you pray yourself at any time during your difficulties?’
Eden shook his head slowly.
Armstrong looked uncomfortable for a moment; then he spoke in a hesitant voice. ‘I should like to say a short prayer now - to give thanks to God for delivering you from all your tribulations, Would you like to pray with me?’
‘No... thank you... Mr. Armstrong.’ Eden shook his head again with an effort. ‘My feelings... about such things haven’t changed.’
After another moment of hesitation the missionary closed his eyes, bowed his head and murmured a heartfelt prayer of gratitude. A scuttle in the hull was open, giving a view of the green western shore of the bay, and Eden turned his head to look out through it while Armstrong prayed.
‘Do you have any regrets now about what you did?’ asked the missionary; after another long pause.
‘None . . . at all,’ replied Eden in a faint voice, still gazing out through the scuttle. ‘For myself...’
Armstrong frowned. ‘Do you regret it for somebody else’s sake?’
‘They killed. . . Sentaro. . . I very much regret that.’
Armstrong narrowed his eyes in a grimace of regret as he absorbed the news.
‘That’s why I asked you. . . to come to see me,’ continued Eden weakly. ‘Sentaro was a simple man.. . But he understood things wiser men choose to ignore. . . And he died because of that...’
‘How can I help?’ asked Armstrong, bending closer. ‘I’ll do anything I can. .
‘Nobody who cares about him knows of his death... or where his body fell. . .‘ Eden paused to gather his waning strength. ‘His wife and children... live in a village called Yurutaki on the western shore of this bay.. . They should know that he died bravely:
‘Do you want me to try and inform them?’
Eden nodded feebly. ‘Sentaro used to pray to his own gods... Perhaps to honour his memory; you could also pray for him sometimes?’
‘I’ll gladly pray for Sentaro’s soul,’ said the missionary in a hushed voice. ‘And I’ll do all I can to inform his family. How did he die?’
‘They beheaded him. . . and tossed his body into a side crater.’
Armstrong shook his head in dismay. ‘Why did they do that?’
‘For consorting with foreign barbarians.., as he always feared they would.’
‘Where is his body?’
Eden nodded towards the open scuttle and when he turned to look, Armstrong saw that the distant image of Mount Fuji had drifted into view again above the distant hills. ‘We climbed the sacred volcano together. . .‘ Eden closed his eyes again and his face twisted with pain. ‘But we never reached the top. They laid a trap for us.’
Armstrong stared incredulously at the young lieutenant, suspicious suddenly that his injuries might have made him delirious. ‘Did you truly climb Mount Fuji, Robert? I can hardly believe it.’
Eden nodded. ‘Before that I tried to send Sentaro back with a message for the commodore, describing what I’d found. . . Most of the Japanese guns on the cliffs are wooden replicas. They were terrified of us and their defences are pitiful. . . For my own reasons I wanted suddenly to ride to Fuji alone... But Sentaro disobeyed my orders and followed me... We’d almost reached the summit when we were discovered and attacked:
Realizing that Eden was quite lucid, Armstrong looked wonderingly out through the porthole again, seeing the distant mountain with new eyes. ‘How, in heaven’s name, did you get back to the ship?’ he whispered.
Eden lay silent for a long time and the missionary wondered whether he had enough strength to answer; then unexpectedly he stirred and opened his eyes.
‘Many clans are fighting among themselves. Some wanted to attack us straight away. Others were trying to stop them. I became the prize captive and I was carried back to the coast, hidden in a sedan chair. .
‘How did you escape?’
‘I didn’t escape. My captors were attacked by another clan. They seized me and brought me secretly to the ship themselves:
Armstrong closed his eyes in relief. ‘I can see now just how close we came to disaster. We’ve committed a grave error in trying to cow such a spirited people with unsubtle threats of war.’
Eden nodded in agreement. ‘They may be very backward but they are brave and proud. .. I think we’re making the same mistakes here that we’ve made with the native Indians back home.’
For several moments Armstrong sat looking at the young officer in a reflective silence. ‘Why did you want to climb Mount Fuji, Robert?’ he asked at last. ‘What possessed you to attempt such an extraordinary feat?’
‘I can’t explain it rationally...’ Eden broke off, wincing with pain. Then he turned suddenly to look at the missionary again, as though his words had just triggered a deeply buried memory. ‘When we first sighted land here, I caught a glimpse of Fuji. It looked like a vision in the moonlight. That night I had a very strange dream about the -volcano which left very p
owerful feelings inside me.’
‘What sort of feelings?’
‘A strange new sense of understanding. . . On top of Mount Fuji, in the snow, I had pulled down the night heavens and wrapped them round me in a cloak. . . I felt totally at peace. . . I tried to write of that dream in my journal.’
‘What was it you “understood”?’ whispered Armstrong.
Eden’s eyes narrowed with the effort of thought. ‘That in the stars there’s something more important than the “God” you preach about.. - They’re part of us, we’re part of them. And one day we’ll make other voyages of discovery like this one - but to the unknown countries of the stars.’
Armstrong frowned and shifted uncomfortably on his stool. ‘There can be nothing more important than God, Robert.’
‘You don’t understand, Mr. Armstrong!’ Eden raised himself up agitatedly from his pillow. ‘I can see now - it was because of these very intense feelings that I swam ashore. . . And on Fuji and afterwards I felt other things which are just as hard to put into words... Will you listen to me?’
‘Of course,’ said the missionary gently. ‘I’m listening.’
‘After I was wounded I seemed to hover between life and death. I think I believed I was already dead. . . But then I felt I understood that we somehow carry all knowledge of the past and the future inside us. . . Perhaps locked up somehow inside the physical tissues of our bodies...’
Alarmed at his agitation, Armstrong placed his hands gently on Eden’s shoulders and tried to guide him back towards the pillow. But the young lieutenant resisted with surprising strength and sat up, staring out through the scuttle.
‘I felt certain we could unlock all these silent secrets if only we knew how to do it! And I saw how we had made the same terrible mistakes over and over again. . . Always we kill and maim one another without cause - because we haven’t understood this simple truth. . . There’s an evil side to our natures which relishes killing, but it can be overcome.’ He stopped speaking and his eyes widened with anguish. ‘In the end. . . I saw that all the beauty of life will be swallowed up in awful destruction and horror if we don’t try to understand... And we’ll never travel to those distant countries in the heavens unless we conquer our terrible urge to hate and kill.’
‘Please, you must rest quietly insisted the missionary soothingly. ‘You need to conserve all your energy to recover.’
As if the strength had drained out of him all at once, Eden sagged abruptly against the pillow. ‘I know my wounds are severe: he said weakly. ‘And I’d like to make a last request of you, if I may. .
‘Of course,’ said Armstrong quietly.
‘My journal of this voyage is among my belongings in my cabin. If I don’t survive my wounds, I want you to take it. And when my son Jonathan is old enough, read it to him. . . and explain what you know of all this?’
Armstrong hesitated for a moment, then nodded. ‘Of course, I’ll do anything I can.’
At that moment the door to the sickbay opened and Midshipman Harris appeared, saluted and stood to one side.
‘I’m afraid your five minutes are up, Mr. Armstrong, sir. I must ask you to leave now’
The missionary rose reluctantly and stood looking down at Eden, his face set in anxious lines. ‘I shall continue to pray for your full recovery Robert - and for Sentaro’s soul. Meantime, may God’s blessing be upon you.’
‘Thank you, Mr. Armstrong.’ Eden’s voice was weary and he did not turn his head to look at the missionary ‘Some day I hope to climb Mount Fuji again - in honour of Sentaro. And next time I’ll reach the top . .
Armstrong touched Eden’s shoulder lightly in a gesture of farewell, then followed the midshipman out of the sickbay. In the act of closing the door behind him, he turned to look back. Eden was lying very still against the pillow, his face deathly pale, and Armstrong was suddenly afraid that he had stopped breathing. His eyes were wide open but unblinking and he appeared to stare fixedly at the snow-capped mountain peak floating high in the morning sky above Japan as the Susquehanna and the other three ships of the US Navy’s East India Squadron ploughed steadily onward down the Bay of Yedo, heading for the Pacific Ocean.
POSTSCRIPT
SUCH A NOVEL as this one, based closely around a single historical event, may stimulate questions about where the line between fiction and history has been drawn. Since some very dramatic facts about this extraordinary first clash between Japan and America seem-to be little known, it is perhaps worth identifying at least some of them.
For example, long after the event, a Japanese samurai who had been involved revealed that a concealed pit had been secretly dug beneath the ceremonial pavilion at Kurihama. So warriors armed with killing swords were in truth crouching beneath the feet of the lordly Perry as he forced unprecedented concessions from his frightened hosts. Another samurai also later claimed that he had been sent aboard Perry’s flagship, albeit during the second trip, on what turned out to be an abortive assassin’s errand. Furthermore, the extraordinary sphere of blue light that lit the heavens so brilliantly for so long on the historic night of the US warships’ arrival was also a stranger than-fiction reality described in detail by several historical accounts. But then perhaps, at best, historical fiction is another, different form of history because professional historians themselves select and narrate their stories according to a subjective point of view - and none of us was there at the time.
But having identified some unlikely-sounding events that were real, I should add that all the named characters in this novel are fictitious. The only exception is the central figure of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry - although most of what is known about Perry makes him seem more like the creation of a novelist’s imagination. I would like to emphasize, too, that even those individuals around him in the story who had counterparts in real life are purely fictional characters.
For my understanding of the time, place and context of this remarkable moment in history; I am indebted to a number of people and sources - and in particular to one coincidence of cosmic proportions. My greatest debt of gratitude is to Pat Barr, author of the outstanding book The Coming of the Barbarians - The Story of Western Settlement in Japan 1853-1870, first published in Britain and the United States in the late 1960s. Arguably the best popular history of Japan at that period, the book fell into my hands during early researches in London libraries. Only when visiting Norwich, the city of my birth, did a local bookseller point out to me that Pat was also Norwich-born. What was more, after many years living abroad including a long spell in Japan, she had recently returned to live in the city again.
A meeting in Norwich was arranged and to our astonishment we discovered that for a time as children we had lived twenty yards apart on opposite corners of Whitehall Road. We had attended the same school for a year or two, our parents and families had known one another and we had even sometimes walked to that school in the same group of children. Pat survived a sudden, near-fatal illness which followed close on the heels of our ‘reunion’ and at many delightful meetings since in our natal city she has invaluably shared her perceptions of Japan, its history and its people with me. Pat has written a number of other books about China and India and had followed up her widely acclaimed first Japan book with another history, The Deer Cry Pavilion - A Story of Westerners in Japan 1868-1905; then she wrote a novel of the nineteenth century, Kenjiro. Both books provide further fascinating insights into Japan’s astonishingly swift rise to international prominence. So this amazing coincidence opened up understandings I could hardly have obtained elsewhere.
Sometimes at our meetings we have tried to calculate what the odds might have been against two children from a small group of friends in an East Anglian city growing up to write - unbeknown to each other - a clutch of internationally published books and novels about Asia. So far we’ve not reached any conclusion.
There were of course other seminal histories of this dramatic period in Japan which provided vital background. They include t
he splendid antique volume Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan - performed in the years 1852, 1853 and 1854 by Francis L. Hawks (New York, 1856); The Mikado’s Empire, Book 1, History of Japan 660 B.C. to 1872 (New York, 1887) by William Eliot Griffis; India, China and Japan (1857) by Bayard Taylor, who was an alert official scribe on board the black ships; and A Journal of the Perry Expedition to Japan published later in Asiatic Society of Japan Transactions by Wells Williams, one of the squadron’s interpreters.
Among more modern publications, Black Ships off Japan by Arthur Walworth stands out, as do two excellent biographies of Matthew C. Perry; Old Bruin by S. E. Morrison and The Great Commodore by Ed M. Barrows. On wider issues, the acute perceptions of the remarkable Anglo-Greek writer Lafcadio Hearn opened wonderful windows on that time. Hearn married the daughter of a samurai and immersed himself totally in the country at the turn of the century His glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Out of the East (1895) and Exotics and Retrospectives (1898), in particular, provide unique revelations.
For other insights into Japanese history and culture I am indebted to Anthony Farrington, director of the Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library in London. Hamish Todd and Mrs. Yu Ying Brown, of the Japanese Department of that library also gave me valuable guidance, particularly in the Japanese language. Ralph Smith, Professor of South East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University; again helped me with some important initial leads; a new friend, Charlotte Duke, later provided kind first-hand knowledge of Japanese customs and Lesley Isherwood and her daughter Lotte in Oxford triggered some rare inspirational images during the initial investigative phase of the novel at the Bodleian Library Reginald W. Rice of Menlo Park, California, first encountered enjoyably on board the QE2 in mid- Atlantic, led me into a new awareness of the intertwined history of native American-Indians and European settlers in New England by generously sharing details of his family’s vivid history with me. Mavis Giles, with typical kindness, drafted and redrafted this manuscript - and the previous one - often at dawn, in the seventh year of assisting loyally and capably with so many projects. Justine Taylor, Elizabeth Murray, Ken Brown, Tony Davids, Chris Metcalfe, John Farrant, Pat Bolger and Frank Marsden also helped generously with essential background research in London. Ronald Titcombe very kindly sacrificed much time in offering expert advice on nautical terminology and seafaring matters.
