About Adrift at Shimoda
This project arose spontaneously. As part of its world civilizations curriculum,
our class had been studying Modern Japan, the period during which Japan is
considered to have been “opened up” to the west in the middle part of the 1800s. This age of imperialism was not lost on the
administration of American President Millard Fillmore, a Whig under whose
auspices Commodore Matthew Perry famously sailed across the Pacific to Tokyo
Bay to urge the waning feudal government, the Shogunate, to agree to trade- and
mariner-friendly relations with the US.
The year was 1853. The Japanese
bakufu agreed, under some measure of
duress with threat of arriving gunboats, to the terms set forth by the
Americans. Perry’s account of his expedition to Japan and
China can be found in The Narrative of the expedition of an American
squadron to the China Seas and Japan, performed in the years 1852, 1853, and
1854, under the command of Commodore M. C. Perry, United States Navy, by order
of the government of the United States (1856) by Francis L. Hawks. The four volumes are available online at https://archive.org/details/narrativeofexped04perr. And Japan’s Yokohoma Archives of History are
a respository of documents and artifacts from the period: http://www.kaikou.city.yokohama.jp/en/index.html.
As part of the Treaty of Kanagawa of 1854, as Perry’s treaty was called, the bakufu agreed to a permanent American consul in the port village of Shimoda, just outside Edo (Tokyo). That momentous post was granted to one Townsend Harris – New Yorker, politician, merchant, founder of the public college called the Free Academy, (the former name of The City College of New York), and now an American adrift at Shimoda. Harris moved to Shimoda in 1856 and resided there and at Edo until his health worsened and he requested of President Lincoln in 1861 to be returned stateside, just in time for the raging war between the states.
Whilst in residence in Japan, Harris was tasked with the heady negotiations for a new covenant to further ties between Japan and the US, which resulted in the Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1858. Similar contracts with other nations eager to take advantage of Japan’s vulnerability to foreign relations, after banning most Europeans except for the Dutch in the middle 1600s, were competitively forthcoming from the Russians, the French, the English and, in a revitalized fashion, the Dutch. In what political climate were Japanese warlord officials agreeing to new business with keen-eyed and experienced western imperialists? The debates centered around procuring Japan’s centuries-long isolation versus engaging with western powers under peaceful terms that would be friendly to Japanese interests. While Japanese-language sources elude the non-specialist, Harris’s perspective can serve as one kind of portal to understand the diplomat’s perspective, one without the threat of guns and thus representing a left turn from the usual in that place at that time.
City College holds the Harris archives. Our class made a visit to the Archives and Special Collections on the fifth floor of Cohen Library, where Dr. Sydney Van Nort, the director of the archives, had curated a special show of documents and ephemera that were part of the life of Townsend Harris. (Professor Van Nort’s electronic platform detailing Harris in his epoch proved to be helpful to us in our learning. It can be accessed at http://digital-archives.ccny.cuny.edu/exhibits/harris/harris_two.html. See also an excellent library guide under http://libguides.ccny.cuny.edu/TownsendHarris).
We observed colorful prints of exotic horizons in moonlight, newspaper cartoons featuring foreigners abroad, a huge silken American flag made by Japanese ladies, and we had the permission to carefully peruse Harris’ letterbooks, contemporary copies of his voluminous correspondences. This was virtually his only means of communication, as he was isolated in Japan and waited for months for ships and prevailing winds to deliver his missives across the vast oceans and bring news back again. The letterbooks are beautiful artifacts in themselves, with elaborate hand-marbled paper frontispieces produced in the 1850s in lower Manhattan on Water and Wall streets, and filled with the slanting formal penmanship of Mr. Henry Heusken, the young, multi-lingual Dutch-born secretary of Harris. Had we not known better we would have overlooked the fact that Mr. Heusken, a target of misplaced anti-foreigner sentiment, was attacked by a cohort of rogue Ronin on a winter’s eve in 1861 and died of his wounds within hours. He was not yet 30 years old.
As a serendipitous project to exercise our primary-source muscles, one of the letters dictated by Harris and indelibly drawn by the young Mr. Heusken was selected for transcription. The letter was neither too short nor too long -- from Harris to Lewis Cass, President Buchanan’s secretary of state, dated September 11, 1858, a few months after the Treaty was agreed to. We would devote the following class period to see what students collectively came up with and we invited Dr. Van Nort and a librarian who had been helping us, Ms. Yoko Inagi, whose knowledge of Japanese language and culture was immeasurably helpful, to join us for the unveiling of the letter. What nuggets of uncovered truths lay within the loops, curlicues, and eccentricities of Mr. Heusken’s 19th-century penmanship with which we entrenched digitizers were unaccustomed?
As far as we know the letters have not been uniformly transcribed and published, though many of them were consulted for the publication of Harris’ journals until early 1848, when Harris discontinued keeping a diary (Consenza, Mario Emilio [ed.]: The Complete Journal of Townsend Harris. Rutland, VT and Tokyo, Japan: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1959 [first edition 1930]. Full text: https://archive.org/stream/completejournalo00harr#page/n7/mode/2up).
The challenge duly taken up, we found that we, like Harris, were a bit adrift at Shimoda, encountering seemingly arcane references to a “steam yacht”, “plenipotentiaries”, the “comity of nations”, and a ship’s captain whose name remains unknowable. Not giving up, we elected to forgo our syllabus for a couple weeks and dig in to the research to unlock the historical context of the letter and its meaning. What you read and see herein was produced in a few short weeks, born of the technical talents, aesthetic sensibilities, and writing and research skills of a small group of emerging scholars. We consider this a work in progress.
We welcome comments, corrections and suggestions. Any correspondence can be directed to [email protected]. There is also a comments page that can be reached from the home page. Thank you for looking.
- Barbara Syrrakos, Department of History, The City College, April 2014
As part of the Treaty of Kanagawa of 1854, as Perry’s treaty was called, the bakufu agreed to a permanent American consul in the port village of Shimoda, just outside Edo (Tokyo). That momentous post was granted to one Townsend Harris – New Yorker, politician, merchant, founder of the public college called the Free Academy, (the former name of The City College of New York), and now an American adrift at Shimoda. Harris moved to Shimoda in 1856 and resided there and at Edo until his health worsened and he requested of President Lincoln in 1861 to be returned stateside, just in time for the raging war between the states.
Whilst in residence in Japan, Harris was tasked with the heady negotiations for a new covenant to further ties between Japan and the US, which resulted in the Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1858. Similar contracts with other nations eager to take advantage of Japan’s vulnerability to foreign relations, after banning most Europeans except for the Dutch in the middle 1600s, were competitively forthcoming from the Russians, the French, the English and, in a revitalized fashion, the Dutch. In what political climate were Japanese warlord officials agreeing to new business with keen-eyed and experienced western imperialists? The debates centered around procuring Japan’s centuries-long isolation versus engaging with western powers under peaceful terms that would be friendly to Japanese interests. While Japanese-language sources elude the non-specialist, Harris’s perspective can serve as one kind of portal to understand the diplomat’s perspective, one without the threat of guns and thus representing a left turn from the usual in that place at that time.
City College holds the Harris archives. Our class made a visit to the Archives and Special Collections on the fifth floor of Cohen Library, where Dr. Sydney Van Nort, the director of the archives, had curated a special show of documents and ephemera that were part of the life of Townsend Harris. (Professor Van Nort’s electronic platform detailing Harris in his epoch proved to be helpful to us in our learning. It can be accessed at http://digital-archives.ccny.cuny.edu/exhibits/harris/harris_two.html. See also an excellent library guide under http://libguides.ccny.cuny.edu/TownsendHarris).
We observed colorful prints of exotic horizons in moonlight, newspaper cartoons featuring foreigners abroad, a huge silken American flag made by Japanese ladies, and we had the permission to carefully peruse Harris’ letterbooks, contemporary copies of his voluminous correspondences. This was virtually his only means of communication, as he was isolated in Japan and waited for months for ships and prevailing winds to deliver his missives across the vast oceans and bring news back again. The letterbooks are beautiful artifacts in themselves, with elaborate hand-marbled paper frontispieces produced in the 1850s in lower Manhattan on Water and Wall streets, and filled with the slanting formal penmanship of Mr. Henry Heusken, the young, multi-lingual Dutch-born secretary of Harris. Had we not known better we would have overlooked the fact that Mr. Heusken, a target of misplaced anti-foreigner sentiment, was attacked by a cohort of rogue Ronin on a winter’s eve in 1861 and died of his wounds within hours. He was not yet 30 years old.
As a serendipitous project to exercise our primary-source muscles, one of the letters dictated by Harris and indelibly drawn by the young Mr. Heusken was selected for transcription. The letter was neither too short nor too long -- from Harris to Lewis Cass, President Buchanan’s secretary of state, dated September 11, 1858, a few months after the Treaty was agreed to. We would devote the following class period to see what students collectively came up with and we invited Dr. Van Nort and a librarian who had been helping us, Ms. Yoko Inagi, whose knowledge of Japanese language and culture was immeasurably helpful, to join us for the unveiling of the letter. What nuggets of uncovered truths lay within the loops, curlicues, and eccentricities of Mr. Heusken’s 19th-century penmanship with which we entrenched digitizers were unaccustomed?
As far as we know the letters have not been uniformly transcribed and published, though many of them were consulted for the publication of Harris’ journals until early 1848, when Harris discontinued keeping a diary (Consenza, Mario Emilio [ed.]: The Complete Journal of Townsend Harris. Rutland, VT and Tokyo, Japan: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1959 [first edition 1930]. Full text: https://archive.org/stream/completejournalo00harr#page/n7/mode/2up).
The challenge duly taken up, we found that we, like Harris, were a bit adrift at Shimoda, encountering seemingly arcane references to a “steam yacht”, “plenipotentiaries”, the “comity of nations”, and a ship’s captain whose name remains unknowable. Not giving up, we elected to forgo our syllabus for a couple weeks and dig in to the research to unlock the historical context of the letter and its meaning. What you read and see herein was produced in a few short weeks, born of the technical talents, aesthetic sensibilities, and writing and research skills of a small group of emerging scholars. We consider this a work in progress.
We welcome comments, corrections and suggestions. Any correspondence can be directed to [email protected]. There is also a comments page that can be reached from the home page. Thank you for looking.
- Barbara Syrrakos, Department of History, The City College, April 2014