Nossa Senhora da Graça incident
Nossa Senhora da Graça incident | |
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Part of the | |
Result | Tokugawa victory |
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The Nossa Senhora da Graça incident (ノサ・セニョーラ・ダ・グラサ号事件), alternatively called the Madre de Deus incident (マードレ・デ・デウス号事件), was a four-day naval battle between a Portuguese
Background
In 1543, Portuguese traders arrived in Japan, initiating its first contact with the West. Soon, they established a trading post in
At the same time, the Portuguese near monopoly on East Asian maritime trade was increasingly being contested by new entrants. The Dutch, who had been
Incident in Macau
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Macao1844.jpg/220px-Macao1844.jpg)
The direct cause of the Nossa Senhora da Graça incident was the waterfront altercation on November 30, 1608, in Macau, resulting in the deaths of 50 Japanese samurai under the orders of the
In 1608, a red seal ship belonging to the
Since appeasement only appeared to encourage the Japanese crew, whom their compatriots joined from a nearby shipwreck, the Portuguese authorities hardened their stance in response, lest the Japanese try to take over Macau.[8] On November 30, the Japanese gang got into a serious brawl. When the Portuguese ouvidor (magistrate) came to stop the fight, he got injured and his retainers killed. Church bells were sounded in alarm following this incident, and Captain-major André Pessoa arrived at the scene with all available armed reinforcements. The Japanese fled and took refuge in two houses, which Portuguese soldiers quickly surrounded. Pessoa offered quarter to those who would surrender, but 27 of those in the first house refused and were gunned down when forced out of the house by fire. The Jesuits and the Bishop of Macau intervened as Pessoa prepared to storm the second house, and the Japanese there, numbering around 50, were induced to surrender on the promise of life and freedom. However, Pessoa had the suspected ringleaders strangled in jail, while the rest were allowed to leave Macau after signing an affidavit absolving the Portuguese from all blame.[10]
The Japan voyage of 1609
Due to Dutch activities in Cantonese waters in 1607 and 1608, no Portuguese ship left for the Japan voyage for over two years. Hence, the 1609 Macau carrack was unusually richly stocked with two years' supply for the Japanese market.[11] This carrack, variously called the Nossa Senhora da Graça (Our Lady of Grace) or the Madre de Deus (Mother of God),[12] left Macau on May 10, six weeks ahead of schedule, because its captain, André Pessoa, heard from Malacca that the Dutch were planning to attack his ship.[13]
It was the Dutch modus operandi at the time to intercept the annual Portuguese trading fleet, especially since their capture of the Santa Catarina in 1603 had been so profitable its booty sold for more than half of the original capital of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). [14] When the admiral of the Dutch fleet in the East learned that the Portuguese were loading an exceptionally rich carrack in Macau, he sent orders to
Intrigues in Japan
In Nagasaki, the bugyō
When Pessoa explained his version of events of the Macau incident to Hasegawa and suggested forwarding the affidavit to Ieyasu (who was retired but still in charge), Hasegawa advised Pessoa to do nothing of the sort. Hasegawa explained that while Ieyasu was mindful of the truculent behaviors of the Japanese abroad, he would be forced to take his compatriots's side as a matter of principle if the issue was brought up officially. This argument did not entirely convince Pessoa, and he drew up an unofficial memorandum of the Portuguese case for Honda Masazumi, Ieyasu's handler of foreign affairs, much to the displeasure of Hasegawa and Murayama, who wrongly suspected that Pessoa had also complained about the two in the memorandum.[22] In any case, Honda, with authorization from Ieyasu, gave Pessoa's envoy written assurances that Japanese sailors would be forbidden to travel to Macau, and any who did could be handled according to Portuguese laws.[23]
Outwardly, Hasegawa still put Portuguese interests in mind as it was in his best interests to keep the Portuguese trade alive in Nagasaki.[21] He arranged to have the Portuguese envoys arrive in Ieyasu's court at Sunpu before those of the Dutch trading party, even though Ieyasu chose to grant an audience to the Dutch envoys first.[24] The Dutch entry provided Ieyasu an opportunity to break the Portuguese monopoly on Chinese silk,[24] and the delighted ex-shōgun gave the Dutch permission to establish a trading post anywhere in Japan without the restriction on prices like the Portuguese had.[25] Hasegawa took the Portuguese side and relayed information of Dutch activities to the Portuguese;[24] however, Pessoa and the Macanese merchants were still suspicious of Hasegawa's intentions and resolved to petition Ieyasu directly to complain about Hasegawa and Murayama. The Jesuits were horrified when they found out about Pessoa's decision due to their knowledge that Hasegawa's sister Onatsu (お夏) was a favorite concubine of Ieyasu, "so much so, that if she said black was white, [Ieyasu] would believe it".[19] The fathers used all sorts of rhetoric they could muster, including the threat of excommunication, to dissuade Pessoa from complaining.[24] Pessoa desisted, but the damage had already been done since the Japanese interpreter hired to translate the list of grievances showed it to the bugyō himself. Hasegawa, in great anger, swore to get even with Pessoa dead or alive.[26]
In September 1609, the Japanese survivors of the Macau affair of 1608 returned to tell their version of events to their lord, Arima Harunobu, and the news was reported to Ieyasu.
The battle for the black ship
Preparations and actions of the first night
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Nagasaki_bay_siebold.jpg/220px-Nagasaki_bay_siebold.jpg)
Through the Christian community in Japan, Pessoa was informed of the intrigues against him and promptly prepared for defense and departure. He prepared a large number of hand grenades and ammunition aboard the ship. Still, due to the large size of the cargo, the ship was not ready to sail until after New Year's Day in 1610, whereas previous Macanese vessels usually returned before Christmas.[27] While the ship was being loaded, Arima tried to entice Pessoa to come ashore with offers of hospitality, saying that he had been sent to Nagasaki only to negotiate silk prices, and that the high officials in Sunpu only wanted Pessoa to give his account of the Macau events in person—he would be pardoned as a foreigner even if he was found guilty. Many Portuguese believed Arima, but not Pessoa, who knew Arima had assembled a force of 1200 samurai against him.[28] Pessoa now would not go ashore even for mass and ordered his crew to come aboard the carrack to set sail. However, this was delayed as some crew believed that the current crisis was merely Pessoa's feud and dragged their feet, while Japanese guards obstructed most who had wanted to embark. By the time Arima attacked the carrack on January 3, only about 50 Europeans were on board with some enslaved Black people and lascars.[28]
Before they struck, Arima, Hasegawa, and Murayama jointly sent a message to the Jesuits justifying their impending attack on the carrack with the fact that Pessoa was trying to escape Japanese justice. They followed with another message suggesting that if the Portuguese crew would give up their captain, the matter would be settled. The Jesuits responded that surrendering their captains was not in Portuguese culture.[28]
At night, Arima's armada of junks full of shouting men approached the Nossa Senhora da Graça unlit and quiet in stark contrast. Some of Pessoa's officers wanted to fire on the mob, being lit by the torches they carried. Still, Pessoa refused to take responsibility for opening hostilities, so the procedures of setting sail and
Hasegawa assumed the battle was lost and sent a courier to Sunpu carrying the news. Ieyasu received the news in great rage and ordered all Portuguese in Nagasaki to be executed, including Jesuit missionaries. This order was never carried out, as the courier returned to Nagasaki to find the situation significantly changed.[30]
The second and third days
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/Nanbansen2.jpg/300px-Nanbansen2.jpg)
The battle continued with minor variations for the next two nights, with half-hearted parleys carried out in the daytime since the Japanese did not dare to attack during the day.[29] In addition to repeating the first night's manoeuvers, Arima tried various methods to subdue the ship. First, he tried sending two samurai to board the ship in disguise and kill Pessoa on deck, but this failed as the two were not allowed onto the ship.[31] He then sent divers to cut the cables of the ship's anchor, but this was also unsuccessful. On the third night, Arima sent forth a flotilla of fire ships, but they all drifted off in the wind save one, which slammed into the bow cable of the carrack but was cleared without much difficulty.[32]
During the third day, Arima sent a message to Pessoa that he wished to renew negotiations about the silk prices and was willing to send hostages aboard to prove his sincerity, provided that the carrack stayed where it was. Pessoa, in return, demanded the sons of both Arima Harunobu and Murayama Toan and that he be allowed to take the ship to the neighboring anchorage of Fukuda, where he could wait for favorable winds to go back to Macau. Arima gave no reply, but Hasegawa was furious when he heard about the exchange, telling Pessoa in a message that Arima had no authority to make such a proposal and, on the contrary, had direct orders to kill Pessoa. Hasegawa added that if Pessoa surrendered himself and let the cargo be sold at a price decided by the Japanese, he could intercede on Pessoa's behalf. Pessoa politely declined further negotiations as long as the Japanese continued hostilities.[33]
The final night
On the morning of January 6, 1610, a favorable breeze made it possible for Pessoa to move his ship to an inlet near Fukuda, but no further. Seeing that his prey was about to get away, Arima gave chase in a flotilla led by a colossal tower-junk. This junk was built by lashing two large boats together, upon which a wooden siege tower as tall as the carrack's deck was erected. The tower was covered with wet hides to protect it against Portuguese fire and had openings for the 500 archers and musketeers inside to shoot out of. With the attacking force having swelled to around 3000 samurai due to reinforcements in the prior three days, the flotilla tried to approach the carrack under the cover of the tower-junk.[34]
Between 8 and 9 p.m., the flotilla closed in at the carrack's
The Portuguese fended off the smaller crafts with hand grenades, but they made little effect on the floating tower, which grappled the poop deck.[35] Up to this point, the Portuguese casualties had been few, with only four or five Portuguese along with a few lascars killed,[36] while the Japanese dead were estimated at several hundred.[2] However, six hours into the fighting,[35] a shot from the tower-junk hit a fire pot that a Portuguese soldier was about to throw, smashing it onto the gunpowder at his feet. This started a conflagration that spread through the deck, setting the mizzen sail ablaze. Pessoa and his men retreated to the forecastle, where they realized they did not have enough men to fight the fire and the Japanese boarders simultaneously. At this point, Pessoa ordered the ship's magazine to be set on fire since he would rather die than surrender. When the ship's purser hesitated, Pessoa cast away his sword and shield and picked up a crucifix, and then he exclaimed: "Blessed be thou, oh Lord, since thou willest that all this should end!" He then told his crew to save themselves as he started the fire.[3] The Nossa Senhora da Graça blew up in two successive explosions, split into two, and sank with cargo, crew, and boarders alike.[2] The Japanese killed all they could see swimming in the water, but a few survivors safely made it onto the shore. André Pessoa's body, however, was never found.[3]
Aftermath
The remaining Portuguese merchants and missionaries were naturally concerned about their fates, especially since Ieyasu had personally ordered their execution. Arima, a Christian, apparently regretted what he had done and interceded on the Jesuits' behalf. Ieyasu had a change of heart since he was convinced that foreign trade would cease without the missionaries. Eventually, the merchants were allowed to leave for Macau with their property while the missionaries could stay. (With the notable exception of Ieyasu's Jesuit translator
Since the Portuguese settlement of Macau greatly depended on the Japanese trade, the Senate of Macau decided it was prudent to send an envoy to Japan to officially negotiate the resumption of trade. They could not send a ship to Japan until the summer of 1611 when an embassy led by Dom Nuno Soutomaior reached the court of Ieyasu in August.
Soutomaior had first justified Portuguese suppression of the incident in Macau, then demanded from the Shogunate compensation for all damages caused by the sinking of Nossa Senhora da Graça and the dismissal of Hasegawa, but the latter demands were rejected. Finally, blame for the incident was placed squarely on the dead André Pessoa for refusing to surrender when asked. Ieyasu permitted the "great ship" to come to Nagasaki as before. After another trip to the court of Ieyasu in 1612 to clear up the terms of trade, the São Felipe e Santiago became the first Portuguese carrack to trade in Nagasaki after the two-year hiatus.[41]
Nevertheless, Pessoa's resistance ultimately harmed Portuguese trade and missionary activities since it reaffirmed that the Portuguese were a troublesome people in the eyes of the Tokugawa shogunate. The Nossa Senhora da Graça incident made Ieyasu and his successors move away from their earlier toleration of the Portuguese in favor of the Dutch. In 1639, the Portuguese were expelled from Japan as the Dutch, resettled to Nagasaki, became the only European presence allowed in Japan during the shogunate's enforcement of their isolationist sakoku policy.[42]
For Arima's part in sinking the Nossa Senhora da Graça, Ieyasu not only rewarded Arima Harunobu with a prized sword but also presented his granddaughter Kunihime (国姫) as a wife for Harunobu's son
Salvage
When the Nossa Senhora da Graça sank, its cargo mainly consisted of about 3000 piculs of unsold Chinese silk and 160 crates of silver bullion; altogether, the total loss was estimated at more than a million in gold. Recovery efforts have persisted from the night of the sinking—when 200 floating baskets of silk were picked up with grappling hooks—right down to modern times, but most of the treasure caches have yet to be found. These efforts centered around the area where the carrack was recorded to have sunk, 35 fathoms (64 m) under the sea off the island of Koyagi, Nagasaki.[44]
Of the 150 or 160 crates of silver on board the vessel, 70 were retrieved by a merchant of Hirado in 1617. Later salvage efforts only turned up three bars of silver, a few trinkets in 1653, and a cannon and some silver in 1658.
Legacy
The British historian C. R. Boxer noted the significant effect that Pessoa's actions had on how the Japanese see Portuguese people. According to Boxer, the event gave the Japanese an exaggerated impression of the Portuguese's fighting qualities and appealed to the Japanese samurai mentality due to Pessoa's rather un-Christian suicide. As such, stories of the event were told and retold again over the next hundred years, often in an exaggerated and wildly inaccurate manner, and found themselves embedded as part of local folklore.[48]
A direct reference to the event can be found in 1808, during Japan's period of self-imposed isolation, when the Royal Navy frigate HMS Phaeton entered Nagasaki harbor to ambush two Dutch merchant vessels that were expected to arrive in an offshoot of the Napoleonic Wars. The Nagasaki bugyō, somewhat inaccurately, threatened to sink the foreign warship "as the Madre de Deus had been burned and sunk some two hundred years before".[49]
See also
- Siege of Moji (1561) – the Portuguese carrack joined a Japanese battle in what became the first European naval bombardment on Japanese soil.
- Battle of Fukuda Bay (1565) – A Japanese flotilla attacks a Portuguese carrack and fails to capture it in the first naval clash between Japan and the West.
- Battle of Manila (1574) – A Chinese and Japanese pirate fleet attacked Manila intending to capture the city
- Battle of Cagayan (1582) – A fleet of Asian pirates led by Japanese attack and are defeated by a Spanish flotilla.
- Second attack on Kamishi (August 9, 1945) – last-ever direct naval bombardment of the Japanese home islands in World War II.
References
Notes
- ^ a b Boxer 1951, p. 281.
- ^ a b c Boxer 1951, p. 282.
- ^ a b c d Boxer 1948, p. 61.
- ^ Boxer 1951, p. 91.
- ^ Boxer 1979, p. 49 note 9.
- ^ Vié 2002, p. 72.
- ^ Boxer 1948, p. 53.
- ^ a b Boxer 1979, p. 37.
- ^ Boxer 1948, p. 53; Boxer 1951, p. 270.
- ^ Boxer 1951, p. 271.
- ^ Boxer 1979, pp. 34, 39.
- ^ In Boxer 1951, Boxer notes that "it is still not absolutely clear by which name the carrack was really called" (p. 487, note 20). However, he used the name Nossa Senhora da Graça in his later works as opposed to Madre de Deus in his 1929 "The affair of the Madre de Deus" and its reprints. In "Affair", Boxer notes at least five ships using the name Madre de Deus during the Iberian Union (all meeting catastrophic ends), including the subject of this article and the carrack captured by the English in 1592 (pp.84–86).
- ^ Boxer 1979, p. 41.
- ^ Boyajian 2008, pp. 150–1.
- ^ Boxer 1979, p. 40.
- ^ Boxer 1979, p. 41; Boxer 1948, p. 54.
- ^ Boxer 1951, pp. 272–3.
- ^ Boxer 1948, p. 55.
- ^ a b c d Boxer 1948, p. 58.
- ^ Boxer 1951, p. 274.
- ^ a b c d Boxer 1951, p. 275.
- ^ Boxer 1948, p. 56.
- ^ Boxer 1951, p. 274; Boxer 1948, p. 57.
- ^ a b c d Boxer 1948, p. 57.
- ^ Boxer 1951, p. 289.
- ^ a b Boxer 1951, p. 276.
- ^ Boxer 1979, p. 50.
- ^ a b c Boxer 1951, p. 279.
- ^ a b Boxer 1951, p. 280.
- ^ Boxer 1979, p. 52.
- ^ Boxer 1951, p. 486 note 16.
- ^ Boxer 1948, pp. 59–60.
- ^ Boxer 1951, pp. 280–1.
- ^ Boxer 1948, p. 60; Boxer 1951, p. 281.
- ^ a b Boxer 1979, p. 53 note 2.
- ^ Boxer 1948, p. 60.
- ^ Milton 2011, [1].
- ^ Boxer 1948, p. 61; Boxer 1951, p. 283.
- ^ Boxer 1979, pp. 55–6.
- ^ Boxer 1979, p. 59.
- ^ Boxer 1951, p. 284.
- ^ Curvelo 2003, p. 147.
- ^ Boxer 1951, p. 315.
- ^ Boxer 1948, p. 61; Boxer 1951, p. 282; Boxer 1979, p. 86.
- ^ Boxer 1979, p. 63.
- ^ Boxer 1951, p. 282; Boxer 1979, p. 86.
- ^ Tomé 2000.
- ^ Boxer 1979, p. 63-4; Boxer 1951, p. 284.
- ^ Boxer 1979, p. 64.
Works cited
- Boxer, C. R. (1948). Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550–1770. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
- Boxer, C. R. (1951). The Christian Century in Japan: 1549–1650. University of California Press. GGKEY:BPN6N93KBJ7.
- ISBN 0890932557.
- Boyajian, James (2008). Portuguese trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640. Baltimore, Md. London: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0801887543.
- Curvelo, Alexandra (2003). "Nagasaki/Deshima after the Portuguese in Dutch accounts of the 17th century" (PDF). Bulletin of Portuguese - Japanese Studies. 6 (June 2003). Universidade Nova de Lisboa: 147–157. Retrieved 6 May 2015.
- Milton, Giles (2011). Samurai William: The Adventurer Who Unlocked Japan. Hachette UK. ISBN 978-1444731774.
- Tomé, Eduardo (2000). "'Madre de Deus' – A Japanese Dream". Macau Magazine (August 2000): 60–66. Archived from the original on July 15, 2007. Retrieved 26 June 2014.
- Vié, Michel (2002). Histoire du Japon : des origines à Meiji. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ISBN 2130528937.