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Other writers have produced biographies of the great adventurers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age--Drake, Raleigh and their peers--but in Samurai William, as he has done previously, Giles Milton has specialised in rescuing someone who has slipped through the net of history into anonymity. In Nathaniel's Nutmeg and Big Chief Elizabeth he drew attention to minor, but intriguing, figures in the story of England's earliest expansion both eastwards and westwards, bringing them out of dusty archives and into the light of day. In Samurai William he has done the same for William Adams of Limehouse and the book is just as gripping as its predecessors.
Fate carried William Adams a long way from the East London docks amid which he grew up. He joined a voyage to the East, which went disastrously wrong and, in 1600, he was washed up on the shores of Japan, one of the few survivors of the journey and the first Englishman to set foot in the country. Adams was clearly a remarkable man. In a few years he had progressed from shipwrecked castaway to honorary samurai and close advisor to the Shogun, the effective ruler of Japan. When the East India Company, alerted by a letter Adams managed to send, despatched merchants to trade with the Japanese, it was the English samurai who made their mission possible. Adams never returned to England and died in Japan in 1620.
This is an extraordinary story and Milton tells it well. His great gift is that he knows how to highlight those details from the archives that bring both Adams and the long-dead merchant venturers back to life. The secret of Adams's survival was that he adapted readily to Japanese life; the traders did not, as Milton shows us. He records their responses to the wonders of the new civilisation they were encountering but he also quotes the laddish jokes about Japanese women they swapped in letters, the details of their epic boozing and their increasingly desperate attempts to make enough money to keep afloat. It is little wonder that the trading station could not survive without Adams and folded less than three years after his death. Japan was to be a country closed to Europeans for the next two hundred years. The story of Adams and the first contact between England and Japan was forgotten for centuries but, as told in Samurai William, it's one well worth recovering from oblivion. --Nick Rennison
Review
"1 Praise for Giles Milton's previous books: 'A magnificent piece of popular history' - Independent on Sunday 2 'Milton has brought the era to life, conveying nuances of character and the values of the time.' - The Sunday Times 3 'The thoroughness and intelligence of his research underpins the lively confidence with which he deploys it.' - The Times Literary Supplement
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