The Word Pirate Is Shameful in Japan: The 1621 Edict Against Dutch and English Privateering

On a warm afternoon in July 1621, a courier from Edo rode into Hirado carrying a document that would unmake an entire strategic architecture. The document was not long. It was written in the formal cursive of the shogunal chancery, stamped with the seals of Tokugawa Hidetada’s senior councillors, the rōjū, the five men who ran the Japanese state on behalf of a forty-two-year-old shōgun who was increasingly content to let them, and addressed to Matsuura Takanobu, the daimyo of Hirado. The daimyo read it, and he understood immediately that his foreign guests were in serious trouble.

The foreign guests in question were the Dutch and the English. They had, over the preceding decade, built comfortable little factories on the daimyo’s island, brought in silk in exchange for silver, and introduced a bracing new element to the port’s commercial life: a fleet of heavily armed warships operating out of the harbour as a private navy. For some years, the bakufu had watched this development with the blank inscrutability that was its habitual response to foreign misbehaviour. Now, in the twenty-second day of the fifth month of Genna 7, 11 July 1621 by the Gregorian reckoning, the blank inscrutability had ended.

The edict forbade the Dutch and the English to pirate in the waters around Japan. It forbade them to seize any vessel whatsoever, Japanese, Chinese, or Portuguese. It forbade them to export Japanese weapons. And it forbade them to hire Japanese crewmen for their overseas voyages.

Jacques Specx, the Dutch opperhoofd at Hirado, would later write to his superiors in Batavia that “the word pirate is shameful in Japan”. He was not exaggerating. The single Japanese word the shogunate had chosen, bahan, was a loaded term whose full weight the Europeans did not immediately appreciate. It was the word the Japanese used for the wakō raiders who had plundered the coasts of Korea and China in earlier centuries. It was a word that had been used to justify the executions of sea-robbers. The Dutch and the English had come to Japan as sovereigns’ agents waging a just war against the pope’s creatures. The shogunate had now informed them that, in Japanese eyes, they were ordinary criminals.

The Fleet That Built Itself

The story starts with a peace treaty that nobody really wanted.

The Dutch East India Company and its younger English cousin had spent most of the 1610s trying to murder each other across the islands of Southeast Asia. The Dutch had the money, the ships, and a governor-general named Jan Pieterszoon Coen who regarded English traders with disdain. The English had optimism, limited capital, and a cheerful conviction that if they just sailed into the clove islands with sufficient enthusiasm the Dutch would eventually see reason. They would not. Between 1615 and 1619, the two Protestant companies fought a series of small, vicious naval engagements over the Moluccan spice trade in which, more often than not, the English came off worst.

In London, in the early summer of 1619, cooler heads prevailed. On 7 July, representatives of the two companies signed the Treaty of Defence at Westminster. The document divided the Moluccan spice trade, two-thirds to the Dutch, one-third to the English, and established a joint mechanism for the defence of their shared interests in Asia. This mechanism was called the Fleet of Defence.

It was not a defensive fleet.

News of the treaty reached Batavia in the spring of 1620, and the joint eight-member council of defence, four Dutchmen and four Englishmen, their instructions drawn up by men whose offices were within walking distance of Coen’s, met in May to translate peace into war. They resolved to assemble a combined force of ten ships, five from each company, with an admiralty that rotated between Dutch and English commanders to prevent the inevitable arguments about precedence. The fleet would operate out of Hirado. Its mission, in the council’s own language, was that if it encountered Portuguese, Spaniards, or their adherents anywhere, it was to assault and surprise them.

The English admiral who was offered the command of the first voyage, Captain Martin Pring, examined his instructions, made some quick calculations about the likelihood of survival, and boarded a ship for home. Robert Adams, commander of the Bull, inherited the admiralty by the time-honoured mechanism of being available. The English contingent consisted of the Elizabeth, the Bull, the Moon, the Palsgrave, and the Hope. The Dutch contributed the Haarlem, Hoope, Trouw, and Bantam. The English ships alone, valued with their ordnance at £47,760, represented a capital investment sufficient to fund the East India Company’s entire home administration for several years.

The Junk in the Strait

The Fleet of Defence sailed on its first Manila cruise in the autumn of 1620 with instructions that read like a primer on piratical enterprise: blockade Manila Bay, intercept the Acapulco galleon if possible, harass Chinese junks running the Philippines route, and, the phrase carried an unmistakable note of corporate salivation, intercept Portuguese vessels on the Macao-Nagasaki route. The voyage was a disappointment. The Acapulco galleon escaped. The Macao galliots escaped. Fourteen Chinese junks escaped. Six galliots escaped. Contemporary reports, compiled with the melancholy precision of accountants looking at a bad year, listed the official prize tonnage as a measly five silk-laden junks.

And one Japanese ship.

It was in the Straits of Taiwan, in the middle of a voyage that had otherwise produced nothing but escaped targets, that the English Elizabeth intercepted a junk captained by a man named Hirayama Jōchin. Hirayama was a Japanese Christian from Kyushu, operating under a red-seal trading pass, a shuinjō, the same kind of document the Dutch themselves had so cherished when Ieyasu issued it to them in 1609. The junk was carrying a mixed cargo of silk and a mixed company of Japanese and Iberian passengers. Among the passengers were two men travelling as merchants. They were not merchants. One was the Augustinian Pedro de Zúñiga. The other was the Dominican Luis Flores. Both were Catholic priests, smuggling themselves into Japan in defiance of the 1614 expulsion edict, which remains the most comprehensive study of how the Tokugawa regime translated religious hostility into deportation policy.

The Elizabeth seized the junk. It seized the cargo. It seized the passengers. It sailed the lot back to Hirado and claimed the entire enterprise as lawful prize.

And so, on a single afternoon in the Straits of Taiwan, the Fleet of Defence accomplished something no previous incident had managed. It combined, in one diplomatic outrage, a violent interdiction of Japanese shipping by European warships with the discovery of two hidden Catholic missionaries, the precise combination of offences that the shogunate, for reasons the English and Dutch had been slow to appreciate, regarded as the most alarming possible intersection of European misconduct. It was as if the captains of the Elizabeth had sat down with a list of the bakufu’s most active anxieties and worked methodically through them.

The junk and its cargo were impounded in the Hirado godowns pending a decision from Edo. Zúñiga and Flores were kept in custody at the Dutch factory by mutual agreement of the two companies, who had the wit to understand that the priests were now evidence in something very much more serious than a routine prize case. The two men, sensibly, refused to admit they were priests. For many months they maintained that they were merchants, which was plausible enough to delay matters but not to resolve them. The case would eventually turn on the testimony of a Japanese apostate named Thomas Araki, a former Jesuit whose own spectacular fall from the faith will one day deserve an article of its own, whose identification of the two men as clergy was produced with the cold professionalism of a man who had learned how the Tokugawa interrogation system worked.

The junk sat in Hirado through the winter of 1620 and into the spring of 1621. The priests sat in the Dutch factory. In Edo, the rōjū sat in their chamber and came to a series of conclusions that would change everything.

The Education of the Rōjū

The councillors had been receiving a steady education in European piratical practice for nearly a decade. The 1615 capture of the Portuguese junk Santo António had already demonstrated the willingness of Dutch commanders to seize vessels within sight of the Japanese coast and to defend the action by appeal to a tangle of European legal concepts that nobody in the Tokugawa court found persuasive. The decade of steady Dutch and English complaints about one another, interspersed with incidents in which both nations’ ships appeared to do exactly what they were accusing the Iberians of doing, had made it difficult for any sensible observer to believe that a meaningful legal distinction separated the Protestants’ operations from straightforward maritime banditry.

The Spanish and Portuguese were not shy about making this point. Nagasaki merchants who had lost ships to the Fleet of Defence lobbied the Nagasaki bugyō, the magistrates of the shogunate’s only legally sanctioned foreign trade port, with a persistence that was reinforced by the bugyō’s own investments in the Macao-Nagasaki trade. Chinese merchants, whose junks had been among the fleet’s preferred targets, added their protests through whatever channels of communication the Ming-Tokugawa non-relationship permitted. The Portuguese presented a narrative that, whatever its self-interested motives, happened to match the observable facts: the Dutch and English were waging war against Iberian shipping from a base in Japan, and the shogunate was in effect providing them with a forward naval station.

By the early summer of 1621, the rōjū had stopped being ambivalent. They had concluded that the Iberians, for once, were telling the truth. They had also concluded something rather larger: that the sea around Japan belonged to Japan, and that Japan’s sovereignty over that sea had been steadily eroded by European behaviour which no previous shōgunal ruling had explicitly prohibited. The 1614 Expulsion Edict had addressed the land. The 1616 Edict of Restriction had addressed the ports. Now, for the first time, the shogunate would address the water.

The decision crystallised, the document was drafted, and on 11 July 1621 the rōjū’s courier rode into Hirado.

The full text of the edict reached Specx and the English factors on 14 September. The core provision was unambiguous. In Japanese: The Dutch or English must not pirate in the waters around Japan. The verb was bahan. A second clause forbade the capture of any vessel, Japanese, Chinese, or Portuguese. Two accompanying clauses addressed the logistics of European maritime violence: a ban on the export of Japanese swords, daggers, and other weapons, and, the clause that mattered most, a prohibition on the “taking of purchased men and women to foreign countries”. The Fleet of Defence had relied heavily on Japanese crewmen to man its ships. The rōjū had worked out how the fleet was operated, and they had decided to terminate the supply chain.

The Dutch translation preserved by the VOC factory rendered the critical verb as rooven. The English had no translation that helped them. There was no way to soften what had happened. The Dutch factors read it, the English factors read it, and the legal architecture on which they had spent two years building a forward operating base collapsed in an afternoon.

Specx on the Swan

The reactions at Hirado were those of men who had been trained to respect documents and who understood precisely what this one meant.

Jacques Specx was a company lifer. He had arrived in Japan in 1609, when the VOC factory was three men and a boy. He had built it into a functioning commercial operation, travelled repeatedly to court, and learned the Japanese language, customs, and politics to a degree that his Batavia superiors seem never quite to have appreciated. His lament to Batavia that the word bahan was shameful in Japan was the observation of a man who grasped what had changed. The edict did not merely forbid the fleet’s activities. It relabelled them. What had been, in European eyes, a legitimate act of war against the king of Spain’s shipping was now, in Japanese eyes, ordinary theft committed by ordinary thieves. And because it was theft, any future act of the kind would be prosecuted as theft, not through the diplomatic channels of state-to-state grievance, but through the criminal machinery of the Tokugawa state.

Specx and Richard Cocks, the senior English factor, were summoned to Edo to explain themselves. The Japanese authorities, operating according to a procedural tempo that Europeans still found bewildering, did not immediately receive them. They waited. They let the factory heads stew. The silence from Edo was, in its way, a more eloquent communication than any reprimand.

Matsuura Takanobu, the daimyo of Hirado, urged Specx to remain in Japan. His argument was practical: Specx knew the rōjū, he knew the court procedures, he had the relationships that would be needed to manage the coming crisis. Sending him away at this moment would be a strategic disaster. The Dutch commander Willem Janszoon, who was preparing to sail with the second Manila voyage, overruled him. Specx was instructed by Batavia to depart on the ship Swan, and on 6 October 1621 he did. He left his successor Leonard Camps, who had no such relationships, to manage the fallout. Cocks remained at Hirado, increasingly desperate, with an English factory whose commercial rationale had just been legislated out of existence.

Camps understood what had happened within weeks of Specx’s departure. In a letter to Batavia, he warned his superiors with the clarity of a man who had been reading the translation: the shōgun was not a minor Southeast Asian king who could be bullied, his laws would be enforced, and Japan possessed the military capacity to enforce them. If the VOC wanted to continue trading out of Hirado, it would do so on Tokugawa terms, inside Tokugawa waters, by Tokugawa rules. The Fleet of Defence, as a strategic concept, was finished.

It took the fleet itself a little while to catch up.

The Second Voyage, the Galliot, and the Stake

The second Manila voyage sailed anyway. Under Willem Janszoon’s command, the ships departed Hirado in two contingents in October and November of 1621, some of them while the ink on the edict was barely dry, and proceeded to do exactly what the shogunate had just forbidden. The voyage was, in conventional terms, a success. It returned to Hirado in the summer of 1622 with six captured junks, a Portuguese galliot taken on 20 January 1622, several sampans, and prize money whose combined value across both voyages reached approximately £100,000.

It was the last significant operation of its kind. Camps’s warning to Batavia had been absorbed by superiors who understood that the Japanese trade, with its reliable silver returns and its peculiarly reliable legal protection, was worth more to the VOC than any number of captured galliots. The fleet was not formally disbanded in 1622, but it never again operated with the same licence. The English company, meanwhile, was simply running out of money. By 1622 the Anglo-Dutch Fleet of Defence had dissolved, primarily because the English East India Company could no longer contribute its share of ships, men, and cash.

The second voyage’s real consequences were not financial but judicial. The priests Zúñiga and Flores had finally been exposed, through Thomas Araki’s testimony, as the Catholic missionaries they were. The junk captain Hirayama Jōchin, whose vessel had been seized twenty-one months earlier by the English Elizabeth, was now, in the shogunate’s view, a man who had smuggled priests into Japan in defiance of the 1614 edict. The shogunate handed down a sentence whose brutality was intended to be instructive.

On 19 August 1622, Zúñiga, Flores, and Hirayama were taken to Nagasaki and burned alive at the stake. The execution was, by design, protracted. Contemporary accounts recorded that the three men survived in the flames for three-quarters of an hour before expiring. The Christian crew and passengers of Hirayama’s junk, along with the Japanese families who had sheltered the two priests on their arrival, were decapitated. The shogunate had, in the most explicit terms available to it, drawn a line between the piracy edict of 1621 and the anti-Christian campaign of the 1610s. Both, it was now saying, were elements of a single policy. A foreigner who violated either would be treated accordingly. A Japanese subject who assisted the violation would be executed.

The August burnings were the direct prelude to the events of 10 September 1622, when fifty-five Christians, including the Jesuit Carlo Spinola, were executed on the hill of Nishizaka, an episode whose meaning the dedicated article on the Great Martyrdom examines in full. The through-line from the Elizabeth’s seizure of a Japanese junk in the Straits of Taiwan in 1620, to the 1621 edict, to the stake at Nagasaki in August 1622, to the mass execution at Nishizaka in September, is one of the clearest causal sequences in the entire Nanban period. European privateering had collided with Japanese religious policy, and Japanese religious policy had absorbed it, and the people who burned for it were, by and large, neither privateers nor policymakers but the ordinary Christians of Kyushu, whose faith was the thing the Tokugawa state could reach.

The Bull Sails Home

The English factory at Hirado had never made a profit.

It had been unprofitable before the edict, for reasons that are canvassed elsewhere on this site: no access to Chinese silk, unsellable broadcloth, a Chinese middleman named Li Tan who absorbed the company’s silver and returned nothing, and a factory location that John Saris had chosen in 1613 for reasons of suspicion rather than commerce. The edict of 1621 merely finished off what had been dying for years. By removing the possibility of supplying the factory through captured Iberian cargoes, a quiet expedient that had underwritten English commerce at Hirado more than Cocks cared to admit in his letters home, the edict eliminated the last commercial rationale for an English presence in Japan.

The EIC presidency at Batavia made its formal decision on 25 April 1623. The Hirado factory would be dissolved. On 24 December 1623, ten years almost to the week after Saris had first disembarked at the island, the English merchants boarded the ship Bull and sailed away. Richard Cocks, who had spent a decade of his life trying to make the factory work, was recalled in disgrace to face charges of mismanagement. Broken in health and spirits, he died at sea in March 1624.

It would be 150 years before another English merchant set foot in Japan.

What the Dutch Learned

The VOC did not leave. Leonard Camps had grasped the essential point more quickly than his superiors, and it became the guiding principle of the Dutch Japanese trade for the next two centuries: the Tokugawa shogunate would not tolerate violations of its maritime sovereignty, and the sovereignty in question extended as far as the shogunate’s interests required it to extend.

What this meant in practice was that the Dutch abandoned their strategic ambition of using Japanese waters as a forward base for prosecuting the global war against Iberian shipping. The fleet-based privateering campaigns that had been the VOC’s principal instrument of anti-Portuguese warfare since the capture of the Santa Catarina in 1603 would, from 1621 onwards, be conducted somewhere else. The Dutch halted their campaigns against Portuguese shipping near Japan. They specifically abandoned their longstanding ambition to capture one of the great Macao-Nagasaki carracks, a prize that had been the holy grail of VOC strategic planning since the Madre de Deus had slipped through their fingers in 1609, and that the destruction of that carrack in Nagasaki harbour the following January had not quenched but redirected.

The consequences of this Dutch retreat were, from a Portuguese perspective, spectacularly good news. Because the Dutch could no longer disrupt the Macao-Nagasaki trade by force, they were compelled to compete with it on purely commercial terms. And on purely commercial terms, in 1621, the Portuguese still had the better of the argument: direct access to Chinese raw silk at Macao, long-established Japanese buyers, and the ancient relationships that their half-century of Nagasaki residence had cultivated. The Macao-Nagasaki trade, which had been expected to collapse under Dutch pressure at any moment from 1605 onwards, instead continued to flourish. The nau do trato, or rather the smaller galliots that had replaced it after 1618, continued to carry silk and silver between the two ports for another eighteen years. The reprieve lasted until the expulsion of the Portuguese in 1639, and in those eighteen years the merchants of Macao made some of the largest fortunes in their city’s history.

The 1621 edict had, in other words, saved the Portuguese trade. The Tokugawa shogunate had achieved what the entire resources of the Estado da Índia had been unable to accomplish: it had forced the Dutch to fight a commercial war rather than a military one, and the Portuguese had always been better commercial warriors than military ones. When Portugal eventually lost the Japan trade, it would lose it for religious rather than for strategic reasons, a testament to the Tokugawa regime’s consistent policy of separating the two questions, even when the European powers kept confusing them.

The Shape of the Edict

The 1621 edict belongs to a sequence. The 1614 Expulsion Edict had addressed the land: Christianity was to leave Japan, and the land on which Japanese Christians had built their communities was to be purified. The 1616 Edict of Restriction had addressed the ports: foreign merchants were to be confined to Hirado and Nagasaki, and their freedom to move within the country was to be legally constrained. The 1621 edict addressed the sea: foreign naval vessels would not wage war in Japanese waters, foreign merchants would not employ Japanese subjects in their fleets, and the weapons of Japan would not be exported to fuel someone else’s war. Each edict narrowed the European operating envelope. Each edict was framed as a response to a specific provocation, the Okamoto Daihachi scandal, the distraction of European merchants within Japan, the Hirayama Jōchin incident, but each was also, in reality, an instalment of a single longer policy whose logic only became fully visible with the final sakoku edict of 1639 and the expulsion of the Portuguese that followed.

Seen from this angle, the 1621 edict is the least famous but arguably the most strategically consequential of the three. It took the European powers at their word. They had arrived in Japan claiming to be merchants. The shogunate responded, after observing their actual conduct for a generation, that it had now decided to accept that claim. They would be allowed to trade. They would not be allowed to do anything else. The private navies would be disbanded in Japanese waters. The Japanese crewmen would stay home. The swords would remain in Japan. The sea was Japan’s. The shogunate said so, and since the shogunate had the fortresses, the fleets, and the willingness to burn people at stakes over protracted periods, the shogunate’s view of the matter prevailed.