Paper and Vermilion: The State Papers of the Macau-Nagasaki Trade, 1611–1621

The Ocean of Paper

What Are the Macau Nagasaki State Papers of 1611 to 1621?

Every empire leaves an ocean of paper behind it. The Portuguese Estado da Índia left rather more than most — a century of viceregal despatches, Jesuit annual letters, notarial deeds, merchant ledgers, petitions, accusations, counter-accusations, and the kind of administrative grumbling that only an overstretched colonial bureaucracy can produce. The Tokugawa shogunate, on its side of the East China Sea, kept its own voluminous records, in its own distinct ink and its own distinct hand, in its own characteristically unsentimental style.

Most of those papers never spoke to each other. They described parallel worlds, separated by an ocean, a writing system, and a set of assumptions about how the universe was organized that mapped onto one another only accidentally.

But for one particular decade — from the autumn of 1611 to the summer of 1621 — the papers did speak. The ruin of the Madre de Deus in Nagasaki harbor in January 1610 had severed the most profitable maritime route in Asia, and the only way to rebuild it was by correspondence. Letters crossed the sea. Embassies were received, processed, and sometimes politely humiliated. Red-seal permits were issued in the vermilion ink of shogunal authority and carried home to the Senate of Macau like holy relics. Petitions were filed. Complaints were logged. And a slowly growing cast of Japanese officials and Portuguese envoys learned to write to one another in the careful, faintly strained register of two parties who need each other but do not especially trust each other.

This is the story of that correspondence. It is not the story of the ships — those have their own article — nor of the silk, nor of the Jesuits, nor of the Anglo-Dutch privateers who would shortly begin cruising off Kyushu with writs of marque and bad intentions. It is the story of the documents those things produced: the state papers in which a diplomatic relationship was, with difficulty and occasional hilarity, put back on its feet.

The Year of the Missing Ship

Why the Nagasaki Silk Trade Halted in 1610 and Macau Wrote to Ieyasu in 1611

The first thing the state papers of 1611 make clear is what was not happening.

In the ordinary course of events, the Portuguese Great Ship of Commerce — the annual carrack from Macau — would have made its summer landfall at Nagasaki, disgorged a fortune in Chinese raw silk into the waiting hands of the ito-wappu guild, loaded several hundred chests of Japanese silver, and sailed home on the northeast monsoon before Christmas. The Jesuits would have conducted their quiet ceremonies, the merchants their less quiet ones, and the bugyō of Nagasaki would have filed his annual reports. It was a machine that had been running, with minor interruptions, since the 1570s.

In 1610, the machine had stopped. André Pessoa's decision to blow up his own ship in the harbor had not merely destroyed a colossal carrack and a million cruzados of cargo; it had destroyed trust. The shogunal court at Suruga was affronted. The Senate of Macau was horrified. The Nagasaki merchants who lived on the annual trade — the yado hosts, the warehouse keepers, the silk buyers, the Jesuit Procurator with his ledgers and his silent prayers — were looking at a year of ruin.

No one really wanted this. That is the interesting part. The Japanese had lost access to the silk their domestic market craved. The Portuguese had lost access to the silver their China investments required. The Dutch, at Hirado, were still too small and too recently arrived to plug the gap. The Spanish, at Manila, were technically permitted since 1609 to trade directly with Japan but had neither the scale nor the supply chain to serve as a substitute. Everyone had something to lose, and almost no one had anything to gain, from the continued silence.

And so, in the early summer of 1611, Macau decided to write a letter.

The letter-writer was Dom Nuno Soutomaior, a minor Portuguese fidalgo with a taste for velvet. The Senate commissioned him as envoy to Tokugawa Ieyasu's court and despatched him aboard a small vessel rigged not for trade but for embassy — which is to say, freighted with gifts rather than cargo. Soutomaior's specific mandate was threefold: to re-open the Macau–Nagasaki route, to secure formal guarantees of safety for future Portuguese shipping, and, if at all possible, to extract some form of reparation for the destroyed carrack.

What Soutomaior chose to interpret as "some form of reparation" would, within weeks, become one of the finer diplomatic miscalculations of the century.

The Envoy at Sunpu

Dom Nuno Soutomaior's 1611 Embassy to Tokugawa Ieyasu and Its Three Demands

Soutomaior's ship dropped anchor at Kagoshima, in the Satsuma domain, in July 1611. He had not gone to Nagasaki, because Nagasaki meant Hasegawa Sahyōe Fujihiro, the bugyō, and Hasegawa was the one Japanese official whom the Portuguese most wanted to pretend did not exist. Satsuma offered a more sympathetic landfall. The daimyō, Shimazu Iehisa, was a cautious enthusiast of foreign trade — his domain had been the arrival point for Francis Xavier in 1549 — and he provided Soutomaior with guides, porters, and river boats to carry the Portuguese embassy overland and by sea toward the central court.

The court, in the summer of 1611, was at Sunpu Castle in Suruga province. Ieyasu had formally retired from the office of shōgun in 1605, handing it to his son Hidetada, but in practice he remained the decisive political authority in Japan — the Ōgosho, the "great retired lord," who ran the country from behind the screens. Anyone with serious business conducted it at Suruga. Formal acknowledgment and legal drafting might pass through Hidetada's court at Edo, but the strategic decisions were taken where Ieyasu drank his tea.

Once granted audience, Soutomaior presented three demands.

The first was financial compensation for the loss of the Madre de Deus, its cargo, and its crew.

The second was a formal exoneration of the late Captain-Major André Pessoa, along with an official acknowledgment that the Japanese sailors involved in the original Macau altercation — the brawl that had begun the whole catastrophe — were the true guilty parties.

The third, most remarkably, was the dismissal of Hasegawa Fujihiro from the post of bugyō of Nagasaki. The Portuguese case was that Hasegawa had maliciously deceived Ieyasu with slanderous reports, and that justice required his removal.

It is difficult to overstate how these demands landed at Sunpu. Hasegawa Fujihiro was a senior Tokugawa official whose sister was Ieyasu's favored concubine. Ieyasu had personally ordered the attack on the Madre de Deus. And the Portuguese were, at that precise moment, a party with no leverage whatsoever — supplicants seeking the resumption of a trade that they had themselves brought to ruin.

Ieyasu listened politely. He was, among his many other qualities, an exceptionally patient man. And then he declined, comprehensively, all three demands.

He refused the compensation. He made it clear that he would not permit outside powers to dictate the conduct of internal Tokugawa administration. And he noted — with a reasonableness that must have been more lacerating than any rebuke — that he was not in the habit of dismissing his own officials on the complaint of foreign merchants.

But he did not, here, throw Soutomaior out. This is the detail that matters. Ieyasu was calculating. He had by now fully absorbed the information that the Dutch and the Spanish, for all their ambitions, could not yet supply the quantity or quality of Chinese raw silk that the Japanese economy required. The Protestant alternative was an alternative in theory. In practice, for bulk commerce, it was not yet operational.

So Ieyasu made Soutomaior an offer that was, in its austerity, quite elegant: he would permit the resumption of trade, on the condition of the status quo ante bellum. Things would continue as they had been before 1610. No compensation. No exoneration. No personnel changes. No changes, full stop.

Soutomaior, having no alternative, accepted.

The Vermilion Seal

The Red Seal Permits of 1611 and 1612 That Reopened the Macau Trade

The formal instrument of reconciliation, issued in the autumn of 1611, was a shuinjo — a red-seal permit stamped with the distinctive vermilion ink of Tokugawa authority. Its text, translated from the chancery Japanese in which it was composed, ran as follows:

An ambassador has come from Goa to request permission for the Black Ship to come again. There is no objection to this. The regulations under which trade will be conducted shall be the same as in the past without any change. If anyone violates them, he will be punished.

Four sentences. Taken together, they constituted the legal foundation on which the Macau–Nagasaki trade would be rebuilt.

But the Senate of Macau, when the text arrived by return junk, was not quite satisfied. The permit said that the Black Ship could come. It did not say, with the legal specificity that Macau's jurists would have preferred, what would happen if the Black Ship encountered, say, a typhoon, or a Dutch privateer, and was forced into an unexpected Japanese port. The status quo ante bellum formula was elegant but ambiguous.

Macau therefore sent another envoy.

Horatio Neretti was an Italian in Portuguese service. He was accompanied by Captain-Major Pedro Martins Gaio, a more conventional Portuguese officer, and their joint mandate for 1612 was narrower than Soutomaior's: secure explicit language on the physical safety of Portuguese ships and crews in Japanese waters.

Meanwhile, at Nagasaki, another stream of correspondence had already begun to flow. Hasegawa Sahyōe Fujihiro — the bugyō whose dismissal Soutomaior had absurdly demanded — wrote to the "Elders of Macau," addressing them as trading partners rather than enemies, and informing them that he had personally petitioned Ieyasu for the issuance of a red-seal permit. The letter closed with a striking note: that the Senate should not hesitate, but should send the Black Ship the following summer. The man the Portuguese had tried to have sacked was now personally lobbying his overlord to restore Portuguese commerce. Hasegawa was a Tokugawa official before he was a Christian-hater; trade served the shogunate, so trade he would defend.

The second relevant letter came from Honda Masazumi, the senior councillor who drafted the formal shogunal response to the Soutomaior embassy. Honda's language was icily precise. Any disorders committed by Japanese officials or merchants against the Portuguese would, he wrote, be investigated and punished. This was a reassurance. But then, in the same document, Honda placed the blame for the Madre de Deus incident squarely on André Pessoa: the Captain-Major had, Honda asserted, repeatedly refused shogunal summons, had fired upon Japanese forces, and had essentially compelled the shogunate to destroy his vessel. It was the kind of rhetorical maneuver that only a mature bureaucracy can produce.

The third letter, arriving the following year, was from Goto Shozaburo Mitsutsugu, the Master of the Mint. Goto wrote to Manoel Vaz and the Senate of Macau in the ninth month of 1612, confirming that Prince Minamoto — Ieyasu, using the court style he occasionally adopted — had decreed that the master of the Black Ship could trade his cargo freely and profitably. The letter promised "open-hearted sincerity" in assisting any future Portuguese requests. The language was warmer than Honda's; the commitment was identical.

And then, in the ninth month of 1612, came the second shuinjo. This one, issued under the seal of Shōgun Tokugawa Hidetada, was the full-text guarantee Macau had been waiting for:

Trade is permitted as previously for the Black Ship and the shipping of the Namban people at Nagasaki. If the ship should be damaged and forced by stress of weather into any Japanese port, the safety of the ship and cargo are hereby fully guaranteed.

With that sentence, the diplomatic chapter of the Madre de Deus crisis was closed. Honda Masazumi had written his version of events into the record. Hasegawa Fujihiro had been rehabilitated in Macau as an ally rather than a slanderer. Goto Shozaburo had extended the mint's good wishes. And Shimazu Iehisa, from Satsuma, had written a charmingly apologetic note to the "Four Elders of Namban," acknowledging their correspondence while admitting that he could not, unfortunately, quite read their "strange characters."

It was a remarkable piece of multilateral diplomatic architecture, assembled from five different directions in two calendar years, and stabilizing a trade route that by rights should have collapsed.

And then, of course, came 1614.

The Edict That Changed the Terms

What Changed for Portuguese Merchants at Nagasaki After 1614

The 1614 Expulsion Edict was not, strictly speaking, about the Macau trade. It was about Christianity — the presence of Catholic missionaries on Japanese soil, the loyalty of Japanese Christian daimyō, the political threat of a universalist religion to a state that preferred its subjects loyal to the shōgun and nothing else. The edict ordered the expulsion of all foreign missionaries and the eradication of Christian worship.

But its commercial consequences, though indirect, were profound. The Portuguese merchants were welcome. The Portuguese silk was welcome. The problem was that, in the Portuguese system, the merchants and the priests were institutionally the same people. Ships of the Macau trade carried Jesuit Procurators. Jesuit colleges in Nagasaki conducted the pancada negotiations. Portuguese merchants lodged, during their months in port, with Japanese Christian families whose homes doubled as informal reliquaries and, occasionally, as hiding places for priests who had refused to obey the expulsion order.

The shogunate's response was to reengineer the trade's physical and social architecture, and it did so in stages. A second edict, issued under Hidetada in 1616, addressed the ports: Portuguese and Spanish were confined to Nagasaki; Dutch and English to Hirado. Free movement through the archipelago was abolished. Later still, Portuguese merchants at Nagasaki were prohibited from lodging with Japanese Christian hosts and were forcibly assigned to non-Christian yado. The surveillance apparatus that had been diffuse and informal began to congeal into the vast paper-trail of registered households and ward-level inspections that would define Tokugawa Japan for two centuries.

The state-paper tone shifts accordingly. The 1611 correspondence had been conducted between commercial partners negotiating a post-crisis restoration. The post-1614 correspondence increasingly reads like partners under mutual surveillance, writing letters they know will be read by officials with strong theological opinions.

The trade continued. But it continued on tighter terms.

The Galliots and the Predators

Why Macau Replaced the Great Ship With Galliots in 1618

The Portuguese Nau do Trato system had been designed in the 1570s for a sea lane that was essentially uncontested. A single massive carrack, fifteen hundred tons, armed with heavy cannon and packed with a year's commerce, was a reasonable economic gamble when the only serious threat was the typhoon.

The Dutch East India Company made it an unreasonable gamble. The VOC's campaign of privateering had begun with the seizure of the Santa Catarina in 1603, had been elevated to a strategic priority by the windfall Hugo Grotius turned into Mare Liberum, and had been systematised across Asian waters by the 1610s. Then, in 1615, a VOC yacht captured the Portuguese junk Santo António off the volcanic island of Meshima, within sight of Kyushu, and Tokugawa Ieyasu was invited to arbitrate. Ieyasu — nudged by William Adams, the English pilot who had become the shōgun's foreign-affairs whisperer — ruled in favor of the Dutch. The junk was declared a lawful prize, and the VOC was emboldened to escalate its privateering near Japan.

By 1616, the annual Great Ship was unable to sail at all — a debt embargo in Macau killed that year's voyage. The final Nau do Trato voyage was made in 1617 by Lopo Sarmento de Carvalho, who slipped the Dutch blockade by a hair. After that, Macau did something which no Portuguese commercial authority had dared to do in fifty years. It abolished the carrack.

From 1618, the trade was carried by squadrons of galliots — galiotas — small, shallow-drafted, single-decked vessels equipped with oars for when the wind failed. Galliots were not invulnerable, but they were numerous, fast, and no single capture could deliver the catastrophic loss of a carrack. The strategy worked. On the inaugural galliot voyage of 1618, four Portuguese vessels encountered the VOC yacht Jacatra. A close-quarters engagement followed in which the Portuguese boarded the Dutch ship — whereupon the Dutch commander, in a grim echo of Pessoa at Nagasaki, blew up his own powder magazine rather than surrender. The galliots cleared the burning wreck and reached port.

By 1619, the English East India Company and the VOC had formed a joint "Fleet of Defense," a corporate military alliance dedicated specifically to the annihilation of Iberian shipping in East Asian waters. The fleet brought captured Chinese junks into Hirado and generally conducted itself as if the waters between Manila and Macau were a private Protestant hunting ground.

The Japanese, watching from shore, found this profoundly irritating — not on humanitarian grounds, which were not much in evidence, but because senior Tokugawa officials had begun personally investing in the Macau trade, and every Iberian galliot captured by the Fleet of Defense was, effectively, money stolen from the Japanese ruling class. A political solution would be required.

It arrived, as all the best Tokugawa solutions did, in the form of a document.

The Petition and the Edict

Macau's 1621 Petition to Doi Toshikatsu and the Reply From Edo

In the sixth month of 1621, the Senate of Macau despatched another formal petition — this one directed to Doi Ōi-no-kami Toshikatsu, one of the most senior shogunal councillors at Edo. The petition, carried by a Portuguese envoy, made two concurrent complaints.

The first was about piracy. The Anglo-Dutch Fleet of Defense, the Senate wrote, had made the China Sea unsafe for the traditional Great Ship. They asked the shogunate to intervene against the Protestants who were, by their predations, damaging the Macau-Nagasaki route.

The second complaint was about pricing. The ito-wappu — known to the Portuguese as the pancada, "the bulk price" — was the Japanese buyer's cartel that had been negotiating the annual silk settlement since the early 1600s. A guild of merchants from the three shogunal cities — Kyoto, Sakai, and Nagasaki — set the bulk price collectively, leaving the Portuguese no room to play buyers against each other. Before the system, Portuguese margins on Nagasaki silk had routinely been 50 percent to 100 percent or more. Under the pancada, the margins had compressed severely. The 1621 petition complained that Portuguese white silk yarn was being "purchased under duress for a very small sum."

Doi's reply, arriving in the same year, handled both complaints with the studied courtesy that characterized senior Tokugawa diplomatic prose. On the matter of piracy, he assured the Senate that the shōgun had strictly forbidden the Dutch from engaging in such acts within Japanese waters. On the matter of silk pricing, he granted, in form, everything that had been asked: trade, he wrote, "shall be carried on in the way desired by your commercial factor." And there was, he added — with an irony that is difficult to miss even in translation — "nobody who is so cruel as to make unconscionable profits in our country."

Translation: Nothing will change.

But the anti-piracy assurance was not hollow. On the 11th of July, 1621, the shogunate issued a stern edict against European privateering in Japanese coastal waters. Dutch and English ships were explicitly forbidden from engaging in bahan — the Japanese legal term for piracy — in or near the archipelago. The prohibition was backed by the credible threat of exclusion from the Japanese trade altogether, which for the VOC and EIC was existential leverage. The Protestants could still capture Portuguese shipping on the open ocean, but they could no longer do it near Japan, and much of the economic logic of the fleet had been predicated on operating exactly there.

In August of the same year, the Nagasaki bugyō issued a further tightening of the pancada: manufactured silk goods and piece fabrics, which had previously been exempt from the bulk pricing mechanism, were now folded into it. Portuguese profits on the non-raw-silk portion of the cargo, which had been their last real pricing freedom, were cut accordingly. Duarte Gomes de Solis, writing a year later in Madrid, complained in print that the Macaonese who had once doubled their investments now had to accept margins that barely justified the voyage.

The system, in other words, was being tightened on the Portuguese from all sides. Japanese officials were cracking down on European privateering because it was costing them money. Japanese merchants were squeezing European pricing because they could. The 1614 religious suspicion was being institutionalised into a dense surveillance apparatus. And through it all, the trade continued, because the silk still flowed, and the silver still paid, and nobody had quite worked out how to replace the Portuguese yet.

The state papers of the 1611–1621 decade end, neatly, with Doi's letter and the July edict. Both documents are characteristically Tokugawa in their balance: the Portuguese were given what the shogunate was willing to give (protection from foreign privateers) and denied what the shogunate saw no reason to give (relief from domestic buyers). The relationship had arrived at an equilibrium.

It was not a stable equilibrium. The 1614 edict would beget the Great Martyrdom of 1622. The Christian question would metastasise through the 1620s. The Portuguese would be expelled in 1639, and their final desperate embassies would end in beheadings at Nishizaka. The decade of letters was a pause, not a resolution.

But as pauses go, it was a remarkably literate one.

What the Papers Reveal

What the 1611 to 1621 State Papers Show About Tokugawa Trade Policy

Three themes emerge from the documents of the 1611–1621 decade.

The first is Tokugawa pragmatism. Despite the Madre de Deus catastrophe, despite the deepening suspicion of Christianity, despite the obvious strategic preferability of the Protestant alternative — had such an alternative existed at scale — the shogunate consistently acted to preserve the Macau–Nagasaki trade because no other partner could deliver comparable quantities of Chinese raw silk on comparable schedules. Ieyasu's 1611 decision to accept the status quo ante bellum, rather than impose punitive terms on a party with no leverage, was the defining commercial decision of the decade. Had he chosen otherwise, the Portuguese presence in Japan might have ended in 1611 rather than 1639.

The second is the progressive erosion of Portuguese commercial autonomy. The pancada tightened its grip decisively — first through buyer-side collusion, then through the 1621 extension to manufactured goods. Spanish competition from Manila, Dutch supply from the VOC's new Asian factories, and the Japanese red-seal ships themselves as minor competitors all shifted pricing leverage away from the Portuguese. By 1621, the Portuguese were still the largest single supplier, but no longer the only one, and every complaint they filed about prices was filed against a backdrop of diminishing irreplaceability.

The third is the remarkable Portuguese capacity for operational adaptation. The abandonment of the carrack in 1618 — the end of a fifty-year maritime institution — in favor of the galliot squadron was neither graceful nor ideologically comfortable for the Estado da Índia. The Great Ship was a symbol of Iberian oceanic mastery; the galliot was, frankly, a smuggler's vessel writ large. But faced with the annihilation of the carrack system by VOC predation, Macau made the switch, and the trade survived in its new form for another two decades.

The state papers — the letters of Hasegawa and Honda and Goto and Shimazu and Doi; the shuinjo of 1611 and 1612; the petitions from the Senate of Macau; the replies from Suruga and Edo — are the patient, bureaucratic undertow beneath the more dramatic story of the period. They are not where the violence happened. They are not where the theology happened. They are where the relationship got managed. The age of the great Portuguese improvisation was over. The age of the file, the permit, and the stamped form had begun. And in the long run, the paperwork turned out to be as destructive as the powder magazine.

Sources & Further Reading

Andrade, Tonio, and Xing Hang, eds. Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550–1700. University of Hawai'i Press, 2016. Essential for the maritime and privateering context of the galliot shift and the Anglo-Dutch assault on Iberian shipping.

Boxer, C.R. The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old Japan Trade, 1555–1640. Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1959. Remains the essential reference on the Macau–Nagasaki route; the 1611–1621 decade is treated with exceptional documentary thoroughness, and Boxer's translations of the Soutomaior, Neretti, and 1621 correspondence underpin most subsequent scholarship.

Boxer, C.R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650. University of California Press, 1951. The foundational political and religious context against which the commercial correspondence must be read.

Boxer, C.R. Papers on Portuguese, Dutch and Jesuit Influences in 16th and 17th Century Japan: Writings of Charles Ralph Boxer. Compiled by Michael Moscato. University Publications of America, 1979. Supplementary essays on the diplomatic instruments of the trade, including detailed analysis of the 1611 and 1612 shuinjo.

Clulow, Adam. The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan. Columbia University Press, 2014. The most thorough recent treatment of the VOC-Tokugawa relationship; essential for the Fleet of Defense and the 1621 edict against bahan.

Cooper, Michael. Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China. Weatherhill, 1974. Indispensable for understanding the Jesuit role in pancada negotiations and the commercial-religious entanglement of the period.

Cooper, Michael, ed. They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640. University of California Press, 1965. Firsthand accounts by Portuguese and Jesuit observers of the embassies and negotiations of this decade.

Cryns, Frederik. In the Service of the Shogun: The Real Story of William Adams. Reaktion Books, 2024. For William Adams's role as Ieyasu's go-between during the Santo António arbitration and the broader Protestant-Iberian balancing act of the decade.

Gomes de Solis, Duarte. Discursos sobre los comercios de las dos Indias. Madrid, 1622. Contemporary Portuguese economic critique of the pancada and its effects on Macau's margins; a primary source of unusual candor.

Hesselink, Reinier H. The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560–1640. McFarland, 2016. The commercial and religious dynamics of the Nagasaki–Macau relationship during the decade covered here.

Massarella, Derek. A World Elsewhere: Europe's Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Yale University Press, 1990. Comparative study of European diplomatic strategy toward Japan, with particular attention to the Soutomaior embassy and Macau's diplomatic architecture.

Murdoch, James. A History of Japan, Volume II: During the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse (1542–1651). Kegan Paul, 1925. Although dated in its judgments, Murdoch remains unparalleled for narrative detail on the Soutomaior and Neretti embassies and the individual personalities of the Tokugawa councillors.

Oka, Mihoko. The Namban Trade: Merchants and Missionaries in 16th and 17th Century Japan. Brill, 2021. Groundbreaking treatment of the commercial mechanics of the pancada and the Portuguese-Japanese economic relationship, with extensive use of Japanese-side documentation.

Totman, Conrad. Tokugawa Ieyasu: Shogun. Heian International, 1983. The standard biographical study of Ieyasu's commercial pragmatism and his handling of the Portuguese question in the years following the Madre de Deus affair.