Sublime

all that forenoon Jack hurried up and down the line in his barge, dispensing officers, gunners, discreet advice and encouragement, and stores of affability. This affability was rarely forced, for most of the captains were right seamen, and given their fiery commodore’s strong lead they set to with a determination that made Jack love them.

In the South China Sea or near Japan, the Portuguese were much more cautious. Here they found a niche as long-distance traders, convenient middlemen for a Ming Empire that disliked overseas activity by its own subjects and refused direct commercial relations with Japan.

Mr Smith, a sea-officer of the small, trim, brisk, round-headed, portwine kind, once shipmates with Stephen in the Lively and now second in the Goliath, rode by on a camel, with his legs folded negligently over the creature’s neck to the manner born:

Two days after Harris’s arrival in Shimoda, Jan Hendrik Donker Curtius (1813–1879), formerly the chief merchant of the Dutch trading station on Deshima but now the Netherlands government commissioner, sent (by way of the Nagasaki magistrate) a letter to the shogunate in which he urged that the policy of the closed country be abandoned.

Harris left Shimoda on November 23, 1857, accompanied by his Dutch interpreter, Henry Heusken,20 and escorted by a great many soldiers provided by the shogunate, anxious to ensure that no mishap occur on the way. In the number of soldiers, the heralds, and in many other respects, it was much like a daimyo’s procession. Harris wrote in his diary, “T

Their romance with the Yankee dollar,

George Melville would serve as the Jeannette’s engineer. Said to be distantly related to the great author, Melville was an improvisational genius with machines—a greasy-fingered savant who seemed most at home among thumping boilers and sharp blasts of steam. The engineer, thirty-eight years old, had a booming voice, a stout physique, and an enormou