written with their own hands to venture in the pretended voyage to the East Indies,” 22 Sept. 1599, he is described as a grocer and subscribes £200.[17] He himself tells us (ii. 317) that, besides being a member of “this Right Honourable and Right Worshipful Society or Company which trade to the East Indies,” he belonged to the Merchants Adventurers and was “made free of the old Hanse”, and he was also a member of the Clothworkers’ Company. A certain Richard Cocks who sailed with Frobisher in his third voyage to Meta Incognita, in 1578, and who was distinguished as “the first to sail in among the ice”, was probably a relative.[18] From 1603 to 1608 he lived at Bayonne, no doubt as a merchant. Many news-letters written by him from thence are preserved in the Public Record Office, addressed to Sir Thomas Wilson, secretary to Lord Treasurer Salisbury. From this we may infer that Sir Thomas was Cocks’s patron. The correspondence was continued when Cocks was in Japan; and some of his letters which dwelt on the wonders of the country were sent to King James to read, who declared them to contain “the loudest lies that he had ever heard.” Wilson pronounces the writer to be, though not lettered, a man of honesty, years, and judgment.[19] As Cocks becomes well known to us as we read his diary, we will leave him for the present.

Of the other members of the factory, two soon disappeared from the scene. Tempest Peacock and Walter Carwarden went on a trading venture to Cochinchina, and, as we shall see, never returned. Richard Wickham appears to have been in more independent circumstances than the rest. Even before Saris’s departure he began to give trouble, as his time of agreement with the Company had nearly expired and he bargained for higher wages. He resigned his place and left Japan early in 1618, and died soon after at Jacatra in Java, worth, it was said, £5,000 or £6,000. William Eaton and Edmund Sayers[20] were with the factory from first to last. The former is called by Cocks “my countryman”, probably meaning that they were natives of the same place or district. William Nealson was turbulent and quarrelsome, particularly when drink put him into his “fustian fumes”. He died in March, 1620, “being wasted away with a consumption.” After reading of their constant bickerings, one smiles to find that he made Cocks his heir; and, piously adds Cocks, “if God had called me in his mercy before Mr. Nealson, then had he had as much of mine” (ii. 321).

When Adams accompanied Saris to court, he had at length got leave from Iyéyasu to visit his native land. Why he did not choose to sail in the Clove, as he at first intended, was, he himself tells us, because of “some discourtesies offered me by the general.” In fact, Saris seems to have disagreed with him on several points, and did not treat him generously. But, perhaps, a better reason for his stay was that which Cocks gives: “that he was loth to return to his country a beggar”; for, although Iyéyasu had given him an estate of some extent, he was ill provided with money. And yet another and nobler reason may have influenced him. “In my simple judgment,” he says in one of his letters, “if the north-west passage be ever discovered, it will be discovered by this way of Japan”;[21] and Cocks adds, “Mr. Adams is of the opinion that, if ever the north-east or north-west passages be found out, it must be from these parts, and offereth his best services therein, the Emperor promising his best furtherance with men or letters of recommendation to all princes, and hath entrance already into an island called Yedzo, which is thought to be rather some part of the continent of Tartaria” (ii. 258). So Adams took service with the Company, after some haggling over the amount of his wages, for two years;[22] and constantly appears in the course of the diary in various employments. Cocks was evidently a little afraid of him, and, while praising him to the Company as “tractable and willing to do your Worships the best service he may,” he cautions Wickham to “have a due care to give Capt. Adams content, which you may easily do if you use him with kind speeches and fall not into terms with him upon any argument. I am persuaded,” he adds, “I could live with him seven years before any extraordinary speeches should happen betwixt us.” Our Cocks doth protest too much. Adams’s friendliness to his old comrades the Dutch is ever a thorn in the side of the cape-merchant: “I cannot choose but note it down that both I myself and all the rest of our nation do see that he is much more friend to the Dutch than to the Englishmen, which are his own countrymen, God forgive him.” But, in spite of occasional outbursts of this nature, they lived generally on friendly terms, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Cocks’s sorrow when his comrade died.

Two others joined the factory at a later date. John Osterwick, of Dutch descent and a kinsman of Wickham, came out in 1615 and remained to the end. Richard Hudson, whom Cocks in 1617 calls a boy, and who had lost father and brother in the search for the north-west passage, was employed as an unattached servant at the factory.

Saris sailed from Japan on the 5th of December, 1613. The merchandise which stocked the factory consisted chiefly of broad cloth and woollen and cotton piece goods; also of Bantam pepper, gunpowder, lead, tin, etc. Its total value was about £5,650. The Company was sanguine enough, on Saris’s representation, to hope for such success in the Japan trade, as to be able to export silver in sufficient quantity to maintain their Indian trade. But Saris’s estimate of the mercantile prospects was based on false premises. When he arrived, the prices of imports were extraordinarily high; but then the Dutch had the market nearly all to themselves, and the demand for European goods was almost too limited to give room for competition. Steel and lead alone among metals, and silk among materials, sold readily. Saris indeed had tried to arrange with the Dutch factor on a profitable price, at which both nations should sell their cloth; but the latter immediately “shipped away great store of cloth to divers islands, rating them at base prices that he might procure the more speedy despatch of his own, and glut the place before the coming of ours.”[23] But even apart from Dutch competition, cloth was not a favourite article of trade in Japan. Saris soon found that the natives were backward in buying, especially when