INTRODUCTION

My own interest in the Bonin Islands and their inhabitants dates from the year 1894. A special request had been made to Bishop Bickersteth, then the English Bishop in Tokyo, that he would send a clergyman to visit the English-speaking settlers on the islands. It fell to my lot to go, and sixteen times, at least, I have made the voyage since. One English clergyman only had previously visited the islands, the Rev. F. B. Plummer of the S.P.G., in the early spring of 1877. He also had gone there to acquaint himself with the condition of the English-speaking settlers, who were the self-governing, and that meant practically the ungoverned, inhabitants of the islands before they were formally taken possession of by the Japanese at the close of the year 1875. Who these settlers were; when and how for the most part they came to the islands; how they lived and how they got on together ; and what intercourse they had with the world outside, it is the purpose of the present volume to recount. It is a remarkable history and not a very easy one to tell, for settlers came to the islands, now one and now another; some stayed on, some left ; some came back again and not one of them but had had his own strange life of adventure. I have hardly attempted to do more than put together in chronological sequence the various records existing, supplemented by such information as I and others have been able to elicit from the settlers themselves.

The islands, which were then uninhabited, had been discovered by Captain Beechey, H.M.S. Blossom, in the year 1827, and the first settlers came to the islands, as we shall see, from the Sandwich Islands in the year 1830. It had been my original purpose to have carried the history on from that date to the present time--in fact, to have passed in review the earlier years as briefly as possible and to have made my volume largely one of personal narrative and of our mission work on the islands in which it has been my privilege to bear a leading part.

But I was soon led to change my purpose, and the considerations that influenced me to deal only with the earlier period in the present volume were these: (1) that the history fell into two very clear divisions, embracing respectively the years previous to, and the years that followed the Japanese occupation ; (2) that much interesting matter have had to be left out if I had been under the necessity of condensing; (3) that one figure stood prominently out in the earlier period, that of Nathaniel Savory, a citizen of the United States, who being one of the original settlers on the main island made it his permanent home until his death in 1874; (4) that it, therefore, gave a unity to the story of that early period to make Nathaniel Savory himself the subject of it; and finally, (5) that the doing this gave fuller justification for including in the volume the bulk of Nathaniel Savory's letters. For the publication of these letters alone I feel sure that I shall be repaid by the gratitude of all who read them. They give us an insight, hardly to be gained elsewhere, or more vividly, into the home life in New England in the early part of the nineteenth century; into the character and lives of seafaring captains masters of whalers and of small trading vessels. They take us into the society of storekeepers and business agents in such places as Honolulu and Manila; they tell us of the fair or failing prospects of trade ; of strange family matters; of feuds and rogueries; and reveal to us how men of a type we are familiar with in the mixed community of trading ports commented on the events of the day and in the world going on around them. Every letter, in fact, has some peculiar interest of its own, and I have been content as a rule to let them follow one another in order of date, without any attempt to connect or elucidate them.

And what causes these letters to be so unique is that they were written to one cut off from the ordinary means of communication and to whom consequently the receiving of a letter meant a great deal. I can well imagine, after a friendly evening spent together, how the storekeeper host would say to our seafaring captain--always an important personage and a welcome guest-- “Right, Captain; then if you are going out on Thursday I will be sure to let you have that letter to our friend Nathaniel at latest by Wednesday night " –and of that letter, just as it was written, it has come to us now unexpectedly to be the readers.

What the published records are from which I have drawn or made extracts will appear in the course of the narrative. The fullest information on the islands is contained in a paper read before the Asiatic Society of Japan by Mr. Russell Robertson, British Consul of Yokohama, on March 15, 1876. Another diligent collector of information has been my friend and fellow-worker, Archdeacon King, who has visited the islands some three or four times, and from whose manuscripts I have freely drawn. I have also had access to the archives of the British Embassy. My special acknowledgments for invaluable help given in collating manuscripts and for persevering researches on many points are due to Mrs. E. O. Gordon, daughter of Dean Buckland (after whom one of the islands in the Bonin Group was named by Captain Beechey), who is the author of the "Life of Dean Buckland," and of "St. George the Champion of Christendom." To Miss Black of Tokyo, who has also been a visitor to the islands with her widowed mother, and from whose graphic story of her visit (not published), I have given a short extract in Chapter X, I am also greatly indebted for much kindly help.