My first cruise as a midshipman in the navy of the United States began a short month too late for me to share in the honors of the Mexican War. In other words, I came in at the foot of the service, with all the grades above me fresh-stocked with comparatively young and vigorous officers. As a consequence, the rate of promotion was so slow that the Summer of 1851 found me, at the age of twenty-four, still a middie, with my lieutenancy ever receding, like a will-o’-the-wisp, into the future.

Had I chosen a naval career through necessity, I might have continued to endure. But to the equal though younger heir of one of the largest plantations in South Carolina, the pay of even a post captain would have been of small concern. It is, therefore, hardly necessary to add that I had been lured into the service by the hope of winning fame and glory. That my choice should have fallen upon the navy rather than the army may have been due to the impulse of heredity. According to family traditions and records, one of my ancestors was the famous English seaman Will Adams, who served Queen Elizabeth in the glorious fight against the Spanish Armada and afterwards piloted a Dutch ship through the dangerous Straits of Magellan and across the vast unchartered expanse of the Pacific to the mysterious island empire, then known as Cipango or Zipangu.

History itself verifies that wonderful voyage and the still more wonderful fact of my ancestor’s life among the Japanese as one of the nobles and chief counsellors of the great Emperor Iyeyasu. So highly was the advice of the bold Englishman esteemed by the Emperor that he was never permitted to return home. For many years he dwelt honorably among that most peculiar of Oriental peoples, aiding freely the few English and Dutch who ventured into the remote Eastern seas. He had aided even the fanatical Portuguese and Spaniards, who, upon his arrival, had sought to have him and his handful of sick and starving shipmates executed as pirates. So it was he lived and died a Japanese noble, and was buried with all honor.

With the blood of such a man in my veins, it is not strange that I turned to the sea. Yet it is no less strange that three years in the service should bring me to an utter weariness of the dull naval routine. Notable as were the achievements of our navy throughout the world in respect to exploration and other peaceful triumphs, it has ever surprised me that in the absence of war and promotion I should have lingered so long in my inferior position.

In war the humiliation of servitude to seniority may be thrust from thought by the hope of winning superior rank through merit. Deprived of this opportunity, I could not but chafe under my galling subjection to the commands of men never more than my equals in social rank and far too often my inferiors.

The climax came after a year on the China Station, to which I had obtained an assignment in the hope of renewed action against the arrogant Celestials. Disappointed in this, and depressed by a severe spell of fever contracted at Honkong, I resigned the service at Shanghai, and took passage for New York, by way of San Francisco and the Horn, on the American clipper Sea Flight.

We cleared for the Sandwich Islands August the twenty-first, 1851. The second noon found us safe across the treacherous bars of the Yangtse-Kiang and headed out across the Eastern Sea, the southwest monsoon bowling us along at a round twelve knots. The double lassitude of my convalescence and the season had rendered me too indifferent to inquire about my fellow-passengers. We were well under way before I learned that, aside from the officers and crew, I was the only person aboard ship. In view of the voyage of from five to six months’ duration which lay before me, this discovery roused me to the point of observing the characters of the skipper and his mates. Much to my chagrin, I found that all were Yankees of the most pronounced nasal type.

As a late naval officer no less than as a Southern gentleman, I could not humble myself to social intercourse with the bucko mates. Fortunately Captain Downing was somewhat less unbearable, and had the good taste to share my interest in the mysterious islands of Japan, as well as my detestation of China. Even as the low, dreary coast of Kiangsu faded from view in our wake, we attained to a cordial exchange of congratulations over the fact that we were at last quit of the filth and fantasies of the Celestial Empire.

As we wheeled about from the last glance astern, Downing pointed over the side with a jerk of his thumb. “Look at that dirty flood, Mr. Adams. Just like a China river to try to turn the whole sea China yellow! Conceited as John Chinaman himself!”

“Give the devil his due,” I drawled. “Biggest nation on earth, and close upon the biggest river.”

“Aye, and thank Providence, every last one of their three hundred million pigtails lie abaft my taffrail, and every drop of that foul flood soon to lose itself in clean blue water!” He stared ahead, combing his fingers through his bushy whiskers, his shrewd eyes twinkling with satisfaction. “Aye! blue water—the whole breadth of the Pacific before us, and Asia astern.”

“Not all Asia,” I corrected. “We have yet to clear the Loo Choos.”

“The Loo Choos,” he repeated. “Queer people, I guess. They are said to be a kind of Chinamen.”

“It’s hard to tell,” I replied. “They may be Chinese. Yet some say the islands are subject to Japan.”

“To Japan? Then they’ve got good reason to be queer!” He paced across the deck and back, his jaw set and eyes keen with sudden resolve. “By ginger, I’ll do it this passage, sir, danged if I won’t! I’ve been wanting to see something of the Japanese islands ever since I came out to the China seas as a cabin-boy, and that’s fifty years gone.”

“You’d run out of your course for a glimpse of the Japanese coast?” I exclaimed, no less incredulous than delighted.

“More than a glimpse, Mr. Adams. Van Diemen Strait is a shorter course than the Loo Choo passage, and with this weather—”

“Midst of the typhoon season,” I cut in with purposeful superciliousness of tone.

The captain of a clipper is as sensitive to any aspersions on his seamanship as the grayest master of navigation in the navy. Downing bit snappily. “Typhoon be damned! I navigated a whaler through uncharted seas twenty odd years, and never lost my ship. I’ll take the Sea Flight through Van Diemen Strait, blow or calm, sir.”

“No doubt,” I murmured with ambiguous suavity.

He scowled, puzzled at my smile. “You naval officers! Commanded my first ship before you were born—before I had need of a razor. What’s more, I’m third owner in this clipper, and I’ve discretion over my course. The skipper who carries the first cargo out of a Japanese port is going to get the cream, and I’ve an idee the Japs are loosening up a bit. I’m going to put into Kagoshima Bay, where the old Morrison tried to land the castaway Japs in ’thirty-seven.”

“She was fired upon most savagely by the soldiers of the Prince of Satsuma,” I replied. “Why not try Nagasaki?”

“Nagasaki?—Deshima!” he rumbled. “I’m no Dutchman or yellow Chinee, to be treated like a dog. What’s more, it’s too far up the west coast. No! I’ll chance Kagoshima. That Satsuma king or mandarin, whatever he is, may have changed his mind since the Morrison, or there may be a new one now, with more liberal idees.”

“Since you’re resolved upon it, skipper, I must confess I have reasons of my own to be pleased with your plan,” I said, and at his interested glance, I told him somewhat in detail of my daring ancestor Will Adams, the first Englishman ever to reach the Land of the Rising Sun and the only European ever made a Japanese noble.

“H’m. Married a Japanese wife, and left children by her,” commented Downing, and he grinned broadly. “I must ask leave for you to land and look up your heathen kin.”

“You forget yourself, sir,” I caught him up. “Be kind enough hereafter to refrain from impertinence when speaking of persons related to me.”

He stared in astonishment. “Well, I’ll be durned! Two hundred years and more since your forefather died, you said—”

“None the less,” I insisted sharply, “my cousins are my cousins, sir. If there are any of my ancestor’s Japanese descendants now living, they are related to me, however remote may be the degree. Therefore they are entitled to be spoken of with respect.”

“Well, I’ll swan!” he muttered. “No offence, Mr. Adams.”

I bowed my acceptance of his uncouth apology, but maintained my dignity. “As I have said, sir, my ancestor was ennobled by the great Emperor Iyeyasu. Heathen or not, rest assured that his Japanese descendants, if any survive, are at the least gentlefolk.”

“No doubt, no doubt,” he grunted. “You’ll soon have a chance to inquire. I’m going to take my ship up Kagoshima Bay, fog, shine, or blow.”

He turned on his heel, and ordered the helmsman to put the ship’s head due east. I went below in a glow of pleasant anticipation. There was no mistaking the look in Downing’s face. Nothing could now shake his stubborn resolve. I was to see the mysterious Cipango of Marco Polo and Mendez Pinto, the Iappan of my ancestor,—the land that for almost two and a half centuries had shut itself in from all communication with the wide world other than through the severely restricted trade with the Dutch and Chinese at Nagasaki.