Scottish Samurai. Alexander McKay
Legation established control of the situation, killing one more of the attackers. The rest apparently escaped.
In a gory finish to his account of the night, Oliphant tells of returning to his darkened room exhausted and feeling in the blood beneath his feet a human eye. A body lay in the centre of his room, headless. Oliphant later discovered the missing head beneath his sideboard.
The attack on the British Legation was sensational and the news spread quickly through the Treaty ports, sending a shock wave through Nagasaki’s foreign settlement. The British residents in particular were now casting nervous glances over their shoulders. If not even the heavily guarded British Legation was safe from attack, what chance had the traders in far-off Nagasaki?
Nagasaki’s newspaper had the standard answer of the day to the problems. Gunboat diplomacy was required to bring the Japanese into line: ‘quick, sharp, decisive measures can no longer be abstained from’. This may well have been true but it was also perhaps the reaction the hotheads were hoping to provoke.
The British Consul in Yokohama tried to cool things down. F. Howard Vyse, in an official notification to British subjects in Japan the day following the attack, wrote:
The undersigned requests that British subjects will be careful, how they walk about during the next week, . . . and to endeavour to remain at home during the evening.
Vyse in his note went on to plead for calm and added that a Royal Navy warship, HMS Ringdove, was on its way.
The upheavals and dangers in the north did not appear to unduly upset Glover. The majority of the British traders in Nagasaki were young – seven out of the ten registered at the Consulate were under twenty-five in mid-1861 – and they seem to have carried on with their businesses regardless.
A real community was forming in the Japanese port. Japan’s first municipal council was elected in Nagasaki that year and two Britons, William Alt and John Major, served on it with the American, Franklin Field. A sailing regatta was scheduled for the late summer and there were organised picnics and amateur dramatics as well as the inevitable British Club. A church and hospital were also planned for the foreigners now numbering around one hundred. Their enclave clinging to the eastern edge of Nagasaki harbour was as near a Western village as could be managed in the circumstances.
Yet perhaps the tensions of living in Nagasaki did surface at times – import returns indicated that plenty of drinking went on. There was the mandatory four or five hours’ daily slog in the heat of the office for Glover, trying to keep his employers in Shanghai happy and at the same time keep up the perpetual search for the big breakthrough of his own. Politics in Japan were a powder keg, ready to blow up at any time, and if civil war erupted the foreigners were unwillingly in the front line. It would have been easy to unwind with a couple of drinks in the Club on the way home, perhaps attend a dinner party at a friend’s where a few more could be sunk and, occasionally, finish the evening by crossing the bridges into a certain house in Maruyama.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONTACT WITH RENEGADES
Glover’s first independent business venture had been in the export of Japanese tea. Tea, silk and, later, coal would be Japan’s major money-earners in its early years after opening. Tom became involved in all three.
Using experienced Chinese supervisors he had established his own tea business by August 1861. Japan exported almost 4500 tons of tea in the 1861 season and although half of this amount went through Nagasaki, it was not quite the lucrative trade Glover had imagined.
Tea was planted on the hillsides of Japan’s interior on land unsuitable for rice and the work of planting and picking was done mostly by the women and children of the farms. It was a part-time occupation and the tea was dried after picking by the farm women over home-made fires. Drying was necessary for the long voyages to Europe or the United States, as too much moisture left in the tea would cause mould and ruin the cargo. The Japanese drying method was simply not good enough and the foreigners were banned from leaving the Treaty ports to supervise and organise the operation themselves. The tea could be bought only through Japanese agents.
Glover got round this by establishing a tea refiring plant in Nagasaki in August 1861 – a building where the tea could be properly dried and prepared for a long voyage – this solved the problem but added expense. A long and not very successful struggle with the tea business had begun for Glover.
A second Glover brother reached Nagasaki that same month. Tom had gone to Shanghai and returned to Nagasaki with his older brother, James, arriving off the Japanese port on the night of 7 August 1861. They arrived on the Gharra and high winds kept their ship from getting into Nagasaki harbour that night. James Glover’s photographs show him to be tall, slim and dark, thick hair stiffly parted, physically a complete contrast to his younger brother.
Accompanying the two Glover brothers on the Gharra was Edward Harrison, another young China-based trader being sent to Nagasaki as an agent for a British firm, Blain, Tate & Co. The trio waited until the following day for the winds to abate enough for their ship to drop anchor and for them to be rowed ashore. Despite all the problems confronting his tea business, Tom Glover must have had some hopes for success in bringing over his brother to join him.
Jardine, Matheson were still a little cautious of their young agent. In an earlier letter they had told him that they were interested only in establishing a sound trade – not in speculative adventures. How much heed to this warning Tom took is not known but the company rapped his knuckles in a letter of 10 September, saying:
Your draft for $2000 has been presented & honored – we should, however, beg you to note that we wish to be advised beforehand when you are in want of funds, for we make it a rule not to accept drafts unless permission to draw on us has been granted.
Clearly the headstrong Glover, presumably still resident in the lower half of the company’s warehouse/office complex on the Nagasaki waterfront during the building of his bungalow on the hill, would have to be held on a tight rein.
The planned regatta went ahead on schedule at the end of September. The winners of the various races were not published on that occasion but over the years the Glover brothers did well in what became an annual event at the port. Their training in their father’s Coastguard boats in the rough of the North Sea was evident.
Early in October Glover sent off a muster of tea samples to Shanghai – ‘tea pressed and fired in our own establishment’. His ‘establishment’ at Oura employed several hundred Japanese women heating, packing and sorting teas. They would have been supervised by a Chinese who separated and graded and generally ran the show. The sound of crying babies strapped to their mothers’ backs, the singing women, the shouting Chinese and the clattering of hundreds of iron heating pans were joined with the aroma of roasting tea and a mixture of all of this wafted out on to the streets of Oura – an unforgettable memory for visitors to the Treaty ports at that time.
Despite the industry and employment Glover’s tea business had brought to Nagasaki, costs remained high and profits low and by the beginning of 1862 he was forced to look at other possibilities of making money. He was not short of ideas.
It was now necessary for him to bring in like-minded people to his organisation. With Francis A. Groom, he founded Glover & Co. on 1 February 1862. Groom had been a partner in Robert Arnold’s firm in the port and his move to Glover would indicate that he was impressed by the ambitions of the young Scot.
Jim Glover and Edward Harrison, who would specialise in property management, became the third and fourth partners in Glover & Co. later that year. Harrison had arrived in Nagasaki with Jim the previous August and, like the Glover boys and Frank Groom, was young and bright and prepared to have a go.
Even with the new talent to help, Glover’s tea business stubbornly refused to pick up. The company were not happy with his product or with the price he was charging. But with his usual optimism he was sure he could reduce production costs once his plant was fully utilised and a temporary shortage of tea pickers and inspectors was over. Tom’s enthusiasm seems to have won over the hardheads in Shanghai