native historians. Heartrending is the narrative of these men who
studied, who taught, who examined, who sifted the mountains of chaff in
the native literature and writings, who made long journeys on foot all
over the country, who furtively travelled in Korea and China, who
boarded Dutch and Russian vessels, who secretly read forbidden books,
who tried to improve their country and their people. These men saw that
their country was falling behind not only the nations of the West, but,
as it seemed to them, even the nations of the East. They felt that
radical changes were necessary in order to reform the awful poverty,
disease, licentiousness, national weakness, decay of bodily powers, and
the creeping paralysis of the Samurai intellect and spirit. How they
were ostracized, persecuted, put under ban, hounded by the spies, thrown
into prison; how they died of starvation or of disease; how they were
beheaded, crucified, or compelled to commit _hara-kiri_; how their books
were purged by the censors, or put under ban or destroyed,[13] and their
maps, writings and plates burned, has not yet been told. It is a story
that, when fully narrated, will make a volume of extraordinary interest.
It is a story which both Christian and human interests challenge some
native author to tell. During all this time, but especially during the
first half of the nineteenth century, there was one steady goal to which
the aspiring student ever kept his faith, and to which his feet tended.
There was one place of pilgrimage, toward which the sons of the morning
moved, and which, despite the spy and the informer and the vigilance of
governors, fed their spirits, and whence they carried the sacred fire,
or bore the seed whose harvest we now see. That goal of the pilgrim band
was Nagasaki, and the place where the light burned and the sacred flames
were kindled was Déshima. The men who helped to make true patriots,
daring thinkers, inquirers after truth, bringers in of a better time,
yes, and even Christians and preachers of the good news of God, were
these Dutchmen of Déshima.