Ranald MacDonald in Nagasaki

Abstract

While he was being confined in the prison“Daihi-an”in Nagasaki, Ranald MacDonald jotted down the names of the fourteen interpreters on a sheet of Japanese paper. He also wrote down on the other side of the same sheet of paper the names of“oyakunin”, or the soldiers who guarded the prison where he was confiend. The existence of such kind of paper on which the names of the guards are written has been well-known in Japan, but I am afraid each name of the guards has not been known in our country so far. The Japanese paper in question is now at the Provincial Archives of British Columbia, Victoria, Canada, and it is my aim to clarify here the names of those guards, though it is a little difficult to decipher in places what MacDonald wrote since he wrote in such a peculiar longhand of his own.MacDonald's listing of the soldiers at“Daihi-an”includes twenty-eight names, among which one, the name of the twenty-eighth soldier, is totally unrecognizable. Ehara Matagero, the first of the listing, is the very captain whose“head was chopped off”because he brought five women including his wife and daughter into the prison so that they could see MacDonald. He is also the guard for whom MacDonald feels very sorry when he hears that“his head was chopped off”. And one can also see from the paper that the name of the captain's wife is Yanagawa. MacDonald learned Japanese words and colloquial expressions more from these guards than from the interpreters. And the fact that MacDonald wrote the names of as many as twenty-eight guards testifies of course that he was on a very friendly terms with them.