MacKenzie was well aware that his presence in Japan was illegal before the beginning of July. It is unlikely this technicality caused him any concern. He had been running a tea business in China at Hankow – 600 miles upriver from Shanghai and an area not scheduled to be opened to foreigners until 1861 – an equally illegal operation. MacKenzie was in his fifties and highly experienced in trade in the Far East, an understandable choice of agent by Jardine, Matheson & Co. to establish their giant trading concern in newly opened Nagasaki. It says much for MacKenzie’s courage that by the turn of the year he was arranging his first cargoes to the company’s base in Shanghai.
The first arrivals were well rewarded for their efforts. MacKenzie made a small fortune on the export of seaweed to China and silk to Europe, both ventures arranged through Jardine, Matheson & Co., in the spring of 1859; the trading giant traditionally gave its agents a lot of freedom to work on their own account. MacKenzie, exporting 300 bales of Japanese silk in early 1859, took a third interest in these shipments, investing $26,632 of his own, which netted him a profit of $9536. This amount, earned by MacKenzie in three months, was around twenty times the annual salary of £100 of Glover’s father in Aberdeen at that time.
There were real dangers to contend with in Japan. Anti-foreign fanatics were on the loose and a very nervous British captain carrying a load of 200 tons of Jardine, Matheson’s sugar into Nagasaki in February 1859 recalled:
On my left there was a strong fort bristling with brass guns glittering in the sun; not a soul was to be seen. I was in some doubt to whether they might fire upon me, and send the mast over the side; but no, I was allowed to proceed up the harbour unchallenged.
MacKenzie had found premises to operate from and was well established by the time the first British Consul General to Japan, Rutherford Alcock, stopped off at Nagasaki in June 1859. Alcock was on his way to Edo to establish the British Legation there and noted that weeks still before the official opening date, a dozen Britons were trading in Nagasaki and that fifteen foreign ships were lying at anchor in the harbour.
With Alcock was the first acting British Consul in Nagasaki, C. Pemberton Hodgson. Hodgson was accompanied by his wife and two daughters and his wife’s reminiscences of those days, particularly her first trip ashore, show her dislike of the posting in particular and Japan in general. The Japanese were overcome with curiousity at the female ‘barbarian’ and her children who found themselves surrounded by jostling locals:
I believe I was the first lady who had been seen in the town . . . So the curiosity was excessive and eventually distressing. We got so far that we really did not know what to do, and tried to get into a shop, as I was almost frightened to death . . . poor Eva began crying: but the brutes only laughed the more . . .
The lucky few traders in Nagasaki who had struck it rich tried to keep confidential the profits they were making – 100 to 400 per cent was common – but the secret was soon out. Many adventurers decided to move from the China coast to Japan to cash in.
The new arrivals in the main were disappointed. After the official opening date, trade and profits slumped. The rules of the Treaty were now in force. This meant the arrival of new Treasury Guild officials from Edo. The Guild was a shogun-appointed body with power to control trade. Restrictions on the exchange of money were enforced and the highly profitable barter trade of early 1859 stopped.
Yet there was still enough potential in Japan for MacKenzie to be joined by Glover, then aged twenty-one, on 19 September 1859. The most likely explanation for his arrival in Nagasaki is that Jardine, Matheson sent him from Shanghai to assist MacKenzie. It is possible, too, that MacKenzie had come across him while in China, had been impressed and had later sent for him. Whatever the case, Glover would register himself at the newly established British Consulate in Nagasaki the following month as ‘Clerk etc’ to MacKenzie.
MacKenzie would surely have greeted his young assistant as he disembarked, taking his first steps on the soil of Japan and looking up as so many have done at the lush green hillsides cascading into the ship-filled, bustling harbour. Many of the Westerners arriving in Nagasaki around this time commented on the freshness of the air – especially sweet after the stench of Shanghai. Later Tom would learn that the Japanese collected the town’s sewage nightly and brought it to their farms for fertilising their crops. The two Scots would have walked along the waterfront towards MacKenzie’s Oura office, past the stalls of the yelling fishmongers on which were displayed conger eels and mackerel and all kinds of shellfish. And on past the warehouses stacked with and smelling of tea and rice and soya sauce – Tom would have noted, like so many others, the near-nakedness of the Japanese labourers. Yet it would be wrong to think of Nagasaki at the time as some kind of primitive community. On the contrary, the Japanese houses and buildings, in general, were perfectly adequate. Inside they were spotlessly clean. The people appeared well fed and there was little or no abject poverty to be seen in what appeared to be a well-ordered society.
Already Western-style buildings could be seen when Glover arrived – one was being used by a Dutch engineer, Hendrik Hardes, who had begun to teach the Japanese the rudiments of the shipbuilding trades some years before. There were, too, the Dutch buildings and houses on Dejima, then still a separate artificial island at the north end of the harbour. The foreign settlement at Oura on the south-eastern side of the harbour was beginning to rise, these buildings alien to those of the surrounding Japanese.
Glover would have had a day or two to look round his new base. Nagasaki’s opening had turned the town into a giant market place – a very hot and sticky one, even in mid-September. The port was already known for its pretty girls and their giggling curiosity at the appearance of the tall and fair young Scotsman no doubt attracted Glover.
The streets of the native town were narrow and unpaved and the low-roofed wooden houses unpainted. But like many others, Glover would have been struck by the cleanliness of the people, their houses and their clothing. He would have noticed, too, the complete absence of beggars.
In the back alleys were the stalls of the scissor-grinders and lantern-makers and he would have found umbrellas, ink, incense and spectacles for sale. In the countryside surrounding the town he saw village Japan, where on his approach the children scattered, signalling with their fingers in a circle in front of their eyes. They had been well warned by their mothers to keep clear of the round-eyed ketojin — ‘barbarian’ – who would take them away if they were bad. Late September in Nagasaki is a glorious time of year – the sky is a daily sapphire blue and the breeze blowing in from the bay is cooled by the sea and becomes an almost sensual pleasure as it touches the skin. The land round the town he would have noted was rich in produce. There was rice, maize and millet crowding the small fields and orchards full of apples and oranges and persimmon as well as vineyards heavy with grapes. Among the shrubs there were patches of thistle, recalling for him the countryside surrounding his family home in Scotland.
To escape from the autumn heat he could have climbed the well-worn path to the coolness of the peak of Mount Inasa on the west side of the bay and from there viewed the panorama of Nagasaki below. Far off to the south and west it was just possible to see Takashima among the scattering of other volcanic islands guarding the entrance to the harbour. But before long Glover would have had to get down to work. As MacKenzie’s assistant he wrote his first communication to Jardine, Matheson’s Shanghai office on 22 September 1859, three days after his arrival in Nagasaki.
Glover moved into a house in the Dutch settlement at Dejima on the northern end of the harbour. This fan-shaped island had been built by the Japanese on the waterfront of Nagasaki as a place where select ‘barbarians’ could be observed yet kept under tight control during the centuries of exclusion. Dejima had a single street with Dutch houses on one side and a Dutch ‘factory’ – warehouses – on the other. A sea wall surrounded the island. Glover occupied the second floor of one of the Dutch houses while he looked for a place of his own.
By the time of his arrival, the original bonanza in trade had ended. In the six months following the July opening, MacKenzie could invest only one-third as much of Jardine, Matheson’s funds as he did in the previous four months. There were all kinds of problems for the new MacKenzie/Glover