Adams The Pilot

William Adams, a Kentish man, is presumed to have been the first Englishman to have lived in Japan, although C.R. Boxer came across a tantalising yet fleeting reference to a Scottish pilot in Portuguese service in the islands around Formosa some years before Adams' arrival in Japan.

During his years in Japan, Adams acted as a an occasional diplomatic agent for Tokugawa Ieyasu, on whose orders he built two European-style ships, as well as working on his own behalf as a commercial agent.

William Corr's unswervingly precise biography encompasses Adams' times no less than the man himself and is a valuable contribution to Anglo-Japanese scholarship.