of Japan, having large privileges allowed us, and also that we have at all times held the Castilians in defiance both by sea and land.  I have been informed of these things by the Chinese who come hither, and that the emperor and other great men of China delight to hear accounts of our nation.  I had almost forgotten to mention, that some China merchants lately asked me, if we were allowed to trade with China, whether the king of England would prevent the Hollanders from robbing and spoiling their junks?  Which question was rather doubtful to me, yet I answered that his majesty would take measures to prevent the Hollanders from injuring them.

We have lately had news that a tuffon or tempest has done vast injury at Jedo, a city of Japan as large as London, where the Japanese nobility have very beautiful houses, now mostly destroyed or greatly injured.  The whole city was inundated, and the inhabitants forced to take shelter in the hills; a thing never before heard of.  The palace of the king, which is a stately building in a new fortress, has had all its gilded tiles carried away by a whirlwind, so that none of them could be found.  The pagans attribute this calamity to some charms or conjurations of the Jesuits, who were lately banished:  but the Japanese converts to popery ascribe it to the vengeance of God, as a punishment for having banished these holy men.

We have lately had a great disaster in Cochin-China, to which place we sent a quantity of goods and money, to the value of L730, as it cost in England, under the care of Mr Tempest Peacock and Mr Walter Carwarden, who went as merchants in a Japanese junk, carrying our king’s letters and a handsome present for the king of Cochin-China.  They arrived at the port called Quinham,[59] delivered his majesty’s letters and present, and were entertained with kind words and fair promises.  The Hollanders, seeing that we adventured to that country, would needs do the same, and were at first kindly entertained; but in the end, Mr Peacock and the chief Dutch merchant going ashore one day in the same boat, to receive payment from the king for broad-cloth and other commodities they had sold him, they were treacherously assailed on the water, their boat overset, and both were killed in the water with harpoons, as if they had been fishes, together with their interpreters and other attendants, who were Japanese.  Mr Carwarden being aboard our junk escaped sharing in this massacre, and came away, but neither he nor the junk have ever been since heard of, so that we fear he has been cast away.

[Footnote 59:  Turon is the port of Cochin-China in the present time, and Quinham is unknown in modern geography; perhaps the old name of some island or village at the port or bay of Turon.—­E.]