Richard Cocks (1565–1624) was the head of the British East India Company trading post in Hirado, Japan, between 1613 and 1623, from its creation, and lasting to its closure due to bankruptcy.[1][2]

Life in France

He was baptised on 20 January 1565 at St Chad's, Seighford, Staffordshire, the fifth of the seven children of Robert Cocks of Stallbrook, yeoman, and his wife, Helen. He was apprenticed in London and became a member of the Clothworkers' Company. He moved to Bayonne in Southern France. In 1605, he was recruited by Sir Thomas Wilson as a spy, where he monitored the movements of English Roman Catholic exiles who passed through the region on their way to Spain. After losing a large amount of money to a Portuguese con artist, he was no longer able to pay his English creditors and returned home in disgrace. His reputation at home was ruined and he decided to leave England to start a new life in Japan.[3]

Life in Japan

During his time in Japan, he wrote a very detailed diary, relating the history of the trading post, the situation of Japan at the time, and the activities of English merchants in Japan, among whom was also the English pilot and samurai, retainer to Tokugawa Ieyasu, William Adams, with whom he wrote he had visited the residence of the Imperial Fleet Admiral, under orders from the Shogun, to discuss the possibility, required logistics, and outcome of an invasion of the Spanish Philippines in 1616.[4] By 1618 he had established trade with China and Cambodia.[5] The surviving documents of the trading post (letters, accounts and journals) are a unique source of first-hand accounts of Early Modern Japan through secular Western eyes.[6]

Death at sea

After the trading post was closed in 1623, Cocks sailed for England on the Anne Royal but died and was buried at sea on 27 March 1624 in the southern Indian Ocean.

References

  1. ^ "Cocks, Richard (bap. 1565, d. 1624)", by Anthony Farrington, "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography", Oxford University Press, 2004. <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/47038>.
  2. ^ A World Elsewhere. Europe’s Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Derek Massarella, Yale University Press, 1990.
  3. ^ Milton, Giles (2002). Samurai William: The Adventurer Who Unlocked Japan. Great Britain: Sceptre. pp. 207–208. ISBN 0-340-79468-2.
  4. ^ Diary of Richard Cocks, with preface by N. Murakami (1899, reprinted from the Hakluyt Society ed. 1883)
  5. ^ Bassett, D. K. “The Trade of the English East India Company in Cambodia, 1651-1656.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 1/2, 1962, pp. 35–61. JSTOR website Retrieved 23 Oct. 2023.
  6. ^ The English Factory in Japan 1613-1623, ed. by Anthony Farrington, British Library, 1991.

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