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　　When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil

War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost

its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to “Old Japan,” with

its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and

perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a

more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in

the course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to an

international power. This great wave of historical and cultural

reciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified during

the late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-life

personalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures prompted

pilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific.

In The Great Wave, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knit

group of nineteenth-century travelers—connoisseurs, collectors, and

scientists—who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving Old

Japan. As Benfey writes, “A sense of urgency impelled them, for

they were convinced—Darwinians that they were—that their quarry was

on the verge of extinction.”

These travelers include Herman Melville, whose Pequod is

“shadowed by hostile and mysterious Japan”; the historian Henry

Adams and the artist John La Farge, who go to Japan on an

art-collecting trip and find exotic adventures; Lafcadio Hearn, who

marries a samurai’s daughter and becomes Japan’s preeminent

spokesman in the West; Mabel Loomis Todd, the first woman to climb

Mt. Fuji; Edward Sylvester Morse, who becomes the world’s leading

expert on both Japanese marine life and Japanese architecture; the

astronomer Percival Lowell, who spends ten years in the East and

writes seminal works on Japanese culture before turning his

restless attention to life on Mars; and President (and judo

enthusiast) Theodore Roosevelt. As well, we learn of famous

Easterners come West, including Kakuzo Okakura, whose The Book of

Tea became a cult favorite, and Shuzo Kuki, a leading philosopher

of his time, who studied with Heidegger and tutored Sartre.

Finally, as Benfey writes, his meditation on cultural identity

“seeks to capture a shared mood in both the Gilded Age and the

Meiji Era, amid superficial promise and prosperity, of an

overmastering sense of precariousness and impending peril.”

From the Hardcover edition.

)HTROOU~TIOH:  THE  MAp

THE FLOATING WORLD

(Herman Melville and John Manjiro)

A COLLECTOR OF SEASHELLS

(Edward Sylvester Morse)

THE BDSTON TEA PARTY

(Kakuzo Okakuro and Isabella Gardner)

A  SEASON  OF  NIRVANA

(Henry'Adams and John La Farge)

FALLING WATER

(Henry Adams and John La Farge)

MESSAGES FROM MARS

(Perdval Lowell and Mabel Lobmis,Todd)

THE MOUNTAIN OF SKULLS

(Lafcadio Hearn and Mary Fenollosa)

THE JUDO ROOM

(Theodore Roosevelt and William Sturgis Bigelow)

EPILOGUE: CIRCA 1913: THE ESCAPE FROM TIME

ACKNOWLEDGMENT5

NOTE5

INDEX

　　Christopher Benfey teaches literature at Mount Holyoke

College, where he is co-director of the Weissman Center for

Leadership. Benfey is the author of Emily Dickinson and the Problem

of Others, The Double Life of Stephen Crane, and Degas in New

Orleans. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife and two

sons.

　　From the Hardcover edition.

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　　Chapter 1

　　THE FLOATING WORLD

　　If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever

　　to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone

　　to whom the credit will be due;

　　for already she is on the threshold.

　　-herman melville, moby-dick (1851)

　　Imagine the following scenario. Two fatherless boys on opposite

sides of the earth take to the sea within days of each other, in

search of adventure and a livelihood. Their paths cross on an

archipelago in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where they

encounter some of the same helpers, and hinderers. One arrives

after years of wandering at the other's port of departure. The

other falls just short but writes an extraordinary book that

completes the journey. One deserts a whaling ship while the other

is rescued by one. One discovers the joys of savage life while the

other discovers the ambiguous joys of civilization. Each dreams of

"opening" the other's country, and each is changed utterly in the

process; their reward is gloom and isolation. Now, let us give

these lost boys and Pacific drifters names and dates.

　　I. The May Basket

　　During the waning hours of a warm spring evening in 1843, in the

coastal

　　village of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, sixteen-year-old John Mung

hung a May basket on the knocker of his classmate Catherine Terry's

door. A note was hidden among the buttercups:

　　Tis in the chilly night

　　A basket you've got hung.

　　Get up, strike a light!

　　And see me run

　　But no take chase me.

　　Mung, according to age-old New England custom, ran off into the

enveloping night-anonymous except for that telltale fifth line.

Catherine Terry had reason to believe that the basket was "hung" by

none other than John Mung, whom on occasion she had smiled at

demurely during recess.

　　One Sunday morning, during that same spring of 1843, John Mung

sat in Captain Whitfield's pew in the Fairhaven Congregational

Church. After the service one of the elders of the church

approached Captain Whitfield and quietly suggested that Mung should

sit in the section reserved for escaped slaves. Mung was

distracting the other worshipers, the elder explained, and would be

more at home among the Negroes in the balcony.

　　Two years earlier John Mung had no idea that the town of

Fairhaven, Massachusetts, existed. He had never heard of the United

States or of the English language. Rituals such as May baskets and

the Christian Mass would have seemed to him impossibly foreign, and

remote. In fact, no one by the name of John Mung existed in 1841.

Call him Manjiro instead.

　　On January 5, 1841, in the Year of the Ox, the boy Manjiro,

fourteen years old, boarded a boat with four other fishermen on the

coast of Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands of Japan.

Manjiro, who lived with his mother in the tiny village of

Nakanohama, had wandered up the coast in search of work. Captain

Fudenjo of the village of Usa, near Tosa, had found Manjiro asleep

on the sand and asked him to join his crew: his two brothers,

Jusuke and Goemon, and another fisherman called Toraemon. In the

fixed feudal order of Old Japan, peasants like Manjiro had only one

name, and one life to look forward to. Like his father, who died

when Manjiro was nine, and his grandfather and great-grandfather

back into the mists of time, Manjiro would be a fisherman. What

knocked him loose from this order established across millennia was

a storm-the "great wind" called the typhoon.

　　Fudenjo's twenty-four-foot boat with a square sail, like all

boats made in Japan, was equipped to hug the shore-to go farther

out was strictly against the national laws and punishable by death.

The nets came up empty for two days. On the third the crew suddenly

found themselves in a school of mackerel. In their excitement they

barely noticed that the wind-whipped waves had risen. They tugged

hurriedly at the heavily laden nets, but by the time they had

retrieved them the storm was in full force. Their efforts to gain

control of the boat led to disaster; the sails were torn and the

rudder split in two. Tempest-tossed, they watched helplessly as

they drifted farther and farther out to sea. The next morning the

color of the sea, dark indigo, confirmed their worst fears. They

were caught in the Kuroshio, or Black Current, a Pacific

counterpart of the Gulf Stream. The best they could hope for was an

island in their path. For these five superstitious and illiterate

men, the sea was boundless-until somewhere, without warning, one

dropped off the edge. Through eight days of terror, they drifted in

the ice-cold water, living on raw fish and on icicles plucked from

the ruined rigging.

　　Suddenly birds wheeled on the horizon-first just a few like

children's kites entangled in the sky, and then a gathering din,

swooping and feeding. Below the swarm of birds was a tiny speck of

bleak land, Torishima, or Bird Island, its steep volcanic cliffs

jutting above the waves. The battered fishing boat capsized in the

crashing surf and was smashed to pieces on the rocks. The five men

dragged themselves to shore and collapsed-Jusuke's leg was badly

mauled in the landing. Barely two miles in circumference and all

but barren of vegetation or animal life, as the men discovered,

Torishima was little more of a refuge than the drifting fishing

boat. Birds, nothing but birds kept the men company. Six months of

a hand-to-mouth existence out of Robinson Crusoe ensued: eating

great-winged albatross that came so close that Manjiro, the most

agile of the men, could kill them with a stone; scavenging for

birds' eggs in the lava crevices; drinking brackish water scooped

from rocks with a scallop shell. Then, as spring edged into burning

summer, the birds too began to depart.

　　One clear morning three wavering sticks rose above the horizon.

On the lookout, Manjiro tied a ragged kimono to a fragment of

driftwood and waved it wildly from the shore. The apparition of a

ship-huge and ungainly and indescribably odd, as it seemed to the

Japanese fishermen-came steadily closer, like something dreamed in

their abject desperation. Then bizarre sailors, some with light

skin and some very dark, rowed in a small boat toward the island.

In sign language, friendly invitations were issued, and the starved

castaways were conveyed to the mother ship.

　　Captain William H. Whitfield, a stern New Englander with a

clipped beard and piercing eyes, had brought the John Howland from

her home port of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, in 1839, in search of

whales in the waters east of Japan. Whaling captains had first

discovered the fabled "Japan whaling grounds" twenty years earlier,

as the overfished North Atlantic yielded fewer and fewer whales.

Whitfield's crew had approached Torishima in hopes of finding giant

sea turtles to relieve the monotony of their potatoes-and-hardtack

diet. Instead they found five gaunt islanders-the Americans had no

idea from whence they came and could make no sense of their

language. They fed and clothed the shivering castaways, who looked

at their rescuers with puzzled eyes.

　　Captain Whitfield then steered the John Howland on an eastward

course toward the Sandwich Islands, hunting whales as he found

them. Manjiro, quick-eyed and curious, was a favorite with the

crew; they shortened his name to Mung, and added John in honor of

their ship. Manjiro was astonished at the efficient violence

practiced by these strangers. Four light whaling boats manned by

six men each were lowered from the ship. With a sail or muffled

oars, they approached the unwitting sperm whale and threw barbed

harpoons into the domed head, holding on for dear life-the

so-called Nantucket sleigh ride-as the whale tried desperately to

free himself from the weapons lodged in his flesh. A boat could be

dragged for miles, and at any moment the whale could dive downward

or attack the boat, hurling the men into the sea. If all went well,

the captured whale was butchered in the sea, and the flesh and

blubber hacked into pieces and boiled down in vats on deck. These

whalers, unlike the Japanese, did not eat the whale meat. The oil

was what they were after, to light the houses of New England.

　　On November 20, 1841, the John Howland, with fourteen hundred

barrels of sperm whale oil in its hold, dropped anchor in the port

of Honolulu, on the southern coast of Oahu. The Sandwich Islands

(later renamed Hawaii) were nominally an independent monarchy, with

a king closely in league with American missionaries. With its dusty

checkerboard streets lined with adobe walls, and a sprinkling of

New England cottages incongruously mixed in among dingy native

huts, Honolulu was part missionary town and part pleasure ground

for sailors. Grogshops, brothels, and gambling dens had followed

the onward march of civilization. With its strategic position along

trade and whaling routes, Honolulu was the mid-ocean switching

point for communications and travel in the Pacific, an obligatory

stopping point for whalers, merchant ships, and naval vessels. Mail

exchanged hands; newspapers were swapped; crew members could be

hired and the sick or mutinous discharged.

　　Perched on the roof of his coral-pink church, Dr. Gerrit Parmele

Judd was surprised to see his old friend Captain Whitfield,

somber-clothed as always, leading five exotic strangers dressed in

sailors' white duck along the main road. Dr. Judd, a Presbyterian

missionary trained in medicine, was attaching the final shingles to

his enormous new church, the Kaiwaiaho or "stone church." Hacked

block by block by Hawaiian converts from coral reefs offshore, and

built to house two thousand worshipers, the structure was the

visual embodiment of Dr. Judd's far-reaching power and influence.

From humble origins on the New England frontier, Dr. Judd had risen

to high places. A tough-minded man with a jaw firmly clenched, he

had won the confidence of King Kamehameha III and persuaded

hundreds of native islanders, including the hard-drinking king, to

sign a temperance pledge. Dr. Judd had also prevented Catholic

priests from entering on British ships, keeping the islands pure of

religious and national contamination.

　　Dr. Judd had seen many exotic islanders pass through the Sandwich

Islands; he was particularly eager to identify the origins of

Captain Whitfield's sea drifters. He spread a map of the Pacific on

the ground before the fishermen, but they had never seen a map and

had no idea what it signified. Then, from his house near the

church, Dr. Judd brought some Japanese coins and pipes left by an

earlier group of shipwrecked sailors. Manjiro and his friends

smiled in happy recognition. Dr. Judd bowed low with his palms

together. The men cried "Dai Nippon," and all five prostrated

themselves on the ground. Satisfied that he had cracked the code,

Dr. Judd quickly offered to hire Fudenjo, along with his brothers,

Goemon and Jusuke, as house servants in his own household, with

menial tasks such as drawing water and chopping firewood. Toraemon,

more independent, found work as a carpenter and boat builder.

　　These arrangements left in doubt the fate of "John Mung." Captain

Whitfield had been struck aboard ship by Manjiro's quick intellect

and cheerful outlook. Manjiro picked up English words much faster

than the other castaways. Nothing was lost on him, and for

everything he sought an explanation and a name. Manjiro was

particularly intrigued by the secrets of navigation and-in his

broken English-asked question after question about how the ship

could find its way with no visible landmarks by which to chart its

course. The captain had a plan. A childless widower, he wished to

take Manjiro back to Massachusetts with him, give him an education,

and eventually adopt him as his son. Manjiro eagerly accepted the

offer, and Captain Fudenjo gave his assent. As the John Howland

made the long journey around Cape Horn in April 1843, and up the

coasts of South and North America, Captain Whitfield had ample time

to prepare Manjiro for what he might expect in the whaling town of

Fairhaven, Massachusetts.

　　Spires jutting into the sky like the straight masts of ships and

a bridge that broke in two so that tall ships could pass through:

these were the sights that Manjiro, now sixteen years old, saw as

the John Howland approached Fairhaven on May 7, 1843. The town, at

the top of the jagged notch below Cape Cod known as Buzzards Bay,

is true to its name: a protected harbor of deep and quiet water. A

drawbridge spans the Acushnet River where it enters the harbor,

connecting Fairhaven to the neighboring town of New Bedford. As

Captain Whitfield explained the mechanism of the drawbridge,

Manjiro, mesmerized by its operation, sketched it carefully. Then

Whitfield pointed to a stone breakwater on the Fairhaven side and

looming above it the proud battlements of Fort Phoenix, where the

first naval engagement of the American Revolution took place.

　　Fairhaven, once called Poverty Point, has benefited from cycles

of wealth and penury. The wealth accounts for the handsome Greek

Revival houses of stone and clapboard that still line the narrow

streets. The poverty accounts for the time-capsule preservation of

so much of the town-money tends to mar. What wealth came to

Fairhaven came from whales. Quaker shipowners in Fairhaven and New

Bedford sent agents into the New England countryside to round up

younger sons in search of more adventure than family farms could

provide. Seasoned seamen were not fooled by the pitch; they signed

instead with merchant ships bound for China or India. Only the

gullible and the desperate fell for the whaler's promise of a

minuscule share of the profits-minus whatever the owner claimed to

have spent on the upkeep of the crew. Whaling ships were notorious

for cruelty and hardship; they almost never returned with their

crews intact. Even the John Howland, with an unusually civil

captain, had lost eleven men, eight of whom deserted, during its

three-and-a-half-year trip.

　　Captain Whitfield had found a son; he now went in search of a

wife. He placed Manjiro temporarily in the household of a sailor

friend and asked a teacher in the local school, Jane Allen, to

tutor the boy after hours. After a week of tutoring sessions, Allen

was so impressed with Manjiro's progress and aptitude that she

enrolled him in the one-room stone school of Fairhaven. When

Captain Whitfield returned with his bride, Albertina Keith, the

Whitfields bought a farm on Sconticut Neck, and Manjiro joined them

there as a member of the family, helping with daily chores and

learning to ride a horse. Less enjoyable were the months he spent

apprenticed to an impoverished cooper in New Bedford, learning the

trade of barrel making. Neither the life of the farmer nor that of

the tradesman appealed to Manjiro. The sea was his vocation, and

somewhere in the back of his mind he retained the hope of returning

to Japan to see his mother.

　　Those skills he had begun to learn onboard the John

Howland-celestial navigation and the English language-Manjiro was

able to perfect in Fairhaven, on the banks of the Acushnet River.

The Christian Bible, an exotic tale of wizards and fishermen, meant

little to Manjiro; his humiliation in the Fairhaven Congregational

Church killed whatever enthusiasm he might have felt for the alien

religion. Far more compelling was The New American Practical

Navigator, by the Salem mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch, the guide

to celestial navigation often called the sailor's bible. For this

castaway who knew the perils of the open sea, Bowditch seemed the

true savior. If Bowditch was a navigational tool on the perilous

sea, Webster's Dictionary was for orientation in the world of men.

These lessons-in language and navigation-proved to be the keys that

opened the world for Manjiro.

　　From the Hardcover edition.

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媒体评论

　　Advance praise for The Great Wave

　　?The close-up brilliance of Christopher Benfey?s depiction of the

early stages of the encounter between sophisticated representatives

of the American Gilded Age and those of nineteenth-century Japan

required an assured grasp of both cultures, their assumptions and

envies, their gifts and weaknesses, their humor and lack of it. He

has portrayed this mutual loss of virginity with grace, wit, and a

range of reference that re-echoes the original astonishments and is

a pleasure to read.?

?W. S. Merwin

　　Praise for Christopher Benfey

　　Degas in New Orleans

　　?Yes, Degas in New Orleans involves a haunted house, ghosts, and

titillating couplings, but all elements are solidly anchored in

historical events and retold by Christopher Benfey in a deft

synthesis of art criticism and historical speculation....An elegant

introduction to a city that remains a secretive, seductive

metropolis.?

?Grace Lichtenstein, The Washington Post Book World

　　The Double Life of Stephen Crane

　　?In this astute and subtle new reading of Stephen Crane,

Christopher Benfey discovers the mysterious process of a life

taking shape from its art. Mr. Benfey writes beautifully and is as

sharp on the social and psychological dimensions of Crane?s

experience as he is on language and literary craft.?

?Jean Strouse, author of Alice James

　　From the Hardcover edition. -- Review

书籍介绍

When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to “Old Japan,” with its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in the course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to an international power. This great wave of historical and cultural reciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified during the late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-life personalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures prompted pilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific.

In The Great Wave , Benfey tells the story of the tightly knit group of nineteenth-century travelers—connoisseurs, collectors, and scientists—who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving Old Japan. As Benfey writes, “A sense of urgency impelled them, for they were convinced—Darwinians that they were—that their quarry was on the verge of extinction.”

These travelers include Herman Melville, whose Pequod is “shadowed by hostile and mysterious Japan”; the historian Henry Adams and the artist John La Farge, who go to Japan on an art-collecting trip and find exotic adventures; Lafcadio Hearn, who marries a samurai’s daughter and becomes Japan’s preeminent spokesman in the West; Mabel Loomis Todd, the first woman to climb Mt. Fuji; Edward Sylvester Morse, who becomes the world’s leading expert on both Japanese marine life and Japanese architecture; the astronomer Percival Lowell, who spends ten years in the East and writes seminal works on Japanese culture before turning his restless attention to life on Mars; and President (and judo enthusiast) Theodore Roosevelt. As well, we learn of famous Easterners come West, including Kakuzo Okakura, whose The Book of Tea became a cult favorite, and Shuzo Kuki, a leading philosopher of his time, who studied with Heidegger and tutored Sartre.

Finally, as Benfey writes, his meditation on cultural identity “seeks to capture a shared mood in both the Gilded Age and the Meiji Era, amid superficial promise and prosperity, of an overmastering sense of precariousness and impending peril.”

From the Hardcover edition.