Theodore Augustin Forcade

• Born: 1816
• Died: 1885

Theodore Augustin Forcade was a French Catholic missionary, active on Okinawa in 1844 to 1846.

Forcade first arrived in Ryûkyû in April 1844 aboard the Alcmene, along with a Chinese interpreter known as Augustine Ho. Forcade remained in the islands for two years, residing at the Buddhist temple Seigen-ji. He had originally represented himself as merely an interpreter, and when his missionary proclivities became evident, it stirred up considerable difficulties and concerns for the royal government.

He departed the islands in 1846/8, aboard the Sabine, one of two French ships which had arrived earlier that year, leaving new missionaries, Mathieu Adnet and Pierre-Julien Le Turdu, in Forcade's place.

References

• Robert Hellyer, Defining Engagement, Harvard University Press (2009), 152.
• Marco Tinello, "The termination of the Ryukyuan embassies to Edo : an investigation of the bakumatsu period through the lens of a tripartite power relationship and its world," PhD thesis, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia (2014), 127-128.
• Mark McNally, "A King's Legitimacy and a Kingdom's Exceptionality: Ryûkyû's Bankoku Shinryô no Kane of 1458," International Journal of Okinawan Studies 6 (2015), 87.