Phaeton Incident

• Date: 1808/8/25-28

The British frigate ''HMS'' Phaeton disguised itself as a Dutch vessel and entered Nagasaki harbor late in the eighth month, 1808, in an effort to plunder Dutch vessels located there. The effort was ultimately unsuccessful, but represented a dramatic failure on the part of the shogunate, and of the domains of Saga han and Fukuoka han, to effectively defend Nagasaki (and by extension, Japan's harbors, and Japan as a whole). The harbor defenses, consisting primarily of cannon roughly a century old and limited in number (the battery closest to the Phaeton held only seven cannon), were not only technologically & numerically inferior to the task, but were sorely inadequately manned as well. Where roughly a few hundred men might have been necessary to effectively man the batteries that existed, only 50-60 men from Saga were in fact present.

Nagasaki bugyô Matsudaira Yasuhira committed suicide in the aftermath of the event, the only example in the entirety of the Edo period of a Nagasaki bugyô having to kill himself for defense-related reasons.

The Incident

The Phaeton was the first British man-of-war to enter Nagasaki harbor. It was captained by ***, with a Lt. C.B. Stockdale as second-in-command. The frigate was armed with 48 cannon.

Historian Noell Wilson identifies two major weaknesses in the organization of Nagasaki's defense. Firstly, the manner in which Saga and Fukuoka han shared responsibility for the defense of Nagasaki was ambiguous and inefficient. Second, the Nagasaki bugyô, a shogunate official, nominally had command of the defense of the harbor, and of the Saga and Fukuoka troops assigned there, but had no troops of his own, and had rather limited powers within Saga or Fukuoka domains themselves, outside of the city or harbor of Nagasaki itself.

While the defense of other "gateways" to Japan at this time was entrusted entirely to individual domains (namely, the Sô clan of Tsushima han and the Shimazu clan of Satsuma han, respectively, in guarding against foreign incursions in/via Tsushima and the Ryukyus), an arrangement much like that at Nagasaki was employed in Ezo in the 19th century, where the Tsugaru clan and Nanbu clan shared responsibility, and in Edo.

References

• Wilson, Noell. "Tokugawa Defense Redux: Organizational Failure in the Phaeton Incident of 1808." Journal of Japanese Studies 36:1 (Winter 2010). pp1-32.