I’ve always been interested in the explorers on the fringe (pun intended) of history. There is Pytheas the Greek, for example, who may have circumnavigated the British Isles in 325 B.C., and then there might have been a Minorite Friar from England who visited Norse Vinland in the 14th century. Had the records of these and many other lost or forgotten explorers been saved, who knows what historical treasures we would discover?

The early Dutch in Japan seem to be a similar case. The first Dutchmen arrived in Japan via shipwreck in 1600. For those considering this form of travel, I discourage it, because it’s rather dangerous. The captain of this shipwrecked ship was Jacob Jansz. Quaeckernaeck, a man who probably had a hard time spelling his own last name properly. Quaeckernaeck survived, the Japanese found an advantage in welcoming Dutch traders and by 1609, the Dutch East India Company established regular trade with Japan.

After the Dutch pushed the Portuguese out of certain Asia trade routes, the Dutch were the only western trading partner of Japan, and remained so until the famous Perry Expedition of 1854. From the 17th century on, Japan trained translators to converse with Dutch merchants, and so Japanese scholars who spoke Dutch in 1854 had little trouble conversing with Perry’s translator, the Dutch-born American Anton L. C. Portman, about whom it appears rather little is known.

At any rate, in an 18th century Dutch text, I found a rather interesting and completely unknown event in Dutch – Japanese history. The text, titled Noord en oost Tartaryen (North and East Tartaries) speaks of a letter, written in Batavia in 1696, which related that in 1643 a Dutchman named Marten Gerritz. de Vries, captain of the ship Kastrikum, sailed North of Japan to ascertain whether Japan was an island, or was somehow connected by land to America. At the time, explorers were uncertain how far California stretched North and West. He reached about 49 degrees North, which put him near either Sakhilin Island or perhaps the Northern Kurills.

The source from 1696 explained further that about 12 years early (therefore 1684) a Dutch merchant named Hendrik Obe knew of a Japanese man who had been driven off the Japanese coast by a storm, landed and overwintered on land that Obe believed to be connected to America. Obe had also met travelers in the Northern reaches of Japan who not only “looked like” North Americans, but who also spoke a language that had many words similar to those that he had heard the natives speak in……get this….New Netherland, where he had been born and raised.

Page 138 of Nicholaas Witsen’s 1785 book Noord en Oost Tartaryen, describing Hendrik Obe’s encounter.

Hendrik Obe, may be, then, the first New Netherlander to have visited Japan. To check if this might have been true, I reached out to historian Jaap Jacobs, who kindly checked his personal files (which I can only imagine look like this:)

….and Jacobs confirmed that there was a Hendrick Obe (a.k.a Obee) who worked in New Amsterdam from 1654 onwards as a collector of excise. His son, Hendrick Hendricksz Obe, was an apprentice who ran away in 1668. Obe senior eventually moved back to the Netherlands, and Obe junior may have done the same, since he appears to have signed up to serve the Dutch East India Company. Born in the West, he sailed East. When the English took over New Netherland in 1664 and renamed it New York, Obe junior would have been a subject of the British crown and therefore a New Yorker. In short, Obe was also the first New Yorker, perhaps even the first American, to ever reach Japan.

What is also curious here is how the Dutch, or rather, the Europeans, were trying to make sense of global geography and the connections between Asians and Americans. It is easy when listening to a foreign language to hear words that you think you recognize from other languages you know. Consider how American explorers long thought they heard Welsh words spoken among the Mandan or other Native American peoples. Europeans spoke of Tartary as this large, poorly-defined region of central Asia that stretched from the Urals to the Pacific. Obe was wrong to think that he heard Algonquian words in the northern Pacific ring, but he wasn’t too far off in thinking that people of central Asia had some deep historic connection with the Americas.