William Napier Bickham was born in England about 1834, the son of a calico printer in the textile production hub of Manchester. After a visit to Australia where he had a cousin, Bickham secured a position in the Hong Kong firm Johnson & Co and traveled to China by steamer, arriving in Shanghai in April 1860. He served as a clerk and silk inspector in Shanghai and made frequent excursions into the interior to purchase raw silk for export to England. In addition to numerous letters, he penned extensive records of his travels that are preserved today at the National Library of Australia.
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| William Napier Bickham (1834-1862) |
In September 1862, suffering from the lingering heat of summer and a bout of dysentery, Bickham decided to travel to Nagasaki to recuperate. He reported the journey in a letter to his mother dated September 26th, using the first pages to relay news about the so-called Namamugi Incident, i.e. the attack by samurai retainers on a British riding party near Yokohama on the 14th of the same month. All of the four Britons involved in the attack (three men and one woman) were acquaintances of Bickham. In fact the one person killed, Charles L. Richardson, was a fellow silk buyer and former Johnson & Co. colleague in Shanghai. Bickham goes on to describe Nagasaki, which he reached the previous day:
Nagasaki is located in a nearly landlocked little harbour very pretty all around and a perfect contrast to the mudflat Shanghai. It is indeed a lovely spot and I shall enjoy my 10 days or so. Amazingly, I had a salt swim this morning and enjoyed it above a little. I have established myself in the house of an old Shanghai friend, so that costs nothing and I am so jolly. Diarrhea etc. clean gone*.
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| Ōura Creek facing east circa 1865. The foreign cemetery is visible at the foot of the hill in the distance (center). |
The “old Shanghai friend” was Edward Harrison, a former employee of the Shanghai firm Blain, Tate & Co. Harrison had established a branch office in Nagasaki and later joined Thomas Glover in Glover & Co. The reclamation of land for the Nagasaki Foreign Settlement had reached completion in April. Euro-American residents were now ensconced within the borders of their exclusive quarter, and the English Episcopal Church, the first Protestant church in Japan, was nearing completion on the Higashiyamate hillside when Bickham’s ship sailed into Nagasaki Harbor.
In the above letter to his mother, Bickham describes the Japanese residents of Nagasaki, calling them “a most remarkable race very like the Chinese in some things and totally different in others, both men and women.” He seems to have taken a special interest in the latter:
I can’t admire the black teeth of the women yet though perhaps it is want of taste on my part. The features of the people are generally distinct from those of the Chinese and yet like them all have black hair and eyes. They are quite European in feature and body, all but the color which is the same as the Chinese, a light brown, though some of the women are as fair as an English girl… The women don’t cramp their feet or wear breeches but have a petticoat or garment that wraps so closely round their legs that they can only take very short steps, and they seem rather proud or at all events not [at] all ashamed of showing the charms of their persons down to their waists, which the Chinese always keep covered.
Bickham seems in high spirits, excited about his planned 10-day holiday in Japan, and he ends his letter with a promise to write his mother again soon. However, the “blue death” of cholera, which had taken Nagasaki by storm earlier that year, was calling at his door.
Until 1859 when the Ansei Five-Power Treaties came into effect, Nagasaki was the only port in Japan officially open to foreign trade. In that capacity it served as a gateway, not only for merchandise and information, but also for pathogens unknown to date in the country. Called mikka korori (drop dead in three days) in Japanese, cholera first reached Nagasaki in 1822, probably on a Dutch ship sailing from Batavia (Jakarta). It returned in 1858 when the U.S.S. Mississippi visited Nagasaki and American sailors suffering from the disease came ashore. The bacteria quickly spread throughout Nagasaki via tainted water and swept eastward across the Japanese archipelago causing thousands of deaths. Cholera outbreaks occurred again the following year and in 1861, but the epidemic of 1862 proved to be the most fatal of all those recorded in the Edo Period.
Already weakened by his previous attack of dysentery, William Napier Bickham contacted cholera under unknown circumstances and died on October 3, 1862, only six days after arriving in Nagasaki. He was 28 years old. The Nagasaki British Consulate Death Register identifies the place of death as the “Blain Tate House,” no doubt the Edward Harrison residence at No. 8 Higashiyamate. Harrison, who reported the death, arranged for the burial of Bickham’s remains in the foreign cemetery at the head of Ōura Creek and the installment of a large gravestone.
In 1883, a friend of the Bickham family named Lucilla Sharp visited the cemetery with her husband and found the gravestone intact and the area meticulously managed. She reported the visit in a letter to Bickham's mother in England and enclosed wildflowers growing near the gravestone. Writes Sharp:
A sweeter little bijou of a place than the cemetery at Nagasaki I never saw. It is on the side of a hill and is laid out in terraces. Lovely flowers and shrubs and over-hanging trees abound and it is kept in the most fastidiously neat order… The day was lovely, the sun shining brilliantly, the birds warbling, and large bright-hued butterflies were fluttering in all directions… A little weeping willow that was planted on the next grave peacefully droops its pendant boughs on your boy's marble, and all around grow many of our sweetest English wildflowers... I could but think that if you had been in my place you would have been more than thankful to see your dear son’s final resting place so carefully tended and in so sweet a spot.
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| Sketch of the gravestone by Bickham's nephew, William Hitchcock-Spencer |
The former Blain Tate House at No. 8 Higashiyamate where William Napier Bickham died was later purchased by the British government and used as a consular residence. Acquired by the Reformed Church in America in 1886, the building was eventually torn down and the lot incorporated into the campus of present-day Kaisei High School.
Ōura International Cemetery was used by the foreign community of Nagasaki until 1888, when a new foreign cemetery was established in the Urakami district north of Nagasaki (present-day Sakamoto International Cemetery). William Napier Bickham's gravestone stands intact on the upper level of the cemetery, its inscription obscured by lichens and eroded by decades of wind and rain.
Ōura International Cemetery was used by the foreign community of Nagasaki until 1888, when a new foreign cemetery was established in the Urakami district north of Nagasaki (present-day Sakamoto International Cemetery). William Napier Bickham's gravestone stands intact on the upper level of the cemetery, its inscription obscured by lichens and eroded by decades of wind and rain.
| (Above left) Bickham's gravestone is intact but badly eroded. (Above right) The view of the gravestone from behind, with the houses of Hinode-machi climbing the hillside in the background. (Below) The cemetery is maintained by Nagasaki City, but many of the gravestones are in a serious state of decay. |
* I thank James Buchanan for kindly sharing the photograph of William Napier Bickham and the sketch of the gravestone, as well as the letters quoted in this article.
