In 1832, a 14-year-old crew member named Otokichi left Japan on a rice transport ship bound for Edo. A storm blew the vessel off course, and it drifted across the northern Pacific for 14 months without a mast or rudder. The crew survived on desalinated seawater and their rice cargo. Most died of scurvy. Three of the original 14 were alive when the ship finally washed up at Cape Alava, the westernmost point of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, in 1834.
The survivors were briefly enslaved by the Makah tribe, then handed over to the Hudson's Bay Company, which sent them to London — making them probably the first Japanese to reach England since the 16th century. The British government declined to use them as trade envoys. They were shipped to Macau, where a German missionary named Karl Gutzlaff learned Japanese from them and together they produced a translation of the Gospel of John into Japanese.
Two attempts to return them to Japan failed — the ship was fired on both times, at Edo Bay and at Kagoshima. Japan's isolation laws made leaving the country an offense punishable by death. Otokichi became a British subject under the name John Matthew Ottoson — "Ottoson" being a transliteration of "Oto-san," a respectful nickname. He eventually rented a colonial house on Orchard Road in Singapore, where he died of tuberculosis at 49.
