Note 50 — Chapter XI

During this residence at Macao the Japanese ambassadors were not idle. They were engaged upon a very remarkable work, printed at Macao in 1590 in Japanese and Latin, purporting to be composed by the ambassadors, and giving, by way of dialogue, an account not only of the embassy, but of Japan and of all the countries, European and Oriental, which they had visited. The Latin title is De Missione Legatorum Japonensium ad Romanam curiam, rebusque in Europa ac toto in itinere animadversis, Dialogus, etc.—“A Dialogue concerning the Japanese Embassy to the Court of Rome, and the things observed in Europe and on the whole journey, collected from the journal of the ambassadors, and rendered into Latin by Ed. de Laude, priest of the Society of Jesus.” It is from this work, though he does not give the title of it, that Hackluyt extracted the “Excellent Treatise of the Kingdom of China and of the Estate and Government thereof,” contained in his second volume, and of which he speaks in his epistle dedicatory to that volume, first published in 1599, as “the most exact account of those parts that is yet come to light.” “It was printed,” he tells us, “in Latin, in Makoa, a city of China, in China paper, in the year 1590, and was intercepted in the great carac Madre de Dios, two years after, enclosed in a case of sweet cedar wood, and lapped up almost a hundred fold in fine Calicut cloth, as though it had been some incomparable jewel.”