Note 116 — Chapter XLV

These islands lie between 26° 30´ and 27° 45´ north latitude, about five hundred miles west of Lew Chew and the same distance south of Yedo, on the direct route from the Sandwich Islands to Shanghai, three thousand three hundred miles from the former, and about one thousand one hundred from the latter. They consist of three groups. The largest island is about forty miles in circumference. There are nine others, diminishing down to five or six miles of circumference, and about seventy rocky islets, all evidently of volcanic origin. The extent of the whole is about two hundred and fifty square miles. The name is Japanese, and signifies “uninhabited,” descriptive of the state in which they were found when discovered by a Japanese vessel in 1675; and, except some ineffectual attempts at penal colonization by the Japanese, so they remained till occupied, in 1830, by a colony from the Sandwich Islands, partly Americans and Europeans, and partly Sandwich Islanders. They had been visited and claimed for the British crown in 1827, by Captain Beechey, in the surveying ship “Blossom.” The larger ones are fertile and well watered, but scantily wooded. The largest, called Peel’s Islands by Beechey, has a good harbor, and here Perry bought a piece of land from a squatter for a coal depot.