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In place of going into the harbour of Kanagawa where Count Putiatine is at anchor, I have determined to proceed to a point several miles higher up nearer to Yeddo. We completely foil by our audacity all the poor Japanese officials. I have said nothing of the bazaar of Simoda, where there were a great many pretty things, of which I bought some, nor of a visit which the Governor paid to me.
We saw the Shogun, under the bombastic title of Tycoon, in spite of the remonstrance of the Emperor and his court, conclude a treaty with Perry at Kanagawa in 1854. The Shogun or his ministers had no right to make treaties with foreigners. Such an act was, in the eyes of the patriots, heinous treason.
Kanagawa is practically a suburban part of Yokohama: one Japanese-owned clock observed here points to the hour of eight, another to eleven, and a third to half past-nine, but the clock at the Club Hotel, on the Yokohama bund, is owned by an Englishman, and is just about striking ten, when the last vault from the saddle of the bicycle that has carried me through so many countries is made.
A battery of field-artillery, the smartest seen since leaving Germany, is encountered in the streets of Kanagawa, at which point the road to Yokohama branches off from the Tokaido. The great Imperial highway, along which I have travelled from the old capital almost to the new, continues on to the latter, seventeen miles farther.
The colored wooden roofs of the town seemed to have been cut out from a picture book of fairy tales. The narrow streets in sight from the deck seemed steep and not too straight. The buildings seemed to lap over on each other. To the west, standing straight up in the sky, as it seemed, loomed the pile of Oyama mountain. To the north showed the roofs of Kanagawa.
In 1890, she came to Yokohama much damaged, was officially surveyed and pronounced not worth repair, was sold at auction and bought as a coal hulk for the Canadian Pacific Company's steamers at that port, and in 1899 was sold to the Japanese, burned and broken up at Kanagawa.
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