THE " JAPANESE " DOGS 



East by the Company " grow faint and die for want of fresh 

 water and too much salt meat aboard, fresh oaten meal or 

 ground barley is the only food for dogs, and a chain and 

 comely collar to grace them ought ever to be remembered. 

 A Turkey cock and hen given by Capt. Moreton were so 

 much admired that a ' sleight ' Chinaman to make a friend 

 by presenting them, would willingly buy the like at 100 ryalls 

 of eight." * 



Sir Rutherford Alcock's opinion that the " Merry 

 Monarch " was indebted to his marriage with a Portuguese 

 princess (and thence possibly to Japan) for the race of 

 spaniels called after him would appear to have consider- 

 able justification, for it appears not unlikely that even if the 

 Japanese races of small dogs were not introduced indirectly 

 through Portugal or Holland by the traders of those two 

 countries before the arrival of their British competitors, some 

 specimens may have been introduced during the brief period 

 in which British traders were in high favour with Japanese 

 rulers at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Fennel 

 in 1841 says of the King Charles spaniel, " This beautiful 

 breed received its name from having been the favourite 

 of that ill-fated monarch Charles I, who rarely walked out 

 without being attended by several of these spaniels. They 

 were black and white, with curly hair, small rounded heads, 

 short muzzles, long ears and webbed feet." t 



The sending of dogs as Imperial presents persisted in 

 Japan up to at least the middle of the nineteenth century. 

 1 The Commodore, upon subsequent inquiry, learned that 

 there are three articles which in Japan, as he understood, 

 always form part of an Imperial present. These are rice, 

 dried fish, and dogs. Some also said that charcoal was 



* " Calendar of State Papers. East Indies " 1615, p. 429 -, 1617, p. 374. 

 f " Toy Dogs and their Ancestors," p. 37. 



M 177 



