364 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
fear, I always meet with some Chinaman who speaks English 
and helps me.” The Chinese not only always assisted our 
sailors as interpreters without remuneration, but accompanied 
them for hours, gave them good advice in making purchases, 
and expressed their sympathy with all that they must have 
suffered during our wintering in the high north. They were 
always cleanly, tall, and stately in their figures, and corresponded 
in no particular to the calumnious descriptions we so often read 
of this people in European and American writings. 
From Yokohama the course was shaped for Kobe, one of the 
more considerable Japanese ports which have been opened to 
Europeans. Kobe is specially remarkable on account of its 
having railway communication with Osaka, the most important 
manufacturing town of Japan, and with Kioto, the ancient 
capital and seat of the Mikado’s court for centuries. 
I had already begun at Yokohama to buy Japanese books, 
particularly such as were printed before the opening of the 
ports to Europeans. In order to carry on this traffic with 
greater success, I had procured the assistance of a young 
Japanese very familiar with French, Mr. Okuschi, assistant in 
Dr. Geertz’ chemico-technical laboratory at Yokohama. But 
because the supply of old books in this town, which a few years 
ago had been of little importance, was very limited, I had at 
first, in order to make purchases on a larger scale, repeatedly 
sent Mr. Okuschi to Tokio, the seat of the former Shogun 
dynasty, and from that town, before the departure of the Vega 
from Yokohama, to Kioto, the former seat of learning in Japan. 
The object of the Vegas call at the port of Kobe was to fetch 
the considerable purchases made there by Mr. Okuschi.^ 
^ The number of the works which the collection of Japanese books 
contains is somewhat over a thousand. The number of volumes amounts 
to five or six thousand; most of the volumes, however, are not larger than 
one of our books of a hundred pages. So far as can be judged by 
the Japanese titles, which are often little distinctive, the works may be 
