Fictional characters based on real people

I saw Shogun recently.  This is a made for television movie based on James Clavell’s novel of the same name.

The novel tells the story of a John Blackthorne  who piloted a ship to Japan in 1600.

In real life there was William Adams, who went to sea at the age of twelve and spent the next years learning how to build ships, learning astronomy, and navigation.

At the age of 24 he joined the Royal Navy and served under Sir Francis Drake.

It was 1598 (the same years used in the Clavell novel) that he was the Pilot Major of five ships of the Dutch East India Company which sailed to South America to sell cargo, then made a try for Japan.

In April 1600, only one of those five had survived. Only nine men were well enough to stand, (twenty dying men lay below) when the ship made landfall.

They were met by locals  and Portuguese Jesuit priests.  The Priests charged the crew for being Pirates and claimed they should be crucified.

It was the Jesuits who seized the ship.

The crew was imprisoned at Osaka Castle on the order of Tokugawa Ieyasu who was  the  daimyo of Edo (and would soon be made Shogun)

As was portrayed in the novel,  the daimyo,  Ieyasu,  was intrigued by Adams and met with him during the next few months.

He found Adam’s knowledge of shipbuilding, mathematics and other sciences more than intriguing.

In the book, Clavell has a love interest for Blackthorne act as interpreter.   In real live, William Adams was married. He wrote many letters to his wife in England, describing the meetings with the daimyo and what he experienced.

In real life, Ieyasu,  fully believed Adams when he explained the Jesuits were his enemies.  Ieyasu had the ship sail to his domain where because of damage it had suffered, it sank.

Ieyasu had a new ship built.  Members of Adams crew were allowed to leave Japan.  But  Ieyasu, who was now Shogun, would not let Adams go. He decreed that William Adams, pilot, was dead and that Miura Anjin, a samurai was born.

Realising he would never leave Japan, William Adams married Oyuki who was not of high status.  They had two children, Joseph and Susanna.

William Adams died in 1620.

Anyone reading the book or seeing the television show might think that John Blackthorne was a fabrication of the author.  But there was a real person upon which it was based; William Adams.