To his own eternal infamy, to the everlasting dishonour of his country, he not only sent his greatest and most powerfully armed ship to Shimabara, which lay on the sea, safe against any ships that the Japanese possessed, but went in command himself.*
Anchored at a safe distance off the devoted town, where no shot that its defenders could fire could reach him, over four hundred balls from his great guns were fired into the town within fifteen days. Still the defenders held out. At last a breach was made in the walls, through which the besiegers poured in, and the inmates of the town and castle, men, women and children, were slaughtered without pity or mercy.* The besiegers’ general, Itakura, was killed when leading his men, and his tomb can still be seen in Shimabara. It was on the 12th of April, 1638, that Shimabara fell.
With this massacre, the story of Christianity in old Japan may be said to have ended. Many Christians still survived, but they were all of the lowest classes, and leaderless and priestless, cowed by the terrors of the terrible persecution which had destroyed their co-religionists, none of them dared profess their faith in public.
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* Longford was a little unfair on the Dutchman, though not the Dutch East India Company. “The secret of Koeckebecker’s action” Longford acknowledged rightly enough “is to be found in his instructions — ‘He was to save at any price the commerce with Japan’. These instructions were from the head office at Batavia.” But the indications from Coeckebacker’s own reports are that his contribution was reluctant. It was also singularly ineffective. It consisted of five cannon, six casks of powder, those four hundred cannonballs, and a ship, De Rijp, starting on February 24th; on March 12th Matsudaira Nobutsuna, who had taken over from Itakura Shigemasa as commander of the Government forces, thanked Coeckebacker for his service, and let him go.
* The rebels kept fighting, but were routed on 15 April 1638. After the fall of Hara Castle, the young leader Amakusa Shiro was executed and his head displayed at Nagasaki as a warning to others.