The crew is shown performing alarming acrobatic feats in the rigging. The immense height of the central mast of this carrack is suggested by the rapidly diminishing size of the crew members furling its sails. By 1650, Christian imagery was banned and missionary activity a capital offense. In 1640, the shogun put into effect a seclusionist policy that closed the country to all outsiders other than Chinese merchants, a handful of Dutch traders, and occasional Korean emissaries. All sixty members of the Portuguese delegation that arrived the following year to plead for resumption of trade were beheaded. In 1638, an uprising by Christian converts convinced the Tokugawa government of the dreaded possibility of intervention by European colonial powers. A handful of Spanish Franciscan friars propagated their faith in Nagasaki, Kyoto, and elsewhere. Spanish ships sailed every summer from Manila to Mexico on the Black Current and a few entered Japanese ports. Until 1624, there was also a small trade between the Japanese and the Spanish, who were based in the Philippine Islands. Francis Xavier, one of the founding fathers of the Jesuit Order, was the first to arrive, in 1549. Jesuit missionaries accompanied the Portuguese traders and spread Christianity in Japan, especially in Kyushu, where there were many converts among the local daimyo. The carrack set off for Macau and Japan from Goa, on the west coast of India, the centre of the Portuguese empire in Asia, and some of the crew are dark-skinned natives of the Indian sub-continent. The great ship was a three-deck carrack of up to 1,600 tons, and its enormous size and exotic crew and cargo were the cause of much wonder and excitement.
Some European goods were traded, but for the most part the Iberians served as middlemen between the Chinese and Japanese. The Portuguese made large profits selling Chinese silk to the Japanese in exchange for silver. (The term originated in China, where all foreigners were regarded as barbarians.) The Portuguese nau do trato was known to the Japanese as the kurofune (black ship) or nanban bune, ship of the Nanban, or Southern Barbarians, so called because these foreigners arrive from the south. Portuguese traders reached Japan in 1543, and by 1570 they had selected the Bay of Nagasaki as the ideal natural harbour for the centre of their commerce, which was conducted with little or no restriction. The scene presents a narrative of the dynamic conflation of East and West around 1600. A three-masted ship unloads cargo in a port that likely represents Nagasaki, on the west coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of the four main islands of Japan.
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