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day he recites the gifts he had given to all his friends; the list registers a rich as-
sortment of expensive gifts for her, including two painted screens. It also includes
more modest gifts for her maid Otto. On 2 March it's all over. Otto wins her free-
dom by revealing that Matinga had been seeing half a dozen other men and can
produce three witnesses to testify against her. The debauchery, if we want to call
it that, was on her side, not his. This is the last we hear of Matinga. The marriage,
such as it had been, was over.
The Company would not have grudged Cocks his Matinga. It was understood
that the men sent abroad on Company business would establish relationships with
women in the places they found themselves, regardless of whether they had wives
at home in England. It was also understood that these relationships could be be-
neficial in all sorts of ways, connecting the newcomers to the society they entered
and providing them with access to resources they might not otherwise enjoy. This
was not a double standard, nor was it a double life; it was simply a double existen-
ce.Itwasanarrangement condoned,indeedencouraged, byall(except perhapsthe
wives left at home, though the trade-off was the promise of riches brought home).
It was standard practice in Hirado, for Cocks in his diary repeatedly refers to the
other Englishmen's women, usually in the context of having to give them gifts as
well. He just declines to be explicit about his own.
London neither knew nor cared. What mattered to the Company was that the
mission to Japan had failed. And it had been expensive. John Saris had picked up
enough pepper and other commodities at ports throughout the region to make him-
self a reasonably wealthy man. All that came back to the Company at the close
of the Japan venture was £1,000 in gold and £100 in silver, which was sent to the
Tower to be coined. From a financial perspective Richard Cocks's legacy was nil.
Li Dan's financial legacy was worse. He outlived Cocks by a year and a half,
continuing with the Dutch the same business ventures he had conducted with the
English, which included holding out the promise that a deal with China was just
about to be struck. His attempts to build a legitimate trading empire that linked
the Dutch, the Ming and SouthEast Asia in a durable trading network would fail
in 1624. The following summer he returned to Japan, defeated and in serious debt,
and there he died. When word of his death reached Company representatives in
Batavia the following January, they reported to London that he 'left a small estate
tosatisfiehiscred[itor]rsandaccordinglyisdistributed,outofw'chyouhaveyour
proportion in divers species' (that is, various precious metals). They promised a
more concrete note to this effect, but none was ever sent. The EIC no longer had
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