The Cellar Lottery and Sailors’ Revolt at Anjiro turns a forced choice into an uprising: the Erasmus crew’s attempt to decide who must die by lot collapses when Blackthorne and Vinck resist the samurai enforcing the decision. The episode makes the crew’s precarious survival tangible, then leaves them trapped again after Pieterzoon is dragged from the cellar.

The Lottery Takes Shape

Near sunset, Paulus Spillbergen raised a bundle of rice straws and asked who would draw first. The crew had been told that their lives would be spared except for one, and the choice therefore offered no safe answer—only a chance to determine who would be sacrificed. When Spillbergen first blustered and gave orders, the men’s pitiless looks stopped him. He rejected volunteering as unfair and proposed drawing lots instead, describing the outcome as placing themselves in God’s hands. Blackthorne refused to take part and urged the crew to fight, but Spillbergen argued that resistance would get them all killed.

Van Nekk backed Spillbergen’s authority as Captain-General and called for a vote. Vinck initially stood with Blackthorne, denouncing the straws, but the others eventually persuaded him. Jan Roper led the prayers while Spillbergen carefully broke ten pieces of straw and halved one. The men—van Nekk, Pieterzoon, Sonk, Maetsukker, Ginsel, Jan Roper, Salamon, Maximilian Croocq, and Vinck—were called to draw. Van Nekk, nearly unable to see the straws through his myopia, chose one that was not short. Vinck selected the next-to-last straw; it fell to the ground, and the crew saw that it was the shortest so far. Spillbergen opened his hand to reveal that the final straw was long, then fainted.

From Lottery to Revolt

When Vinck’s straw proved shortest, the crew’s abstract gamble became an immediate sentence. They stared at him as he slumped, keeping their distance as if he were already marked apart from them. Blackthorne knelt beside the unconscious Spillbergen, while Vinck tried again to stand and called for help. Pieterzoon helped him up; Blackthorne then planted himself at the foot of the ladder, between the sailors and the way out.

Blackthorne shouted the warning word he had learned aboard ship and twisted the ladder to bar Kasigi Omi’s approach. Omi stopped, but only briefly: after ordering his men forward, he sent a samurai down the steps with two others close behind, all with swords drawn. Blackthorne grappled with the first man on the ladder, dodging a sword stroke and trying to choke him. He called the crew to help and pulled at the samurai as another attacker thrust down from above.

Vinck, who had seemed to collapse under the lottery’s verdict, now threw himself into the fight. He intercepted a blow aimed at Blackthorne’s wrist, held the swordsman’s arm back, and struck him before climbing the rungs and clawing at his face for control of the weapon. The cramped ladder restricted the other samurai, but one kicked Vinck away; as the men crowded forward, a blow finally knocked Blackthorne unconscious. The crew lost its leader in the struggle, and the three samurai took control of the cellar, using their daggers to drive the frightened sailors against the walls and away from the ladder rather than killing them.

Pieterzoon Is Driven from the Cellar

With the sailors forced back from the ladder, Kasigi Omi entered the pit and seized Pieterzoon, the nearest man. Pieterzoon struggled as Omi pulled him toward the exit; knives sliced his wrist and opened his arm, and the samurai steadily drove him up the rungs. Pieterzoon pleaded that he was not the one meant to die, but the blades kept pressing him upward until he turned and fled from the cellar in a panic. Omi followed without hurrying, making the removal look less like a rescue than an execution deferred onto another man.

The samurai then withdrew. One picked up Blackthorne’s knife, stepped over his unconscious comrade, and climbed away; the ladder was hauled up after them, and bolts crashed into place. The opening’s air and light vanished, leaving the crew in gloom as their panting, racing heartbeats and the cellar’s stench filled the silence. The flies soon returned. Jan Roper had a small cut on his cheek, Maetsukker was bleeding badly, and the others were mostly in shock. Salamon groped over to Blackthorne, pulled him away from the unconscious samurai, and pointed for water. Croocq fetched it in a gourd, and together they propped Blackthorne against the wall and began cleaning the muck from his face; he remained lifeless, and the boy feared that the blows had broken his neck or shoulder.

The Meaning of the Revolt

The cellar’s narrow ladder becomes the scene’s measure of power. At first it is an exit the sailors cannot use; when Blackthorne twists it across Omi’s approach, it briefly becomes a barrier they can defend. That reversal does not last. The samurai force the crew away from the rungs, and after Pieterzoon is driven upward, they remove the ladder and bolt the opening. The men have resisted the selection of a victim, but they have not escaped the authority holding them there.

The lottery’s appeal to divine judgment offers no protection from human coercion: its result makes Vinck vulnerable, and the armed men turn that vulnerability into an opportunity to take Pieterzoon instead. The abrupt substitution leaves the crew’s stated terms unresolved in practice. Their revolt changes the immediate action, not the conditions of captivity. When air and light disappear behind the closed hatch, the episode ends not with a victory but with survival bought at a terrible cost, and with Blackthorne unconscious among the men he tried to defend.