Rodrigues’s search and arrest

Rodrigues’s search and arrest turns a security measure into a personal rupture: Mariko’s attempt to protect Blackthorne leads to an invasive search of Rodrigues, while the two foreign sailors leave the encounter still indebted to one another but anticipating possible conflict at sea.

The Search and Departure

After the search, Rodrigues stalked off, followed by Yoshinaka and the samurai. At the gateway, the Portuguese collected his arms; soon Rodrigues was swallowed by the night. The account makes the search’s immediate consequence clear—he departed under the samurai’s watch—but does not specify a formal charge or the terms of any arrest.

Why the Search Was Ordered

In the quiet that followed, Blackthorne asked Mariko whether Rodrigues had been going to kill him. Blackthorne could not be sure. He then asked what it meant to search someone in the Spanish manner. Mariko explained that such searches could involve stripping prisoners and probing private places, sometimes with knives. She added that similar abuse could occur in Japan, and that capture itself was considered so dishonorable that a prisoner might be subjected to almost anything.

Blackthorne concluded that Yoshinaka had been right to search Rodrigues and asked whether Mariko had prompted it. She confirmed that it had been her idea, explaining that she had feared for Blackthorne. Her intervention was protective, but its cost was immediate: Blackthorne regretted that without the search he might still have had a friend in Rodrigues.

A Friendship Under Strain

Rodrigues had already framed his debt and his warning in the same terms. Outside a meeting at sea, he considered himself forever indebted to Blackthorne; if they met armed in their ships, however, Blackthorne should look to his life. Blackthorne answered that he hoped to catch Rodrigues’s Black Ship. The search therefore sharpened an existing tension between personal loyalty and the dangers of their competing maritime roles, without resolving whether Rodrigues had truly intended to harm him.