Yabu Seizes the Erasmus’s Weapons and Cargo is the moment when the captured ship’s promise becomes tangible political and military power. What Yabu finds in its holds is not merely foreign plunder: five hundred muskets, twenty cannon, ammunition, and a fortune in silver give substance to a military theory he has kept secret. His decision to hide and organize these resources sets the seizure apart from simple confiscation; it is the beginning of a plan to make firearms decisive in the coming war.

Discovery and Seizure

Omi had received a secret message about the ship and kept it sealed until Yabu could inspect it in person. When Yabu arrived from Yedo, weary from the journey, Omi reported that the holds were filled with crates and bales and handed over the keys he had confiscated. The ship had already obsessed Yabu; he looked toward it while the trial of its foreign crew wore on, hoping it might prove to be a gift from the gods. Its cargo soon gave that hope a practical and dangerous meaning.

Yabu ordered everything taken ashore the following day. He specifically instructed his retainers to repack the muskets in their crates and disguise the cargo beneath nets or sacking. His command joined acquisition to concealment: the weapons were valuable not just because they were numerous, but because they could be moved before rival powers learned what he had taken. He assigned Mura to provide porters and made Igurashi responsible for getting the entire armament, including the cannon, to his castle at Mishima in secret.

The scale of the find astonished even the people present in the ship’s main hold. Igurashi, the quartermaster Zukimoto, ten villagers opening crates under Mura’s supervision, and four members of Yabu’s bodyguard saw the weapons. Yabu recognized that they did not share his exhilaration or understand why secrecy mattered. He threatened that the village would be obliterated if the discovery became public; Mura promised that the villagers would say nothing, while warning that he could not answer for spies or other villages along the route. The threat underscores the vulnerability of the operation: moving the cargo required local labor, but every person who handled it could also expose it.

The Military Value of the Cargo

Yabu counted five hundred muskets, more gunpowder and shot than Toranaga possessed in all the Eight Provinces, twenty cannon, five thousand cannonballs, and crates of fire arrows. He regarded the weapons as European-quality equipment, not as curiosities. The cargo’s concentration and condition offered a force multiplier: firearms that might otherwise be dispersed or treated as novelties could be gathered, supplied, and drilled as a unit.

That prospect challenged the military code surrounding the weapons. After the Portuguese introduced muskets and gunpowder to Japan, Japanese makers began producing them within eighteen months, but guns remained poorly regarded. They were considered less accurate than bows for hunting and dishonorable in warfare, where ritualized individual combat and the sword carried greater prestige. Bushido demanded honorable fighting, loyalty to one’s lord, and fearlessness before death; by that measure, using guns could seem an evasion of the warrior’s proper test. Yabu’s seizure placed him directly at this fault line between inherited martial values and military effectiveness.

He imagined five hundred chosen samurai armed with muskets, trained together, and used to spearhead twelve thousand conventional troops. Twenty cannon would support them, operated in a special way by men trained as a unit. The numbers matter: Yabu was not simply proposing that his soldiers carry captured firearms. He envisioned coordinated formations, specialized artillery crews, and the integration of new weapons with a much larger conventional force. In his view, the coming war could be decided by that organization. His private question about bushido does not resolve the conflict; it shows that he understands the inherited objection even as he prepares to act against it.

Wealth and Other Cargo

The armaments were only part of the seizure. In the strong room, Yabu found silver and gold plate, cups, candelabra, ornaments, and religious paintings in ornate frames. A chest held women’s clothes embroidered with gold thread and colored stones. Zukimoto proposed melting the precious metal into ingots for the treasury and sending the garments, with other salvage, to Nagasaki, the Portuguese trading port on Kyushu. He judged the heavy cloth in another hold useless locally, with no market value, but found twenty thousand minted Spanish doubloons in a strongbox. The coins were described as the best quality.

The varied cargo gave the seizure more than one kind of consequence. Weapons promised battlefield power; precious metals could enlarge Yabu’s treasury; and the embroidered clothing and other salvage might be converted into trade. Yet Yabu’s attention in the bath afterward returns to the wealth as a source of power he had never imagined, while his most specific operational orders concern the armaments and their secret transfer. The scene therefore distinguishes immediate enrichment from the strategic prize that most excites him.

Consequences and Significance

In the aftermath, Yabu lies in a hot bath more confident than he has ever been. The contrast between that private contentment and the concealed work under way gives the seizure its political charge: the weapons are being removed from the ship and redirected into a lord’s private military design. Their presence does not itself prove that the strategy will succeed, but it gives Yabu the material means to develop his theory and makes him a more consequential player in the struggle around Toranaga.

The seizure also turns the Erasmus’s foreign technology into a test of political and cultural judgment. A rutter, the pilot’s detailed record of routes, depths, winds, currents, and hazards, could make dangerous voyages more navigable; Portuguese and Spanish powers guarded such books as national secrets, while their English and Dutch enemies sought them. The wider value of the ship thus lies in knowledge as well as goods, although the evidence of this seizure identifies weapons, valuables, and currency rather than confirming that Yabu took a rutter. The episode’s decisive result is more concrete: Yabu has acquired the arms, money, and secrecy needed to imagine a new kind of war, and he intends to move that possibility from the hold of the Erasmus into his castle at Mishima.