John Blackthorne reunites with the surviving crew of the Erasmus in a rough wharf-side house and discovers that they have been living in an eta village. The joyful recognition of old shipmates becomes a reckoning: the Captain-General is dead, the ship’s restoration was carried out by Toranaga’s men, and the crew’s new home occupies a place Japanese society marks as polluted. Blackthorne is welcomed back as their pilot, but he cannot return unchanged to the world they remember.

The Sound of the Crew

Blackthorne is crossing the marshy southeastern edge of the city, through roads and air thick with the smells of mud flats, seaweed, and feces, when a fragment of Dutch sea song reaches him. He recognizes the possibility that Johann Vinck is singing and hurries toward it, accompanied by porters and samurai. The sound cuts through the discomfort of the journey: it promises not simply information about the ship, but contact with the people whose language and shared past connect him to his former life.

The building is unmistakably a makeshift settlement. It stands on pilings inside a rickety bamboo fence, with no gate, a thatched roof, rough boards, and Dutch-style shutters. A limp Dutch flag hangs from a short pole; its presence quickens Blackthorne’s anticipation before he can identify any voice. When he enters, he finds Johann Vinck, Baccus van Nekk, and the others crowded into a candlelit room with crude furniture, a large saké keg, dirty dishes, and half-roasted meat. The place is fetid and disorderly, but its Dutch singing and banter make it a pocket of the world he once knew.

Recognition breaks the initial astonishment. Van Nekk welcomes Blackthorne with a theatrical announcement, and the crew’s silence gives way to shouting, embraces, blows on the back, and overlapping questions. They make room for him in the best chair and press a drink into his hand. Their welcome is affectionate and physical, expressed in the men’s eagerness to touch and question him after believing him dead. The reunion gives Blackthorne a moment of belonging, but it also makes the distance between his current identity and theirs immediately visible: one of the men has taken him for a samurai.

What the Crew Has Endured

The men present are Sonk the cook, Johann Vinck, the bosun’s mate and chief gunner, Salamon, Croocq, Ginsel, Baccus van Nekk, and Jan Roper. Roper sits apart with his familiar sour smile, while the others gather around Blackthorne. Their collective welcome is tempered by a loss he learns as soon as he asks after the Captain-General. The crew answers that he is dead; Van Nekk explains that, after Blackthorne was taken away, the sick Captain-General choked in the darkness of the pit and never emerged. The account is confused in its timing, shaped by the men’s fear, but the death itself is clear. Blackthorne’s homecoming therefore begins with news of an absence that cannot be repaired.

The ship’s condition brings another reversal. Blackthorne praises the crew for the work he assumes they accomplished, promising that he will argue for triple shares of the prize money and an additional reward. Van Nekk corrects him: Toranaga’s men did the labor, while Vinck showed them what needed to be done. Vinck explains that Sato-sama asked what was wrong with the ship; he told him that it needed careening, scraping, and repairs throughout. Japanese workers then careened the vessel, cleaned its bilges, and scrubbed it, with hundreds of workers involved. The Erasmus has been made more serviceable, but its recovery is not a simple triumph of the old crew’s skill. Their practical knowledge helped direct the work, while the physical effort came from Toranaga’s people.

The sailors’ account also traces how they arrived at their present lodging. After their time in the pit, they were moved to another house in the wharf area. Weeks later, Vinck—then the only one permitted out because of his work on the ship—asked Sato-sama whether they could move. He had been allowed to fish from a small skiff, and the smell of blood led him to the present place. The surrounding slaughterhouse and tannery explain why the crew is settled there: the house is part of an eta village, not an ordinary lodging assigned without regard to its neighbors.

Encounter with the Eta Stigma

Blackthorne recognizes what the others have not understood. When he realizes that the village is eta, he explains that Japanese society treats eta as a separate group associated with executions, hides, the killing of old horses and oxen, and the handling of corpses. His crew responds by comparing this work with things they have done themselves: they have buried the dead, washed bodies, butchered meat, and, in Ginsel’s case, served as a hangman. Blackthorne concedes that there is nothing inherently wrong with the work, yet he still feels befouled. The distinction unsettles him precisely because he can see that the stigma is social rather than a judgment he can justify by the tasks themselves.

The realization does not remain an abstract disagreement. Fleas and mosquitoes infest the place, and Blackthorne has been scratching without noticing the bites. As he leaves, his mind holds the opposing judgments together: nothing is wrong with the eta, yet everything seems wrong because his own people are living among them, while the Japanese remain, to his unsettled perspective, foreign and enemy. He tears off his wet, flea-infested kimono and throws it into a ditch. The gesture brings immediate relief from the crawling sensation on his skin, but it also registers how bodily discomfort and inherited social revulsion have become entangled in his response to the village.

A Reunion That Does Not Restore the Past

The crew treats Blackthorne’s arrival as an answer to their prayers and urges him to take Van Nekk’s bunk. He responds warmly, but on the walk back, surrounded by ten samurai guards, the celebration gives way to confusion. He has told the men about his adventures but has withheld that he is a samurai and hatamoto, one of Toranaga’s protégés, or that Fujiko and Mariko have become part of his life. He has also kept from them his plan to land in force at Nagasaki and seize the Black Ship. He postpones those revelations rather than trying to fit his transformed circumstances into the first rush of reunion.

The scene thus restores fellowship without restoring the life Blackthorne left behind. The Dutch song, flag, and crew’s unguarded welcome recall his identity as a pilot among Europeans, while their mistaken assumption that he is a samurai exposes the status he has acquired in Japan. The dead Captain-General and the Japanese laborers who repaired the Erasmus make the separation concrete: events have continued in Blackthorne’s absence, and his ship and crew now depend on arrangements made by Toranaga’s people. He can recognize his men as his own and share their relief, yet he cannot simply return to their former understanding of him. The reunion offers a homecoming and reveals its limits in the same moment.