William Adams. a Kentish man, is presumed to have been the first Englishman to have lived in Japan, although C. R. Boxer came across a tantalising yet fleeting reference to a Scottish pilot in Portuguese service in the islands around Formosa some years before Adams' arrival in Japan.

During his years in Japan, Adams acted as an occasional diplomatic agent for Tokugawa Ieyasu, on whose orders he built two European-style ships, as well as acting on his own behalf as a pilot and a commercial agent.

William Corr's unswervingly precise biography encompasses Adams' times no less than the man himself and is a valuable contribution to Anglo-Japanese scholarship.