Ranald MacDonald Secretly Enters Japan

Ranald MacDonald, a Chinook and Scottish sailor, knowingly sailed toward isolationist Japan in 1848 and staged a fake shipwreck on Rishiri Island off Hokkaido. Local Ainu captured him and remitted him to the Matsumae domain authorities, who then sent him under guard to Nagasaki, the only Japanese port open to limited foreign contact. There, officials decided he could be useful and assigned him to teach English to a group of interpreters, making him the first native English speaker to teach the language in Japan before he was later released to an American warship.

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