ONLY A FEW of the first British visitors to Ezo or Hokkaido, as it was renamed after the Meiji restoration, travelled outside the limited area around Hakodate which was open to foreigners under the Treaty Port system established by the Treaties of 1854 and 1858 with the United States and the European powers. Travel outside this area became more frequent in the 1870s and Isabella Bird was able in 1878 to travel quite extensively among the Ainu (see her Unbeaten Tracks in Japan published in 1880). It was about this time that the young missionary John Batchelor began his studies of the Ainu, their language and culture and spent part of each year among them. By the early 1880s when A.H. Savage Landor travelled among the Ainu, the island had been, at least partly, opened up and his experiences related in his book Among the Hairy Ainu (1893) were probably not as unique an adventure as Landor made out. Landor in his account of his travels reveals himself as a particularly obnoxious type of Victorian Englishman and it is easy to understand why he travelled ‘alone’.

In my book Victorians in Japan: In and Around the Treaty Ports I have edited some of the British accounts of life in Hakodate in the nineteenth century. For reasons of space I had to omit accounts of the area outside the Treaty limits, but some of the accounts which have been preserved of journeys in Ezo, as I propose to call the island, are worth recalling. In what follows I have tried to piece together some of the more interesting accounts from the available materials. Apart from some Victorian books long out of print and difficult to find, I have drawn on contributions to the Royal Geographical Society.

One of the first British officers to visit Ezo was J. M. Tronson, who accompanied Admiral Sir John Stirling to Japan in 1854 for the negotiations with the Bakufu, which led to the first British Treaty with Japan. His account in A Voyage to Japan, Kamtschatka, Siberia, Tartary and Various Parts of Coast of China in H.M.S. Barracoota was published in 1859.