Venture in the East

Bruce Lancaster is known to his large audience as the author of a number of the finest historical novels written to date about the American Revolution and the Civil War. Now Mr. Lancaster, who was for five years American vice-consul at Kobe, Japan, has written a novel with an altogether different historical setting — 17th century Japan, when the Dutch East India Company had a rich but precarious foothold in that little-known land.
Most people know about the opening of Japan by Commodore Perry, but very few know about the closing of Japan to the western world several centuries earlier. As is true of all Bruce Lancaster novels, Venture in the East is solidly researched. No contriver of costume pageants, Mr. Lancaster knows his Japan, its people and its history. His almost fabulous Frenchman Francois Caron, who serves the Dutch East India Company as liaison man with the Japanese, whose ruler he advises, is not a fictional character, but an actual historical figure.
According to inflexible Japanese law at that time, no white woman was allowed to enter the country. When lovely, high-spirited Trudi Van Os bribed her way aboard a ship bound for Japan, rather than make a distasteful marriage in Batavia, it could have meant her death. But Dirk Young, the English youth employed by the Company, fell in love with her at first sight and managed to persuade the local ruler to let her stay. After all, Trudi was born in Japan — of European parents; even her middle name was Japanese.
Caron’s plan to load Japan’s unemployed and dissatisfied soldiers on Dutch boats and seize the Philippines from the Spaniards might have changed the whole course of Oriental history had it succeeded. How and why this bold plan failed, how Dirk and Trudi became involved in it at the peril of their lives, and how they were finally smuggled out of the country, married, and set sail for the new world, makes as exciting a plot as you would ever want to read.
Here is an astonishing re-creation of a people so far away from us in time and place and especially in customs as to seem almost fantastic. Bruce Lancaster makes these ancient Japanese seem as real to us as the Frenchman Caron, the English Dirk, the Dutch Trudi and the members of the Eat India Company. Venture in the East is a remarkable achievement in the field of the historical novel.

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