YANKEE TRADER'S DESCENDANT WELCOMES U. S. FLAG
Nathaniel Savory, a Yankee adventurer and trader from Bradford, Massachussets, settled on the island of Chichi Jima in the Bonins, 615 miles south of Tokyo, in 1830. He spent most of his long life vainly trying to make the island, then called Peel Island, a part of the US. He was still being rebuffed by the US when he died in 1874 at the age of 80. Though the Japanese took over and colonized Chichi Jima, Savory's descendants still kept up their loyalty to a country they never saw. Every Forth of July, they held secret celebrations in their houses. Now Nathaniel Savory's great- grandson, Frederick Arthur Savory, is carrying on the family's ancient feud against the Japanese. He is a key man in the U.S. Navy's war criminal trials now being held on Guam. As interpreter and investigator , Frederick Savory has turned up evidence which accuses Lieut. General Yoshio Tachibana and Major Sueyo Matoba of executing American fliers shot down in the Bonins and, even more revolting, of practicing cannibalism on them.
The name "Bonin" means empty of man, and the islands had been just that until Nathaniel Savory arrived with the pioneer colonists in 1830. Technically the two Americans, five Europeans, and score of Polynesians were under British auspices. But the dominant figure was the resourceful, industrious New Englander, Nathaniel Savory.
He soon had difficulties with the drunken, inefficient Genoese named Matteo Mazarro, who acted as governor, and it was not long before he hoisted the Stars and Stripes in front of his home and defied Mazarro's order to haul it down. When Mazarro died in 1848, the man from Massachussets, who still proudly insisted that he was a citizen of the U.S., was unanimously chosen governor of the Cinderella British colony.
Savory, who had lost two common-law Polynesian wives, married Mazarro's widow, a Guamanian belle, (her original name was Maria de los Santos y Castro) and he was careful to have the ceremony legally performed aboard the whaler, "No Duty On Tea" outside the three mile limit. Their second son was Horace Perry Savory, his middle name honoring the most distinguished visitor the Bonins have ever had, Matthew Calbraith Perry, who dropped anchor there in 1853 and bought about one hundred acres fronting on the islands best anchorage for fifty dollars. The same day he named Savory his agent, requesting him to " forbid trespass" on his land. Seventy years later, the boy Fred Savory saw the Japanese trespassing unhindered on the tract which his family still called "The Commodore's Land."
As early as 1861, the Japanese tried to colonize the Bonins. However, the peasant settlers found that the rich soil and balmy climate would grow anything but rice and they went back to Japan as soon as they could. The invasion in 1875 was different. A thousand or more Japanese, unwilling emigrants, were shipped to the Bonins. The original colonists appealed to London and Washington for aid. Neither was interested. So far as the colonists of American extraction were concerned, Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish had laid down the line in 1873: The colonists had received no promise of U.S. protection and Americans living in the islands were to be regarded as having expatriated themselves.
Nathaniel Savory had died before knowledge of this harsh decision reached the Bonins. His youngest son, Benjamin, born in 1867, grew up while the Japanese were closing off the islands from the outside world, but he went to an American Mission school in Tokyo. Benjamin's son Daniel found a way to see something of American territory: Each year, in early life, he shipped aboard on of the sailing ships which called to sign up the expert Bonin hunters. In that way, he got to the Aleutians, Alaska, and Seattle. But his papers described him as a Japanese. Though the descendants of the Europeans spoke Japanese and answered to Japanese names, they tried socially to segregate themselves from the new colonists. Only a few of them married Japanese.
Daniel's son, Fred went to school in Japan. He graduated from St. Joseph's College in Yokohama when he was twenty and prepared himself for the new day, which showed no sign of dawning, by working for American enterprises.
The American boycott of Japanese goods in 1940 ended Fred's mercantile career and he went back to Chichi Jima. All around were signs of Japanese preparation for war. The Commodore's Land was being enlarged by filling in the shoreline; the Imperial Navy already had a base there.
Fred was conscripted for the local labor corps and helped to pour concrete for secret underground radio stations. If war should come, he would have valuable information for the Americans he still regarded as brothers.
War reached the Bonin Islands on June 15, 1944. In one swoop, Hellcats and avengers from Rear Admiral "Jocko" Clark's carriers destroyed a third of the Jap's installations above ground on Chichi Jima. They also burned out a third of the town in which Savory lived. Fred was blown off a bridge by an American bomb, within a stone's throw of where Nathaniel Savory's original house had stood. He had been trying vain to make contact with American naval craft. Now it was too late. The Japanese evacuated all civilians to Japan where Fred worked as a painter.
Fred traveled more that one hundred miles from western Honshu to Yokosuka (no mean feat on Japan's crippled transportation lines) to see the Stars and Stripes raised. The other descendants of the colonists gathered around Fred and appointed him to lead them back to their beloved Bonins. Fred had another reason for wishing to go: He wanted to help the American authorities track down the war criminals. He promoted himself a passage and arrived at Chichi Jima last December 16. Only three days earlier the Stars and Stripes had been raised in the Bonins, for the first time since Nathaniel Savory's days, by Marine Colonel Presley M. Rixey, commander of the occupation forces.
Rixey engaged Fred as an interpreter. He soon proved invaluable by furnishing the evidence of American fliers being clubbed, bayoneted and beheaded, of their bodies being mutilated, of their livers being served in sukiyaki, and strips of their flesh used to flavor soup.
While at Guam for the trials, Fred learned the news he most longed to hear: Colonel Rixey's recommendation that Bonin Islanders of American and European descent be allowed to return to their homes had been approved in Washington. The Bonins have been cleared of Japanese rule and, at least until final disposition of the Bonins is decided, the descendants of Nathaniel Savory will live under the Stars and Stripes.
Note: My thanks to Bill and Mary Wilcox for supplying me with this article. They were stationed at NAVFAC CHICHI JIMA
JLW
NOTE: The Bonin Islands were returned to Japanese rule in 1968