These epistles show him to have been on the most friendly terms with some of the foremost men in state and church, though his ardent protestantism offended Laud and hindered his preferment. His “occasionally” printed sermons, when collected in 1629, placed him beyond all comparison in the van of the preachers of England, and had something to do with shaping John Bunyan. He equals Jeremy Taylor in brilliance of fancies, and Thomas Fuller in wit. Robert Southey calls him “the prose Shakespeare of Puritan theologians.” His numerous works display great learning, classical and patristic, and are unique in their abundance of stories, anecdotes, aphorisms and puns.
His works were edited in J. P. Nichol’s Puritan Divines, by J. Angus and T. Smith (3 vols. 8vo, 1862).
ADAMS, WILLIAM (d. 1620), English navigator, was born at Gillingham, near Chatham, England. When twelve years old he was apprenticed to the seafaring life, afterwards entering the British navy, and later serving the Company of Barbary merchants for a number of years as master and pilot. Attracted by the Dutch trade with India, he shipped as pilot major with a little fleet of five ships despatched from the Texel in 1598 by a company of Rotterdam merchants. The vessels, boats ranging from 75 to 250 tons and crowded with men, were driven to the coast of Guinea, where the adventurers attacked the island of Annabon for supplies, and finally reached the straits of Magellan. Scattered by stress of weather the following spring the “Charity,” with Adams on board, and the “Hope,” met at length off the coast of Chile, where the captains of both vessels lost their lives in an encounter with the Indians. In fear of the Spaniards, the remaining crews determined to sail across the Pacific. On this voyage the “Hope” was lost, but in April 1600 the “Charity,” with a crew of sick and dying men, was brought to anchor off the island of Kiushiu, Japan. Adams was summoned to Osaka and there examined by Iyeyasu, the guardian of the young son of Taiko Sama, the ruler, who had just died. His knowledge of ships and shipbuilding, and his nautical smattering of mathematics, raised him in the estimation of the shogun, and he was subsequently presented with an estate at Hémi near Yokosuka; but was refused permission to return to England. In 1611 news came to him of an English settlement in Bantam, and he wrote asking for help. In 1613 Captain John Saris arrived at Hirado in the ship “Clove” with the object of establishing a trading factory for the East India Company, and after obtaining the necessary concessions from the shogun, Adams postponed his voyage home (permission for which had now been given him) in order to take a leading part, under Richard Cocks, in the organization of this new English settlement. He had already married a Japanese woman, by whom he had a family, and the latter part of his life was spent in the service of the English trading company, for whom he undertook a number of voyages to Siam in 1616, and Cochin China in 1617 and 1618. He died on the 16th of May 1620, some three years before the dissolution of the English factory. His Japanese title was Anjin Sama, and his memory was preserved in the naming of a street in Yedo, Anjin Cho (Pilot Street), and by an annual celebration on June 15 in his honour.
See England’s Earliest Intercourse with Japan, by C. W. Hillary (1905); Letters written by the English Residents in Japan, ed. by N. Murakami (1900, containing Adams’s Letters reprinted from Memorials of the Empire of Japan, ed. by T. Rundall, Hakluyt Society, 1850); Diary of Richard Cocks, with preface by N. Murakami (1899, reprinted from the Hakluyt Society ed. 1883); R. Hildreth’s Japan (1855); J. Harris’s Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca (1764), i. 856; Voyage of John Saris, ed. by Sir E. M. Satow (Hakluyt Society, 1900); Asiatic Society of Japan Transactions, xxvi. (sec. 1898) pp. 1 and 194, where four more hitherto unpublished letters of Adams are given; Collection of State Papers; East Indies, China and Japan. The MS. of his logs written during his voyages to Siam and China is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
ADAMS, a township in the extreme N. of Berkshire county, N.W. Massachusetts, U.S.A., having an area of 23 sq. m. Pop. (1880) 5591; (1890) 9213; (1900) 11,134, of whom 4376 were foreign-born; (1910, census) 13,026. It includes a portion of the valley of the Hoosac river, extending to the Hoosac Range on the E., and on the W. to Mt. Williams (3040 ft.), and Greylock Mountain (3535 ft.), partly in Williamstown, and the highest point in the state. The valley portion is level and contains several settlement centres, the largest of which, a busy industrial village (manufactures of cotton and paper), bears the same name as the township, and is on a branch of the Boston and Albany railroad. The village is the nearest station to Greylock, which can be easily
ascended, and affords fine views of the Hoosac and Housatonic valleys, the Berkshire Hills and the Green Mountains; the mountain has been a state timber reservation since 1898. The township’s principal industry is the manufacture of cotton goods, the value of which in 1905 ($4,621,261) was 84·1% of the value of the township’s total factory products; in 1905 no other place in the United States showed so high a degree of specialization in this industry. The township (originally “East Hoosuck”) was surveyed and defined in 1749. Fort Massachusetts, at one time within its bounds, was destroyed in 1746 by the French. An old Indian trail between the Hudson and Connecticut valley ran through the township, and was once a leading outlet of the Berkshire country. Adams was incorporated in 1778, and was named in honour of Samuel Adams, the revolutionary leader. Part of Adams was included in the new township of Cheshire in 1793, and North Adams was set off as a separate township in 1878.
ADAM’S APPLE, the movable projection, more prominent in males than females, formed in the front part of the throat by the thyroid cartilage of the larynx. The name was given from a legend that a piece of the forbidden fruit lodged in Adam’s throat. The “Adam’s apple” is one of the particular points of attack in the Japanese system of self-defence known as jiu-jitsu.
ADAM’S BRIDGE, or Rama’s Bridge, a chain of sandbanks extending from the island of Manaar, near the N.W. coast of Ceylon to the island of Rameswaram, off the Indian coast, and lying between the Gulf of Manaar on the S.W. and Palk Strait on the N.E. It is more than 30 m. long and offers a serious impediment to navigation. Some of the sandbanks are dry; and no part of the shoal has a greater depth than 3 or 4 ft. at high water, except three tortuous and intricate channels which have recently been dredged to a sufficient depth to admit the passage of vessels, so as to obviate the long journey round the island of Ceylon which was previously necessary. Geological evidence shows that this gap was once bridged by a continuous isthmus which according to the temple records was breached by a violent storm in 1480. Operations for removing the obstacles in the channel and for deepening and widening it were begun as long ago as 1838. A service of the British India Steam Navigation Company’s steamers has been established between Negapatam and Colombo through Palk Strait and this narrow passage.
ADAM SCOTUS (fl. 1180), theological writer, sometimes called Adam Anglicus or Anglo-Scotus, was born in the south of Scotland in the first half of the 12th century. About 1150 he was a Premonstratensian canon at St Andrews, and some twenty years later abbot and bishop of Candida Casa (Whithorn) in Galloway. He gained a European reputation for his writings, which are of mystico-ascetic type, and include an account of the Premonstratensian order, a collection of festival sermons, and a Soliloquia de instructione discipuli, formerly attributed to his contemporary, Adam of St Victor.
ADAMSON, PATRICK (1537–1592), Scottish divine, archbishop of St Andrews, was born at Perth. He studied philosophy, and took the degree of M.A. at St Andrews. After being minister of Ceres in Fife for three years, in 1566 he set out for Paris as tutor to the eldest son of Sir James Macgill, the clerk-general. In June of the same year he wrote a Latin poem on the birth of the young prince James, whom he described as serenissimus princeps of France and England. The French court was offended, and he was confined for six months. He was released only through the intercession of Queen Mary of Scotland and some of the principal nobility, and retired with his pupil to Bourges. He was in this city at the time of the massacre of St Bartholomew at Paris, and lived concealed for seven months in a public-house, the aged master of which, in reward for his charity to a heretic, was thrown from the roof. While in
