Richard Cocks (1566–1624) was the head of the

British East India Company The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southea ...

trading post in

Hirado is a city located in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. The part historically named Hirado is located on Hirado Island. With recent mergers, the city's boundaries have expanded, and Hirado now occupies parts of the main island of Kyushu. The components ...

, Japan, between 1613 and 1623, from its creation, and lasting to its closure due to bankruptcy. He was baptised on 20 January 1565 at St Chad's,

Seighford Seighford ( ) is a village and civil parish about west of Stafford in Staffordshire, England. The population of this civil parish at the 2011 census was 1,793. The ford across a small stream is the origin of the village's toponym. The village ...

, Staffordshire, the fifth of the seven children of Robert Cocks of Stallbrook, yeoman, and his wife, Helen. He was apprenticed in London and became a member of the

Clothworkers' Company The Worshipful Company of Clothworkers was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1528, formed by the amalgamation of its two predecessor companies, the Fullers (incorporated 1480) and the Shearmen (incorporated 1508). It succeeded to the position of t ...

. He moved to

Bayonne Bayonne (; eu, Baiona ; oc, label= Gascon, Baiona ; es, Bayona) is a city in Southwestern France near the Spanish border. It is a commune and one of two subprefectures in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department, in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine ...

in Southern France and in 1605 he was recruited by Sir Thomas Wilson as a spy, where he monitored the movements of English Roman Catholic exiles who passed through the region on their way to Spain. After losing a large amount of money to a Portuguese con artist, he was no longer able to pay his English creditors and returned home in disgrace. His reputation at home was ruined and he decided to leave England to start a new life in Japan. During his time in Japan, he wrote a very detailed diary, relating the history of the trading post, the situation of Japan at the time, and the activities of English merchants in Japan, among whom was also the English pilot and

samurai were the hereditary military nobility and officer caste of History of Japan#Medieval Japan (1185–1573/1600), medieval and Edo period, early-modern Japan from the late 12th century until their abolition in 1876. They were the well-paid retai ...

, retainer to

Tokugawa Ieyasu was the founder and first ''shōgun'' of the Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan, which ruled Japan from 1603 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. He was one of the three "Great Unifiers" of Japan, along with his former lord Oda Nobunaga and fel ...

, William Adams, with whom he wrote he had visited the residence of the Imperial Fleet Admiral, under orders from the

Shogun , officially , was the title of the military dictators of Japan during most of the period spanning from 1185 to 1868. Nominally appointed by the Emperor, shoguns were usually the de facto rulers of the country, though during part of the Kamakura ...

, to discuss the possibility, required logistics, and outcome of an invasion of the Philippines in 1616. The surviving documents of the trading post (letters, accounts and journals) are a unique source of first-hand accounts of Early Modern Japan through secular Western eyes.''The English Factory in Japan 1613-1623'', ed. by Anthony Farrington, British Library, 1991. After the trading post was closed in 1623, Cocks sailed for England on the '' Anne Royal'' but died and was buried at sea on 27 March 1624 in the southern Indian Ocean.

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* English businesspeople English diarists British expatriates in Japan British East India Company civil servants 1560s births 1624 deaths 16th-century English writers 16th-century male writers 17th-century English writers 17th-century English male writers {{UK-nonfiction-writer-stub