Growing Pressure For The Opening of Japan
In the summer of 1864, the British government chartered the ship to bring troops to Kanagawa, Japan, because of the anti-foreign sentiment then prevalent among certain segments of the Japanese population who were resisting westernization.
As an outgrowth of this hostility to aliens in the summer of 1863, a Prince of Nagato, Mori, of the clan of Choshiu, fortified one side of the Strait of Shimonoseki to close that waterway to western commerce.
The following year, the western Treaty powers determined to open those waters once and for all. However, the only American warship then in that part of the world was the sail-powered sloop-of-war Jamestown, which could not overcome the strong currents in the strait and thus was unable to participate in any allied expedition to open navigation to foreign shipping.
Read more about this topic: USS Ta-Kiang (1862)
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