Joshua Robertson - Australian convict pirates in Japan: evidence of 1830 voyage unearthed
An amateur historian has unearthed compelling evidence that the first
Australian maritime foray into Japanese waters was by convict pirates on an
audacious escape from Tasmania almost two centuries ago. Fresh translations of
samurai accounts of a “barbarian” ship in 1830 give startling corroboration to
a story modern scholars had long dismissed as convict fantasy: that a ragtag
crew of criminals encountered a forbidden Japan at the height of
its feudal isolation.
The brig Cyprus was
hijacked by convicts bound from Hobart to Macquarie Harbour in 1829, in a
mutiny that took them all the way to China. Its maverick skipper
was William Swallow, a onetime British cargo ship apprentice and naval
conscript in the Napoleonic wars, who in a piracy trial in London the following
year told of a samurai cannonball in Japan knocking a telescope from his hand.
Swallow’s fellow
mutineers, two of whom were the last men hanged for piracy in Britain, backed
his account of having been to Japan.
Western researchers,
citing the lack of any Japanese record of the Cyprus, had since ruled the
convicts’ story a fabrication. But that conclusion
has been shattered by Nick Russell, a Japan-based English teacher and history
buff, in a remarkable piece of sleuthing that has won the endorsement of
Australian diplomatic officials and Japanese and Australian archival experts. Russell, after almost
three years of puzzling over an obscure but meticulous record of an early
samurai encounter with western interlopers, finally joined the dots with the
Cyprus through a speculative Google search last month. The British expatriate
all but solved what was for the Japanese a 187-year mystery, while likely
uncovering vivid new detail of an epic chapter of colonial Australian history. “If you’d said I was going to go hunt and find
a new pirate ship, I’d have gone, ‘you’re crazy’,” Russell told Guardian
Australia. “I just stumbled on it. Boom. There it was on the screen in front of
me.
“I immediately knew
and as soon as I started checking, everything just fitted so perfectly.”
The ship anchored on
16 January 1830 off the town of Mugi, on Shikoku island, where Makita
Hamaguchi, a samurai sent disguised as a fisherman to check the ship for
weapons, noted an “unbearable stench in the vicinity of the ship”... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/may/28/australian-convict-pirates-in-japan-evidence-of-1830-voyage-unearthed