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Pirates and Samurai

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Pirates and Samurai Pirates and Samurai Finding a Pirate Ship On 14th August, winter, 1829, after departing Hobart, she had met with a storm and taken Thursday 20th April 2017, 8:04 pm, I googled ‘mutiny 1829’ and there she was on the shelter in the uninhabited Recherche Bay. All the prisoners on board had reoffended in screen. I instantly knew it was her. One of those moments of disbelief at your own utter Van Diemen’s Land and were heading for Macquarie Harbour Penal Station, also known certainty tinged with annoyance that a hunt started two and a half years before had been as the Hell’s Gates and considered the worst place of punishment in the British Empire. A solved by a search that any 9-year-old worth their salt would have made. Her name was Victorian historian later described it as a place of ‘inexpressible depravity, degradation the Cyprus, a shallow draft brig (two-masted square-rigged ship) and her true story more and woe’. exciting than any Jonny Depp film. I had first come across the old ink and watercolour drawings chronicling the 1830 arrival of a foreign ship off Mugi Cove, Tokushima Prefecture while purchasing an old fisherman’s cottage in the area in June 2014. I had always been interested in obscure local histories and tried googling ‘foreign ship Tokushima’ in Japanese. I clicked on the top result and there on the screen were four ink and watercolour drawings: a nameless brig under British ensign; a crew member; a page of curiosities including a pipe, a bucket and some hats; and a map showing she had moored less than 900m from the back garden of my new holiday home. Notice on Sturminster Newton Bridge, U.K., 2004 J. Dunckley, courtesy of Creative Commons. Some six months later I finally made my way to the Tokushima Prefectural Archive and The Horrors of Transportation, c.1849 J. Platt, courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. found that there was a 5th image, the odd one out, that the archivists had not bothered to put up on the website. It was of a red coat and epaulet. Impressed with the detail on the In the late afternoon, the lieutenant in charge of the military guard of the West Suffolk 63rd cuffs, I photographed it before hearing a brief description of the illegible hand-written Foot went out in the jolly boat fishing in the calm of the bay. While he was away the account from Tani-san, one of the volunteer archivists. The manuscript, titled An prisoners, some in irons, were being let up on deck five at a time to exercise. Some of Illustrated Account of the Arrival of a Foreign Ship, was written in meticulous detail by a them simply overpowered the three guards on duty, freed the other prisoners, blocked the low-ranking samurai artist, Hamaguchi Makita. It was obviously a fascinating window narrow hatchway to prevent the other soldiers from coming up on deck, grabbed weapons into the Edo period recorded as Hokusai carved the wood blocks for his Great Wave. There and took control of the ship. Of the 63 prisoners, guards, crew, and accompanying family was also a second much shorter manuscript entitled A Foreign Ship Drifts in Off Mugi on board, 45 of them were put ashore on the beach 70km from Hobart with limited supplies. Cove. Tani-san, it turned out, was member of the Tokushima Old Manuscript Reading Group and had edited an annotated transcription of legible but still barely comprehensible versions. I took a copy home to translate and two and half years later with a slightly desperate last-ditch two-word Google search, ‘mutiny 1829’, I had solved an almost 200- year-old mystery of the ship’s name and her history, and quickly discovered that there were two books, an academic paper questioning the captain’s claim of having reached Japan, numerous webpages, articles and chapters, as well as a poem and folk ballad all written in English about this amazing escape. Mutiny and Piracy on the Brig Cyprus The brig Cyprus was purchased by the colonial government of Tasmania, then Van Diemen’s Land, in 1826 to convey convicts and supplies to prisons around the island. West Suffolk 63rd Foot redcoat shown in part of the Battle of Bunker Hill, 1897 by H. Pyle, presumed stolen. Van Diemen’s Land was then a British colony and had been settled as a penal colony for The Making of the Coracle, 1829 by W. B. Gould, courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. transported convicts since 1803. The brig was 70 feet 6 inches (21.8m) long 20 feet (6.1m) wide and had a yellow streak down each side and her hull was sheathed in copper. Of the 33 prisoners destined for Macquarie, 18 took the Cyprus, her cargo of supplies for the penal station and the personal effects of all on board. Later, all but one of the prisoners who stayed behind on the beach had their Macquarie Harbour Penal Station sentences revoked for not escaping and assisting the lieutenant and ship’s captain. William Swallow (a nom de guerre, his real name was William Walker) claiming to have played little active role in the mutiny was later to be celebrated in an Australian folk ballad that includes the following verse: ...The Morn broke bright the Wind was fair, we headed for the sea With one more cheer for those on shore and glorious liberty. For Navigating smartly Bill Swallow was the man, Who laid a course out neatly to take us to Japan... Swallow could read and write and had served an apprenticeship on a collier in the North Sea. He had been pressed to serve in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. After being discharged he was unable to find work and had turned to thieving. He also had a Brig Cyprus shown in part of Hobart Harbour, 1825 A. Earle, courtesy of the Dixson Galleries, State Library of New history of daring escapes having once stuffed his shirt with cork and jumped overboard South Wales. from another ship. 1 © Nicholas Russell 2017 Pirates and Samurai or they would be fired upon, a large ball was shown them as earnest of the intention of the natives. At that time it was a dead calm, and it continued so until after sunset, and they could not get away. The Japanese, to frighten them, then opened a fire from the batteries with musketoons. They made every attempt to get away, but could not, and the Japanese fired upon them from the guns of the batteries. One shot knocked the spyglass out of his hand, and another struck the vessel under the counter [part of the stern] betwixt wind and water. At 10 o’clock a breeze sprung up from oft the land, which enabled them to depart and make sail from the shore, and the Japanese ceased firing.’ The Samurai’s Curious Encounter with a Foreign Ship off Mugi Cove The key events of Swallow’s account appear to match those recorded in detail by the samurai chronicler Hamaguchi Makita in his Illustrated Account of the Arrival of a Foreign Ship. He was a low-ranking samurai who worked as an artist under the pseudonym Hamaguchi Gyoboku. Hamaguchi’s account can be divided into his eyewitness accounts and what was reported to him by others. Map data ©2017 Google To keep the Cyprus away from other shipping, Swallow set a course for New Zealand and sailed between the North Island and the South Island where they stocked up with water. Next, probably influenced by the story of the mutiny on the Bounty, they laid a course for Tahiti. But on August 25th, while being driven off course by a storm, a man was lost overboard and they landed on Chatham Island where they stole from a Moriori village and some sealers. When they finally neared Tahiti, the seasonal winds were against them and the sails in poor repair so they ended up sailing back westward to one of the Friendly Islands (Tonga) that the pirates called ‘Nowey’, probably Niuatoputapu. Here they stayed until mid- November when there was a disagreement and only 10 of the remaining 17 headed for Japan. There, the ship was damaged by a cannonball. After that, they headed past Map data ©2017 Google Formosa (Taiwan) where they scuttled the ship and headed for Canton, China: two men in ‘The foreign ship first appeared 50km off None, Tosa no Kuni [Kochi Prefecture] on the the jolly boat, 4 on a Chinese ship, and 4 in the long boat, the stern lettering of which had 11th day of the 12th month of the 12th year of the Emperor Bunsei.’ [The old Japanese been changed to ‘the Edward’. In Canton, Swallow claimed that they were shipwreck calendar was lunar and this was the 5th of January 1830 on the European Gregorian victims and that while in Japanese waters ‘being in want of Provisions and water’ were calendar.] The next day, the 6th of January, she was 12~16km off the village of None. After ‘fired at by two batteries and 16 Boats, and one shot struck the vessel between wind and dawn on the 7th, on the land standards were raised, gongs and drums were beaten, conch water’. Although viewed with suspicion by the authorities three of the crew of ten horns were sounded, and beacons were lit. Around 8 o’clock in the morning the ship was managed to board a ship to Mexico and were never heard of again, four of them returned seen to be sailing south toward Muroto Misaki Cape.
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