After Google Map to the help of Archeology, here is Google Search to the help of History
An amateur historian used Google Search to uncover the long-lost story of the first Australian ship reaching the coasts of Japan
Japan, mutiny, Australian convicts, amateur historian and google power user?
The tools at the hand of everybody are so ubiquitous today that we tend to forget how powerful they are. Just as people were getting used to see amateur archeologists using Google Maps to discover Mayan ruins in the jungle (or not), here is an amateur historian using Google Search to discover how the first Australian maritime foray into Japanese waters was by convict pirates on an audacious escape from Tasmania almost two centuries ago.
It’s not entirely luck though.
The Mutiny of the brig Cyprus took place on 9 August 1829 off the coasts of Tasmania while carrying prisoners from Hobart Town to Macquarie Harbour Penal Station. The mutineers sailed the brig into the South Seas with former sailor William Swallow as skipper, and reached Canton in China, where they were captured and taken to London.
At the time, Swallow wrote an account of the voyage which included a visit to then-isolationist Japan before reaching Canton. This was generally dismissed as fantasy and fabrication.
Indeed, a 1825 edict by the shogun stated that: “All foreign vessels should be fired upon. Any foreigner who landed should be arrested or killed. Every interaction should be reported in the utmost detail.”
But in 2014, as the Guardian relates it, Nick Russel, a British expatriate living in Tokushima, observed a strange watercolour sketch of an unnamed ship with a British flag on the website of the Tokushima prefectural archive.
Indeed, these paintings are strikingly beautiful and impressive.
After investigation, he discovered that they were parts of written accounts of a British ship off the town of Mugi, Tokushima on Shikoku island in 1830 by two samurais named Hamaguchi (Account of the Arrival of a Foreign Ship) and Hirota (A Foreign Ship Arrives Off Mugi Cove).
Thinking first that these reports were describing a whale ship lost in Japan, he begun questioning this view when he understood through the translations of the two reports that they were rather describing some sort of Pirate group.
He then googled “mutiny 1829”, and stumbled on the records of the story of the brig Cyprus, that matched in many points.
As it happen, Russel is now living 900m away from the point where the ships went to shore.
How lucky is that?
It’s part dedication, part serendipity, and probably part something else.
It’s not the first time the Mutiny of the Cyprus is of public interest. The conviction of the mutineers was already a matter of (un)luck. They went being arrested for another offense, but a clerck of the Court in London made the connection between their story and the story of a previous convict named Popjoy who had participated to their Mutiny but saved the Officers.
The Mutiny of the Cyprus became a folksong in Australia, already telling tales of their fictitious travel to Japan:
It also became a book by Frank Clune and P. R. Stephensen that states to have been based “on original documents never before published”… (I might want to add it my 20 books list for this summer):
It’s also a 1829 poem by Francis McNamara.
And, finally, a Greek stamp:
