Pirate’s tall tale is true
In 1829, a gang of convicts destined for a prison colony in Tasmania, an island south of Australia, made a daring escape. They hijacked their boat, called the Cyprus, and fled to China. From there, some of them eventually made it to the UK, where they were arrested and put on trial for piracy. During the trial, William Swallows, the man who had captained the ship of fleeing prisoners, described an episode as they sailed past Japan. There, he said, they had been fired upon by fearsome warriors. Swallows told the court that during this attack, a telescope was knocked out of his hand. No one believed his story, and for years, the tale was dismissed as a lie – until now.
Nick Russell, a British historian living in Japan, has spent almost three years researching a document written by a Japanese samurai warrior in the early 19th century. In it the author tells of an encounter between the samurai and a ship bearing sailors with “long pointed noses”. The samurai, thinking the escaped prisoners must be pirates, fired a cannon at them.
One of their cannonballs knocked the telescope from Swallows’s hand. Russell heard about the Cyprus, and made the connection between the ship, the story and the document. Now, experts from Japan and Australia agree that Swallows’s tale was true all along, making the Cyprus the first Australian ship ever to reach Japan.