Tall tales, tall ships

ON A COLD DAY IN 1829 a worn and battered ship arrived unannounced at Chatham Island; no one had known she was coming, and soon all on the Island would want her gone. She was the brig Cyprus, once a fine two-masted vessel launched in Sunderland, England in 1816, but the ship that arrived that day was a shadow of her former self. Chatham Islanders reported that her sails were ripped, her rigging in tatters and parts of her upper deck appeared damaged or dismantled. This was a ship that did not look like the usual whalers that called, and her captain was not handling her like one, but then the Cyprus - as the Chathams were about to find out and as the rest of the world is still discovering to this day - was no ordinary ship and her master no ordinary man.

Cyprus first sailed the ocean waves on a regular route from England to the Baltic, but in 1825 she was brought to warmer climates, running between Sydney and Hobart; just a year later she was carrying convicts in the service of the Australian Governor. In 1828 a Lieutenant Carew was overseeing a ‘cargo’ of just over 30 convicts and their families with 14 troopers when Cyprus anchored in Recherche Bay in southeastern Tasmania to escape a storm. With the storm blowing itself out, Carew and some of his menremarkably - went fishing, and returned to find the ship in the hands of the convicts and quite ably led by one William Swallow.

Swallow is a character that only the early 1800s could produce. He was known by various aliases and arrived in the Australian penal colonies in 1821, charged with the heinous crime of stealing a quilt. He soon absconded and made his way back to England where he upped his game from bedding and instead plundered ships and stole sheep. This earned him another deportation - and saw him aboard the Cyprus on that fateful day in Recherche Bay.

The rebellious convicts left the hapless fishing party and some of their fellows and family members who were not up to the adventure behind, and set off south, aiming to get as far away from England as possible. With a largely untrained crew - Swallow was the only able seaman - it must have been a hair-raising voyage, but they made it to New Zealand and then on to the Chathams for that rendezvous in 1829. Even in a community used to seeing what the ocean threw up, the Cyprus was a spectacle - a spectacle that quickly relieved another ship, the Samuel, of her cargo of seal skins, essentially cleaning out that crew of a season’s toil. The

convicts - now essentially pirates - also managed to make themselves unwelcome to the fairly rough and tumble local population of that time, and with nothing to the south but ice, Swallow instead turned the ship north.

They set out for Tahiti, the preferred destination of most of the Pacific’s wastrels, but ended up in Tonga. Some of the crew jumped ship there, but Swallow was just getting started and headed north. What happened next was for many years open to conjecture; according to Swallow the Cyprus reached Japan, at a time when that country’s isolationist policy spelt death to foreigners. The Cyprus supposedly arrived desperately short of water and provisions, anchored over and began a bizarre interaction with the locals, who marvelled at the smoking of pipes, the keeping of dogs as pets and the way the sailors spoke, which they described as being like birds twittering.

Before long however local samurai were ordered to fire on the ship, with Swallow later recounting that a cannon ball knocked a telescope from his hand, and the Cyprus quickly set sail, making a hasty and very lucky escape.

Swallow now set off for China, and in Canton they scuttled the ship and pleaded innocence with local English officials, claiming they were shipwreck survivors fresh from Japan and eager to return home. The bureaucracy wasn’t buying it however; no western ship had ever made it in and out of the closed country of Japan, and Swallow’s stories seemed far too implausible, and he was labelled a fantasist. The tall tale also triggered further digging that revealed the true identities of the crew, and while this certainly got them home to England, they arrived there in irons.

Following a trial, two of the mutineers went to the gallows at Execution Dock, London in December 1830, becoming the last men to be hanged for piracy in Britain.

William Swallow was not one of them. Ever the survivor, he convinced the court that as the only capable seaman he had been forced to follow the wishes of the mutineers, and amazingly he escaped the gallows. He couldn’t escape the charge of fleeing custody and not remaining with the other innocents in Recherche Bay however, so was once again deported, to the notorious Port Arthur where he died of consumption just four years later in 1834 aged 42. He is buried in an anonymous grave.

And for nearly 200 years the fantastical tale of the Cyprus’s Japan sojourn was buried with him, until some amateur sleuthing of Japanese historical records turned up an account of a ship crewed by ‘barbarians’ that arrived in Shikoku in 1830.