page_title: Cyprus mutiny
section_title: Visit to Japan
hierarchical_section_title: Cyprus mutiny / Visit to Japan
caption_attribution_description: English: A watercolour by samurai Makita Hamaguchi showing one of the sailors with a dog from the ship that ‘did not look like food. It looked like a pet.’
context_page_description: The Cyprus mutiny took place in 1829 off the British penal settlement of Van Diemen's Land. Convicts seized the brig Cyprus and sailed her to Canton, China, where they scuttled her and claimed to be castaways from another vessel. On the way, Cyprus visited Japan during the height of the period of severe Japanese restrictions on the entry of foreigners, the first Australian ship to do so.
  The mutineers were eventually captured. Two of them, George James Davis and William Watts, were hanged at Execution Dock, London on 16 December 1830, the last men hanged for piracy in Britain. Their leader, William Swallow, was never convicted of piracy because he convinced the British authorities that, as the only experienced sailor, he had been forced to remain onboard and coerced to navigate the ship. Swallow was instead sentenced to life on Van Diemen's Land for escaping, where he died four years later.
context_section_description: Swallow wrote an account of the voyage which included a visit to Japan before reaching Canton; this was generally dismissed as fantasy. However, in 2017 this account was compared with Japanese records of an unwelcome visit by a British vessel off the town of Mugi, Tokushima on Shikoku in 1830, and matched in many points.
  Makita Hamaguchi, a local samurai sent disguised as a fisherman to check the ship for weapons, wrote an account of the episode which included watercolour sketches of the ship and its crew. Another samurai chronicler called Hirota noted the crew offered gifts, including an object he later drew which has since been identified as a boomerang. The mutineers were desperately low on water, firewood, and supplies, but were attacked and sent away by the Japanese, in line with the isolationist policy of the time.
  Warwick Hirst, former curator of manuscripts at the State Library of New South Wales, said that  there were "too many coincidences for it not to be true"; Takashi Tokuno, chief curator at the archive of Tokushima Prefecture, Japan, said there is a "high probability" the ship in Japanese records was Cyprus.
caption: A watercolour by samurai Makita Hamaguchi showing one of the mutineers with a dog from the ship
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