
Australian convict pirates in Japan: evidence of 1830 voyage unearthed - jwfxpr
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/may/28/australian-convict-pirates-in-japan-evidence-of-1830-voyage-unearthed
======
femto
The Australian classic novel, "For the Term of His Natural Life" by Marcus
Clark (1874) contains a fictionalised account of this mutiny and convict life.
It's a good read.

The novel in turn draws from Clark's earlier piece "The Seizure of the Cyprus"
[2].

[1]
[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3424](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3424)

[2]
[http://www.telelib.com/authors/C/ClarkeMarcus/prose/OldTales...](http://www.telelib.com/authors/C/ClarkeMarcus/prose/OldTales/seizurecyprus.html)

------
aaron695
[http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/8644472](http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/8644472)
(1829)

Original account of how they took they ship.

~~~
eddy_chan
Thanks for posting that. It's amazing how accessible the english language was
(190 years ago) to a reader today. Spelling and vocabulary are pretty much the
same. Compare that with a period 190 years before 1829, 1639 and you'd almost
be back in Shakespearean England.

~~~
kwhitefoot
English from 1639 is much more accessible to English speakers than texts from
that period in many other languages are to their speakers now.

What often makes Shakespeare difficult is that he and his audience had a
shared background so a lot of allusions are lost on a modern audience.

Even Chaucer has a lot of quite readable passages. Take a look at this side by
side original and modern English versions of the prologue to the Canterbury
Tales: [http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/source/CT-prolog-
para...](http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/source/CT-prolog-para.html)

------
i_feel_great
“It is very strange that everyone who goes out for a closer look returns
feeling very sorry for them.

I feel sorry for them from what I know about convict history and penal
colonies in Australia. The British authorities were very nasty. You could be
sent to the penal colonies with hard labour for stealing a loaf of bread to
feed yourself. Patrick Logan, the commander of the Moreton Bay penal colony
here in Brisbane, was a very vicious man
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Logan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Logan)

~~~
robotmay
There's a folk song about Moreton Bay that details some of the horrible things
Logan did. Here's a pretty recent rendition by a couple of British folk
musicians (apologies to any Australians who know of good Aussie versions):
[https://saulrosejamesdelarre.bandcamp.com/track/moreton-
bay](https://saulrosejamesdelarre.bandcamp.com/track/moreton-bay). Although
lyrics change over time, folk songs are often a good record of events as they
were usually created by less literate people and you get the working man's
viewpoint essentially by word-of-mouth.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> Although lyrics change over time, folk songs are often a good record of
> events

On the other hand, these songs could be disingenuous romanticizing of criminal
lifestyles. Just look at the narcocorrido genre in Mexico -- two centuries
from now, do you think it would be reasonable for people to examine then and
think that their subjects were decent, hardworking folk being unnecessarily
hassled by The Man?

~~~
robotmay
Haha, there's certainly a bit of that going on.

For quite a long time a lot of events were written down and communicated via
Broadside Ballads:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadside_(music)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadside_\(music\)).

Broadside Ballads often described events and people and were usually written
to be sung to common tunes that the public might know. A lot of the ballads
became folk songs over time and the lyrics/stories/tunes changed, but they're
often still traceable back to their roots. So where a ballad might describe an
event pretty plainly, the songs derived from it will most likely embellish and
romanticise it.

The Bodleian Library in Oxford has an online collection of Broadside Ballads
that is very well maintained:
[http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/](http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/). I
found the following whilst seeing if there was anything related to Moreton
Bay, and although it only shares the namesake, this is quite a good example of
how the ballads were written:
[http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/static/images/sheets/15000/...](http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/static/images/sheets/15000/11164.gif).

A good example is the quite famous folk song Scarborough Fair, which is one of
a number of variations descended from a ballad called The Elfin Knight:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elfin_Knight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elfin_Knight).

My knowledge is mostly limited to English and related folk music, so I'm not
sure if there's anything similar elsewhere, but it's certainly an interesting
subject and it can be pretty fun to take a song and see if you can find out
the original story :)

------
kapauldo
What a great story, thanks for sharing.

------
RangerScience
TL;DR - Amateur historian connects the dots between some Australians (who
escaped from Tasmania as pirates) and a bunch of Japanese records of what
appeared to be a British ship, by realizing the Japanese records indicated the
ship was probably a pirate vessel, and (literally) googling "mutiny 1829"
(since most pirate vessels were from mutinies).

What's really neat is how detailed the Japanese records were, and that they
were made by Samurai, and incorporated watercolor illustrations. I didn't
realize (or, it never sunk in) the variety of work they were responsible and
trained for.

~~~
douche
If you haven't yet, read some of James Clavell's novels. _Shogun_ was
fascinating, as was _Tai-Pan_ \- I've been meaning to get through the rest.

The shogunate and the Meiji period are very, very interesting periods of
history, and under-represented.

~~~
a_bonobo
For a Japanese twist, read Eiji Yoshikawa's novels - he fictionalized
historical accounts into novels, _Taiko_ is set before Shogun and is about the
rise of Oda Nobunaga, who was succeeded by Clavell's Tokugawa Ieyasu.
_Musashi_ is about the famous swordsman's life.

