Through Samurai eyes: one of Australia's greatest convict escape stories

If you are a regular reader of SWS you will know that we love stories where different threads intertwine producing a colourful fabric of history that is so much richer than the individual components. This piece of research, aired for the first time on the ABC this week is a great example of this phenomena.

Try to find 28 minutes from your busy day to listen to the whole ABC podcast. Just click on the image below and follow the prompts. Part two of this amazing story should be on the ABC Radio National next week. We’ll let you know.

Some Background

When he bought a holiday shack on a small island off the coast of Shikoku in Japan, British expatriate Nick Russell stumbled across some documents which captivated him. They were a series of illustrated samurai manuscripts detailing an eleven-day cross-cultural encounter between locals and the crew of a mysterious foreign ship - a meeting which took place in 1830, at the height of Japan’s isolation period. After the Japanese ultimately fired cannons at the ship, it was assumed that the foreign 'pirates' on board had all been killed.

After two years of research, Nick Russell found evidence that the men on the ship were convicts who'd escaped from the penal colony in modern-day Tasmania, who'd made a daring bid for freedom by hijacking a prisoner transport ship, the Cyprus, and eventually make it all the way back to England.

Nick Russell’s discovery of the events recorded in the samurai manuscripts would help resolve a long-standing local mystery, and stand as a record of early contact between Australia and Japan.

A watercolour by samurai Makita Hamaguchi showing one of the mutineers with a dog from the ship