LOST IN JAPAN

Evening Star, Issue 21640, 8 February 1934, Page 1

LOST IN JAPAN

EARLY AUSTRALIANS A ROMANCE OF HISTORY Who knows what fascinating discoveries the embassy, which the. Federal Ministry is preparing to send to Japan, ’ may make? , asks Thomas :Dunbabin,' iii the Sydney l ‘Daily Telegraph.’ A little research may yield much about the first direct relations between Australia and Japan. It is 104 years since our first emissaries lauded in Japan, but we know all too little about them. What became of them after they had landed we do not_ know, but a search might show their descendants still living happily in some coastal district of Japan. It is certainly worth inquiry. Whether these pioneers of trade and of other relations, who broke into Japan a quarter of a century before Admiral Perry and his United States fleet blustered a way into Japanese harbours, came from Australia or not depends on whether we regard Tasmania as part of Australia. Mr Lyons at least would have no doubt on the subject, even if members of the Royal Historical Society of Australia _ hold that Tasmania is not in Australia. The first Tasmanians in Japan were seven convicts who had helped to carry on the brig Cyprus from Recherche Bay in 1829. The Cyprus was becalmed in Recherche while on her way to Dlacquarie Harbour with thirty-one convicts on hoard. Having nothing better to do, the mate, the officer of the guard, and others took the boat and went fishing on August 16, 1829. PRISONERS RISE. While they were away the prisoners, led by a man named William Walker, alias Swallow, who had been a seaman on Yankee vessels, rose tn the guard and seized the Cyprus. They put on shore the crew, the guard, and the wives of some of the officers, who were making the passage to Hell’s Gates. With Swallow in command _ the pirates renamed the brig “The Friends of Bostpn,” and sailed to Cloudy Bay. New Zealand. There the brig lay near two Sydney whaling schooners, one commanded by John Guard and one by Billy Worth. Swallow said that his vessel had come direct from Dlanila. One of Worth’s seamen borrowed some fishing hooks from a man on the Cyprus, and was surprised to see them wrapped in a piece of Hobart Town newspaper about a month old. Worth proposed to Gpard that they should take the brig, reasoning that the crew must be runaway convicts. The story runs that Dlrs Guard, to whom Swallow had given some of the finery left on the Cyprus by the officers’ wives, toldher husband hot to he a fool and not to meddle with matters that did not concern him. So the Cyprus lurched northward across the Pacific. They made the southern end of Japan. There seven men took a boat and went ashore, deciding to try their luck in that hermit kingdom, then closed to the outside world except for the visits of a few Dutch traders. Nothing more was ever heard of these men. hut then no one has ever sought traces of them in Japan. Probably they settled down and married Japanese wives, just as Will Adams, the English shipbuilder, had done, over two centuries earlier. OTHER EUROPEANS. Even then, away hack at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Adams was not the only European to settle in Japan, for John Saris, who tried in vain to persuade Adams to return to England, says that he was much in the company of certain Spaniards and Portuguese, who lived after the fashion of the country. Who knows, indeed, how much Jajan has owed to all these daring European adventurers, who, having reached the remotest land that they could find, settled in Japan? They became Japanese subjects, and contributed something to the Japanese race.

The pirates of the Cyprus were not the only early visitors to Japan from Tasmania. A few years after the voyage of the Cyprus the Hobart Town whalers began to work on the coasts of Japan. The Japanese “ grounds,” first opened up by the Syren and the Transit, vessels belonging to the great London house of Enderby, in the twenties, soon became one of the world’s great sperm whaling waters. The whalers from the Derwent took their part in this “ fishery,” and pushed even farther north. In 1857 seven Hobart Town whaling ships were working in the Sea of Okhotsk. These whalers touched for water and supplies at relnote harbours in the north of Japan, especially on the island of Yezo, where the hairy Ainus were then more numerous than to-day. And there, as elsewhere, some of the whalemen used to desert from time to time and settle on shore. MANY DESERTERS. The life of the deep sea whaler waa a hard, brutal, often dull business, with little to look forward to if the voyage was not prosperous. In the great days of whaling the - islands of the Pacific and the seaports round the ocean were full of whalemen who had deserted from their ships. The Tasmanian vessels which put into out of the way ports of Japan were no exceptions to the rule. Like the pirates of the Cyprus, \ these runaways dropped for ever out of the world from which they came. Whether they were native youths, English seamen, or Portuguese from the Western Isles they never say Tasmania again once Japan had swallowed them. Never again did they beat round the Pillar or hear the waters of the Derwent lapping under the black wharves of Hobart Town. And never again did they walk the streets of the little town in the shadow of the great mountain at the world’s end, where ! the whalemen from the Seven Seas came in to drink rum and “ sheoak ” in the house of Blood Street Joe, the onearmed Portuguese from Flores, in the Azores, or to paint the town red in the Cat and Fiddle, the Bird in Hand, the Man at the Wheel, and the Hole in the Wall. If Mr Latham takes with him someone who knows Japanese he may find in Japanese records some trace of the after lives of these lost Tasmanians.