This is the first complete and accurate account of one of the most extraordinary adventures in the annals of seamanship and crime. On 14 August 1829 the brig Cyprus was sheltering in Recherche Bay on the south-east coast of Van Diemen's Land. She was taking a batch of convicts to the penal settlement at Macquarie Harbour. With the Captain drunk, the Mate and Army lieutenant lured out of the way by accident or design, the convicts mutinied under the skilfully disguised leadership of William Walker—alias William Swallow—who had, unknown to the authorities, al-ready once been transported to Van ( Diemen's Land and had escaped. Swallow's remarkable pertinacity in sailing the stolen brig to New Zealand, the Tonga Islands and Japan, before 'scuttling her in the China Sea, provides an epic of leadership and endurance, 'ward and the un mutinous convicts the officers in charge, and heroism tale of vacillating pusillanimity and the adventures of the military who were marooned ashore is an extra-ism and enterprise in the little double-crossing cockney who did his best to go betray his fellow-convicts. The authors have based this book entirely on documentary evidence and hown not only considerable narrative ability but also much skill in disen-tangling the truth from the many contradictory accounts of an event about which most of the protagonists were only too keen to tell lies to save their own skins.
ThIs is the first true and detailed story of the piratical seizure of the Cyprus brig. Many other writers have told the outlines of the story briefly, and usually inaccurately, adding fiction to fact, and substituting imagination for solid research; but this is the first book-length narrative of the events, and, further, every significant statement of facts in these pages is based on documentary evidence, most of which is now published for the first time.
It would be invidious to name and blame other writers for inventing what they did not have the patience to investigate in the historical archives. It is enough to claim that, without exception, every former account of the Cyprus that has been published has been seriously deficient in some details, incorrect in other details, and in some cases grossly distorted and invented.
For narrative convenience, the story in these pages is told in the technique partly of an historical novel, and not of an historical treatise. Dialogue and minor details are invented, and there is some use of rational conjecture, but in everything of factual importance there is documentary evidence in support of the narrative details.
The documentary material in general, including as it does many depositions by individuals who sought to exculpate them-selves by inculpating others, is frequently conflicting in factual details. In such cases the historian must estimate the weight of probability, in relation to positively discernible facts, and this has been our method.
The large amount of new material incorporated here has been unearthed chiefly in the Mitchell Library, Sydney; the Tasmanian State Archives, Hobart; the Public Records Office, London; and from contemporary newspapers and records of births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths. The story has been told entirely from these original contemporary sources of information, without drawing in the slightest on versions given by other writers, who sometimes contradict one another, and sometimes repeat one another's errors.
Acknowledgement and thanks for assistance in research is gratefully made to the Librarian and staff of the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and to Miss Ida Leeson, former Mitchell Librarian; to the Librarian and staff of the State Library of Tasmania, and especially to Mr Robert Sharman, archivist; and to the late James Whittaker, of London, who was indefatigable in ferreting out facts in the Public Records Office and elsewhere in England.
Sydney Australia 1960.
FRANK CLUNE
P. R. STEPHENSEN
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