The Cyprus mutiny took place on 14 August 1829 in Recherche Bay off the British penal settlement of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania, Australia).

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.

They were saved by a convict called Popjoy who constructed a makeshift boat or coracle using only the three pocket-knives they had, and sailed to Partridge Island with Morgan, a free man, where they got help.

However, the lack of sailors among the brig's new convict pirate crew, only four with experience instead of the brig's usual complement of 16 plus; their pending flight through the Roaring Forties, running the inevitable gauntlet of extratropical winter cyclones; and Aboriginal Tasmanian women's reputation for swift acquisition of the two fundamental crewing skills of climbing a mast and tying a knot – they were adept tree climbers and basket weavers – gave the pirates an existential reason to abduct her.

If Arthur had reported the deaths, murders and abuses of Aboriginal Tasmanian women and children properly, it would have led to enhanced oversight of his administration or his recall.

While the convict pirates were moored off Mugi Cove, in modern-day Tokushima Prefecture, Awa Domain spies documented the brig and reported to Hayami Zenzaemon, the Shogunate's Feudal Overseer and Yamauchi Chūdayū and Mima Katsuzō, the two samurai Field Commanders.

An ink sketch by one of the spies shows a convict revealing a memorial portraiture tattoo of a woman with short-cropped hair: a style characteristic of and unique to Aboriginal Tasmanian women.

Arthur's orchestrated diminution created conditions that promoted the spread of infectious disease among the (initially overseen and then interned) Aboriginal Tasmanians, while repeatedly failing to provide the level of medical attention and/or supplies that were the norm on convict transports, in prisons and barracks at the time.

Syphilis, despite being faster-acting among Aboriginal Tasmanians -- due to their not having previously acquired any natural immunity -- was the slowest of the pathogens, taking months rather than days to kill, thereby resulting in deaths of weeks rather than hours apart.

The samurai spies had documented the memorial portraiture tattoo, its wearer's expression of suppressed grief, the toast, the salute, and an awful odour about the ship two weeks earlier on 16 January 1830.

However, a man the mutineers had left in Canton confessed and by chance his account reached Britain a week before Swallow and his last three companions arrived there.

[7] Simon Barnard's book Gaolbird: The True Story of William Swallow, Convict and Pirate, is a fictionalised account of the mutiny in which the mutineers are depicted as birds.