He travelled to the West Indies and climbed Mount Pelee in Martinique before it erupted, and spent weeks exploring the interior of Dominica, producing the first map of it.

In Canada, he served as the secretary of a miner's union, and was outraged at how the Premier of British Columbia, James Dunsmuir, who was also a mine owner, hired Chinese labour for low wages in preference to Caucasians.

According to John Dunmore, Yung was an elderly Canton Chinese gold prospector, aged 70, who had a pronounced limp as a result of a past mining accident.

Although police had no leads on the murder, Terry submitted himself to the authorities the following day saying: "I have come to tell you that I am the man who shot the Chinaman in the Chinese quarters of the city last evening.

A 1911 petition on Terry's behalf claimed that he'd committed the crime, which "arose from an excess of patriotic zeal," out of impulse, which was "the result of over-anxious thought on the subject of race pollution.

Over time, he developed messianic religious delusions and later assaulted a doctor who attempted to administer an anti-typhoid injection in 1940, whereupon he was returned to solitary confinement.

Not all of this interest has been scholarly in tone, as the neofascist New Zealand Nationalist Workers Party republished copies of The Shadow for their anti-immigrant racist purposes in the eighties.

Terry and his trial in the Supreme Court feature in the early part of Alison Wong's novel, As the Earth Turns Silver, published by Penguin in 2009.

The story of Terry's victim, Joe Kum Yung, is told in How to Be Dead in a Year of Snakes, a book of poems by Wellington poet Chris Tse.