this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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However, it's geographically improbable
"So you're saying there's a chance"
Eh, pirate sails around the world, picks up disgraced samurai who needs to leave Japan. Afterwards they'll sail to England at some point or another, and the thief is looking for passage to America (as a thief he needs to get abroad for a while). They sail over the Atlantic, where they meet the cowboy who's driven cattle from the West to sell at a better price on the East coast.
A call to adventure on top, aaand campaign is a go.
You wouldn't need anything that extravagant, you could reasonably find all these people in California in the late 1800's. The earliest Japanese immigrants to California happened in the 1860's. After the gold rush people from all over the world flocked to Cali.
Would make more sense if the thief was bound for Australia as a convict with the privateer,then some shit happened and they ended up in Japan, then sailed for the west coast of the US.
I like the suggestion, but had to do a bit of research for it.
As with sailing, traveling routes are not as simple as with flying.
So I began to wonder how common it would've been to sail from Japan to the US during that time. Which is why I did my route as I did. The Atlantic was more common to use, at least during a certain part of history.
Here's the common route too Australia
But, I ended reading that whole reply more or less. https://www.quora.com/During-the-age-of-sail-how-would-crossing-the-Pacific-Ocean-have-compared-to-crossing-the-Atlantic-Ocean
And I guess yours is plausible and might make for a better story, actually. But pretty much just barely timing wise, as the scenario takes place in the 1860's right? The Treaty of Kanagawa was signed on March 31, 1854, ending Japan's 220-year-old policy of national seclusion (sakoku).
Gunslinger comes across the samurai who has escaped to America and is hiding as a railroad worker. Some kind of fuckery happens and they escape and go to San Francisco. They meet the English dandy and they get into some more fuckery and the privateer gets them back out to sea.
It's actually pretty plausible, the first wave of Japanese people to immigrate to California and Hawaii was in the 1860s. By the 1900 census there were nearly 25k Japanese people living on the West Coast.
And I guess since the Meiji Restoration was bad news for the samurai class, it makes sense that they would want to emigrate.
(I looked it up because often it isn't the upper classes that are motivated to leave a society, but in this case it checks out.)
The first Japanese embassy to America even landed in San Francisco in 1860
Not with a sailor in the mix, it's not!
Yeah, the pirate could easily be the lynchpin that brought them together.