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Claiming the Bonin Islands: Captain Beechey’s Plaque

ABSTRACT In 1827, Captain Beechey arrived at what are known today as the Ogasawara Islands and quickly claimed the islands for Britain by attaching a copper plaque to a tree on Peel Island, or present-day Chichijima Island. However, this claim was later complicated by a Japanese assertion of earlier possession. In this article, I trace the provenance of the Beechey Plaque demonstrating that, although the plaque was a powerful tool of sovereign claim over the Bonin Islands, its significance soon diminished and it became merely an object of curiosity shuffled around various private and public collections. However, I argue that the plaque requires greater recognition and attention because it was used as a symbol of sovereign claim that led to some of the earliest Anglo-Japanese diplomatic interactions and Japan’s first negotiations over sovereign territorial claim with the West. Moreover, the plaque represents a territorial assertion by Britain that pinpoints the common origin for the transnational pasts of the descendants of early settlers on the main island of the Osagawara archipelago, Chichijima.