While supporting US forces during the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, Col. Richard Coolidge (NU Class of 1863) acquired a piece of ancient clamshell-style chest armor from the Palace of the Seventh Blood Prince in Beijing. He later donated it to Norwich University, where it sat in collections storage for more than a century, mislabeled as Chinese. Student researcher Sean Michael McCrystal (NU Class of 2017) studied Coolidge’s armor and proved that it actually belonged to a Japanese Samurai warrior – likely a flag bearer — of the Miyoshi or Hosokawa clan. It dates from the chaotic Sengoku period, mid-to-late 1500s, after Portuguese traders and missionaries arrived in Japan with guns, but before Tokugawa Ieyasu took power as Shogun and expelled all foreigners. Ultraviolet light revealed extensive bloodstains that suggest the last person who wore it in battle was probably beheaded. When McCrystal teamed up with a forensic scientist at Madonna University to test the blood, he discovered possibly the most fascinating fact about this enigmatic armor: the person who lost their life in it was probably African.
If an object could talk, the Samurai armor in the Sullivan Museum and History Center would have quite a story to tell. Unfortunately, we can never know for sure what happened to this armor and the person who wore it. There is historical evidence that at least one African slave brought to Japan by the Portuguese did become a Samurai warrior, but there is no historical record for this particular Miyoshi clan flag bearer. How did he rise to the status of Samurai? Under what circumstances did he lose his life? And how did his armor end up in the Palace of the Seventh Blood Prince in Beijing?
Students in the Fall 2025 History of Civilizations classes undertook the challenge of filling in the missing details with fiction, based on our knowledge of the African slave trade, Sengoku Japanese culture, armor-making, Samurai training, warcraft, and politics. Each of the stories that follows is a historically plausible account of what might have happened to the armor, its maker, or its wearer in sixteenth-century Japan.
