Category Archives: Hawai’i

by Joel | 7 January 2004 · 9:01 pm

The Ningpo: A Chinese Ocean-going Junk

Not all the China trade was in Yankee clipper ships. There was an enormous amount of almost entirely undocumented coastal and ocean-going shipping in Chinese junks plying the seas between China, Southeast Asia, and even North America. One of the few surviving ships of the so-called Junk Trade is the Ningpo, “one of a handful of large old junks that crossed the Pacific and ended up on the West Coast of the United States.”

The Ningpo, 138 feet in length and 31 in beam, was a medium-sized (300 ton) three-masted Fujian style ocean-going ship, very similar to what’s called the Fuzhou pole junk design. Her upper works were teak, with a hull and numerous bulkheads of camphor wood and ironwood hull. The ornately carved oval stern, complete with bird motif and images of the immortals, is typically Fujianese in character. If historical sources can be believed, she was built originally as the Kin Tai Fong, either in 1753, or maybe 1806. And here is where things start to get really interesting.

Apparently, soon after being launched, the Kin Tai Fong soon turned smuggler and slaver, taking part in a rebellion against the government in 1796, a time when pirates were particularly active in Southern China. Next, she was seized for smuggling (silk and opium) and piracy in 1806, and again in 1814, and again in 1823. In 1834, the Kin Tai Fong was reportedly confiscated by Lord Napier for smuggling and carrying slave girls to Canton. In 1841, she began her seven year stint of serving the imperial government as a prison ship. Reportedly, 158 rebels were summarily executed during this time, hence the blood in the scuppers and heads bouncing across the decks. In 1861, she was seized by Taiping rebels and converted into a fast transport. Retaken by English forces, her name was changed (by “Chinese” Gordon?) to Ningpo …

In 1911 she was sold to Americans for $50,000. After having been damaged in a couple typhoons, abandoned by a mutinous crew, and rowed 320 miles back to port after yet another storm, the Ningpo finally sailed across the Pacific to San Pedro, California in a fast 58 days. There she began her career as floating attraction and museum of bizarre torture implements in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and San Diego. By 1917, the Ningpo was towed to Catalina Island, where she eventually began to sink (literally) into oblivion but not before appearing in the background of several Hollywood adventure films. In fact, it was during one of these Hollywood productions that a prop replica of a fire ship drifted out of control when the winds shifted and ran into the slumbering hulk of the Ningpo, burning the topsides to the waterline. What is left of the ship is covered with mud off Ballast point at Cat Harbor, along with an assortment of artifacts at the Casino in Avalon on Catalina Island.

Or so the story goes. Hans Tilburg, a maritime historian and underwater archaeologist at the University of Hawai‘i has a fuller account–with photos–in the online journal Explorations in Southeast Asian Studies.

The Era of Big Business in Micronesia

The cash economies of small Pacific Island states these days are generally based on MIRAB, that is, a combination of Migration, Remittances (from those migrants), Aid (from donor nations), and Bureaucracy (salaries funded by that aid). However, this was not always so. A photo essay added in December 2003 to the Micronesian Seminar‘s splendid website provides a glimpse of The Era of Big Business, when the government of Micronesia was self-supporting.

It may be hard to believe, but there was a time when the islands had a favorable trade balance and turned a sizeable profit. In the 1930s, under Japanese administration, Micronesia was doing a booming business. There was the giant sugar industry and phosphate mines, but its exports also included katsuobushi [dried bonito flakes], starch, pineapples, and marine products like shell and pearls. This was a period when island exports paid the cost of running the colonial government. Thousands of Japanese immigrants provided the bulk of the labor, while islanders watched the marvels worked on their islands.

There was a high price to pay, however. Micronesians ended up Strangers in Their Own Land. Most of the immigrants to Micronesia came not from the main islands of Japan, but from the Ryukyus (Okinawa).

After 1925, the Okinawans came to constitute not merely the largest bloc within the Japanese colonial population, but an absolute majority of Japanese settlers, whose growth outran even the ballooning rate of overall Japanese immigration into Micronesia.

Most of the Okinawans worked in the sugar industry on Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas, where by 1940 they constituted about 90% of the population of nearly 50,000. Immigrants also accounted for about two-thirds of the population of Palau, where the phosphate mines were. By 1940, the population of Micronesia was less than 50% of Micronesian origin. As war approached, large numbers of Koreans also arrived in labor battalions to fortify the islands against attack.

SOURCES: [above] Mark R. Peattie, Nan’yo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire in Micronesia, 1885-1945 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1988). [below] Lin Poyer, Suzanne Falgout, Laurence Marshall Carrucci, The Typhoon of War: Micronesian Experiences of the Pacific War (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001).

EPILOGUE: Some Palauans “credit their reputation as hard-working entrepreneurs to what they learned from watching Japanese business success” (p. 345), but on a larger scale a whole generation of Micronesian leaders educated under the Japanese was sidelined.

Those who came of age in 1940 looked forward to participating in a thriving economy and a global network as part of the Japanese empire. By 1945 … many discovered they were too old to participate in the new order: too old to learn English in the new schools, too old to be selected for the programs the U.S. Navy set up to train leaders who would identify with American interests and turn to American culture as a guide to how they wanted to live. It was a difficult time for these mature and ambitious men and women who were approaching the peak of their productive years. [p. 326]

The American Civil War in the Pacific

The American Civil War reached into every major ocean. After the most successful Confederate raider of U.S. merchant shipping, the CSS Alabama, was sunk by the USS Kearsage off Cherbourg, France, in June 1864, The C.S. Navy hurriedly and secretly commissioned the CSS Shenandoah to attack merchant shipping in the Indian Ocean and the Yankee whaling fleet in the Pacific. The Shenandoah sailed from Glasgow in October 1864 under the command of James Iredell Waddell of Pittsboro, NC (no apparent relation to Scott Waddle, the commander of the nuclear sub, USS Greenville, that sank the Japanese training ship, Ehime Maru, off Honolulu in 2001).

Although she was a steam ship with a retractable propeller, almost her entire voyage would be under sail. Her general mission was to capture and destroy American merchant ships. Her specific orders were to find the American whaling fleet operating in the Arctic Ocean and destroy it. It was hoped that this action would propel the owners of the vessels to lobby President Lincoln for an end to the war. The Confederacy was in a difficult position by this time and its leaders were looking for options other than a complete surrender. In order for the Shenandoah to locate the whaling fleet, she first had to secure whaling charts. These were the highly prized charts kept by whaling ships showing the location of whales sighted and hunted. The charts changed as the whales changed routes and new locations of whales were found. Captain Waddell knew he needed to locate current whaling charts to pinpoint the location of the whaling fleet.

Sailing into the Pacific, the Shenandoah learned that several whaling ships were at anchor in Pohnahtik Harbor, Pohnpei, Caroline Islands. The Shenandoah immediately sailed to Pohnahtik, arriving there April 1, 1865. There were four whalers at anchor when the Shenandoah arrived. All were headed for the Arctic whaling grounds and had stopped for reprovisioning and repairs. The Shenandoah sent boarding parties in small boats to each whaler, capturing all four vessels, and set about stripping the ships of anything of value including the coveted whaling charts. The four ships were burned between April 1 and April 15 and with the whaling charts the Shenandoah left the harbor and sailed to the Arctic Ocean. She located and destroyed 40 vessels, nearly the entire American whaling fleet out that season. All of these ships, including those at Pohnahtik, were captured after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, signaling the effective end of the Confederate States of America. It was not until August, 1865, that the crew of the Shenandoah learned of the capture of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the official end of the war. Rather than surrender in some American port, Captain Waddell decided to return the ship to England and sailed around Cape Horn, thus circumnavigating the globe.

The extract above is from the website of the L.J. Skaggs and Mary D. Skaggs Foundation, which funded an “off-beat grant” to archaeologists at the University of Hawai‘i to salvage the ships sunk in Pohnpei. (The latest off-beat grant is to the University of Iowa to support the production of The Devil’s Rope, a documentary video on the history and development of barbed wire. Take it away, Regions of Mind!)

MacKenzie J. Gregory and the Naval Historical Society of Australia have fuller accounts of the exploits of the Shenandoah and other Confederate merchant raiders, the French Cannings genealogical website has extracts from the ship’s logs and other documents pertaining to the Shenandoah, and the Hawaii School Reports website has an essay on the impact of the Civil War on the whaling and the sugar industries in Hawai‘i, citing Mark Twain’s reports published in the Sacramento Daily Union in 1866.

Twain points out that Louisiana plantations produced at most 1,500 pounds of sugar per acre, while in Hawaii the average production was 10,000 pounds per acre. Writing in 1866, Twain also noted how much money was spent on customs duties to import sugar into the U.S.

The Civil War sealed the fate of the American whaling fleet, and threatened the economy of Hawaii. That war also sparked a demand for sugar and Hawaiian planters responded. Sugar growing rapidly replaced supplying the whaling fleet as the business of Hawaii. The high duties on sugar also created a reason for planters to want Hawaii to become part of the United States.

Hawai‘i sugar production soared from 5 to 10 to 15 to 27 million lbs. from 1863 to 1866, while the number of whaling ships wintering in Hawai‘i dropped from as many as 400 during the 1840s to fewer than 100 in 1866. Although Twain doesn’t mention it, the long-term decline of the whaling industry owed less to the temporary effects of the War and more to the rapidly growing supply of petroleum after the War.

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