Ep. 19: Steven Schwankert on the Titanic's Chinese Survivors

The author of "The Six" tells us about the Chinese survivors of the Titanic, and how they were met with racist scorn on arrival in America after the disaster.

The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to info@chinabooksreview.com.

Transcript

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While the story of the Titanic is one of the world’s best known tales, what isn’t so well known is the fate of the ship’s Chinese passengers, especially the six Chinese men who survived the sinking in 1912, but arrived in New York only to be met with suspicion and turned away.

Our guest this month is Steven Schwankert, an award-winning writer who lived and worked in Greater China for 25 years. He was the co-creator and lead researcher behind a 2020 documentary, which first told this tale, and now he has a book out about it fresh off the press titled The Six: The Untold Story of the Titanic’s Chinese Survivors. It’s a rip roaring read full of surprising detail and narrative and humanity, and it even has a forward by James Cameron. We were delighted to be joined by Steven at Asia Society’s Studio in New York to tell us about the Chinese survivors of the Titanic, the racism those passengers faced, and how to research history that has long been sunk.

Alec Ash: So Steven, let’s begin just by telling our listeners the outline of this Titanic story to wet their appetites, if you’ll forgive pun. How did the Chinese passengers end up on board in the first place? Who were they? They were mostly from the Taishan region, right? And why were they going to America?

Steven Schwankert: Sure. Well, thank you for having me, Alec. So the story of the Chinese passengers on board Titanic is really one that has been encrusted in as much legend and myth as, as many other parts of Titanic. They just happen to be a lot less explored and that’s really what appealed to me about this particular story. Some people feel that the Chinese men were stowaways. They were not, they were fare-paying passengers. Some people think that they were part of the crew. They were not. They were professional mariners. They were professional seamen, but they were not working on Titanic at the time that it sailed. They were listed as all being from Hong Kong. We think that’s only true in a couple of cases. Mostly they were from the Taishan region. So for those of you who aren’t as familiar with it, it’s sort of west of Macau. It’s sort of the area of Guangdong west of Macau. It’s a little bit less economically developed at the time. In sort of the late 19th century, there was a big population crunch going on, some internecine warfare going on, and it just wasn’t a great time to be a third or a fourth son. You just weren’t going to inherit enough land to support your own family. So it was a time when we really start to see Chinese laborers looking for work overseas.

It’s post-Gold Rush. So it’s not that initial wave of Chinese laborers going abroad first to the Gold Rush and then later to build the railroads in North America. But it’s still not a well-trodden path at that point. The reason that a lot of these men ended up getting jobs on ships, especially ships, British ships out of Hong Kong, was because as one British captain put it, they get paid less and work harder than the Irish and they’re less drunk as well. So apologies to all of our Irish friends, but… 

Or the Chinese ones who think they can outdrink the Irish. 

Indeed, indeed. So, you know, it was a time when those opportunities were there. British ships needed crews. There was an easy supply of low cost labor coming out of southern China. And so that’s really why these men were sort of sailing the high seas at the time that Titanic comes around. Part of the work that they did and other Chinese sailors did, was that they would crew. These were not men that you would see as stewards. For example, on passenger liners, these were people who worked in engine rooms and often they worked as cooks either for other crew, but certainly for Chinese crew. Chinese crews often had their own cooks. They had their own supply list of vegetables and other Chinese favorites. Because they didn’t make a lot of money, as long as you fed them well, they seemed to be a little bit happier. I think that’s true of any crew anywhere. 

And specifically they were heading to New York to work for the Donald Steamship Company, was it?

That’s correct. So it’s an interesting moment in history because right around the time that these men go to North America, first of all, the Chinese Exclusion Act has already been in effect for 30 years. But they were really being, today, we would call it seconded. They were being seconded from the Donald Lines operations in the UK and around Europe over to North America because there was just a need for crew there. Now, again, they’re not able to be admitted into the country. But even today you have sailors who can work on ships and never be admitted to the United States through an immigration process. There were, you know, sailors’ visas and so forth at the time the situation wasn’t quite as sophisticated, so they’re really just being sent over.

That’s why they’re fare paying passengers on Titanic. Their fare, we believe, was paid by the Donald Line. And so really for probably for the first time in their working lives, they had time off on a ship and, and what a ship to have time off on. 

Indeed. So, as we all know, the Titanic never made it to New York. What were you able to piece together about, why six of them survived and two didn’t. Was it just luck of the draw? They were all men, right? And in third class quarters, which can’t have helped. Tell us how you pieced this together and, and what can we know about those fateful hours that led to their deaths or survival?

So we’re lucky as it relates to the men in their story. From a very early point, I started to think of the Chinese passengers on Titanic as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the Titanic. I think that’s a reference I can make on the China Books Podcast, but they are not major characters, but they’re minor characters who pop up at very opportune moments in the story and illuminate the larger story by doing so.

So a lot of what we know about the men comes from their escaping. Four of them escape in the same lifeboat as Jay Bruce Ismay, who was the owner of Titanic. And he talks about them. He was grilled about their presence in the lifeboat, in two inquiries that were conducted into Titanic sinking. One in the U.S., one in the UK. And we know a lot about them, or a lot of what we know about them, comes from that testimony. So as single male, third class passengers, they would’ve been quartered near the bow, probably an F or G deck. So without drawing a schematic of Titanic, just think of it as quite far down in the bow.

The good news, I guess, is that when Titanic strikes the iceberg, they’re very close to it and they know almost immediately that something is wrong. Again, these are professional seamen. They know when something is wrong on a ship. When engines stop on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, that’s not good news. That’s not, you know, to look at a whale or something like that. It’s bad news. And even if they hadn’t noticed it within 20 minutes, they would’ve been flooded out of their compartment. So they’re on the move early. That probably contributes a lot to their survival. I mean, six out of eight … altogether, there were eight Chinese passengers and six of them survived.

Now that’s a small sample size, but it’s a very high survival rate. And that was one of the things that, really made me curious about this story. So we think that because they were on the move quite early, that that put them in a position to get to a boat, to at least sort of survey their options and then potentially to be rescued. As it was, the four that escape in Ismay’s lifeboat, that’s the last lifeboat to launch from the starboard side. There’s only one other lifeboat that leaves after that. Another man gets into an earlier lifeboat at about 1:45 in the morning. That tells us that they probably weren’t on the boat deck very long and so they didn’t have as much opportunity to get into a lifeboat or they certainly weren’t having any success doing it. The last three end up in the water together and two of those perish. Fong Wing Sun – I guess we can consider him our main survivor – he is ultimately plucked from the water, and is one of only four people to be rescued from the water in that way. So it was a minor storyline within the greater Titanic story, but certainly one that told us a lot about third class passengers. Told us a lot about Ismay and told us a lot about, you know, opportunities for survival on board.

So the book begins with this just fantastic scene, which you sort of take a little bit of, I suppose, artistic license to tell cinematically, of one of the survivors Fong Wing Sun in the water of the Atlantic, finding a plank of wood, maybe a door or a table. It’s straight out of Jack and Rose’s story, who, sidebar: totally could have both fit, just redistribute your weight, Rose. And like Rose, he’s picked up by a lifeboat and he survives. Can you tell us, flesh out a bit more of Fong Wing Sun’s story, his immigration story, where he is from, how you found out his identity and backstory?

So Fong Wing Sun comes, from an island called Xiachuandao, Xiachuan Island, which is off the coast of sort of the Taishan region. On Shangchuan Island, there’s a significant Navy base now, and also the area is well known, at least for underwater archeology, because the Nanhai Yihao, the Nanhai Number One, which is quite a well-known historical shipwreck, was found in the area. So it’s an area that has a lot of seafaring history and has a lot of shipwreck history as well.

So he probably leaves the island when he’s about, depending on when you believe he was born, maybe he was 12, maybe he was 15. But certainly pre-teens, early teens. And he goes off to Hong Kong to find work and joins one of these crews and starts sailing around with the other men. We don’t believe that the men all knew each other. That was a big question for us early on. You know, were these eight sort of a crew unto themselves and that’s why they were all going to the U.S. at the same time. We found that wasn’t really the case. Some of them had worked together before, but we believe that Fong Wing Sun and two of the others, Lee Ling and Ah Lam, that they knew each other, and that they had a plan ultimately to go to the United States.

And that they’re being seconded to the United States really worked in their favor in that way. Fong Wing Sun was a very interesting character because among the possessions that he claimed, when he filed his insurance claim against the White Star Line, Titanic’s owner, he claimed that he was carrying, six dress shirts and six collars. Of course, at the time you would, you would change collars. You wouldn’t launder your shirts quite as often as we would today. But you change the collars out so the collar didn’t look dirty. And we thought, that’s so interesting because this is a man who’s working in an engine room, or he’s working in a galley. When is he gonna have the opportunity to wear shirts like this? And neck ties, he also had a half dozen neck ties. You know, a neck tie is something that’s gonna get you caught in a machine, you know, in a 1912 engine room. So clearly he was looking forward to a different life. He had a different sort of idea of what his future was going to be. And it wasn’t always going to be onboard ships. So that, you know, those characteristics are the things about people that really draw you into a story and make you wanna learn more about them and that really compelled us from a research angle.    

And there’s even a wonderful letter halfway through the book from one of the female passengers and survivors who describes finding Fong Wing Sun in the water, although she misidentifies him as Japanese. 

That’s a very interesting account because Charlotte Collyer arrives in New York with her daughter, her husband was lost on Titanic. It’s one of the downsides of the women and children first policy, or women and children only policy as it was enforced in some cases. And that is that you had breadwinners for families going down with the ship and people arriving and mothers and daughters, or mothers and children arriving just having no means of support, no support network to tap into. And Charlotte Collyer was definitely in that position. I think she was paid $300 to give that interview. I’m sure that she wanted to tell the truth, but I’m sure that she was willing to answer just about any questions that she was posed.

Her story for the most part seems to be true, but there’s a whole tale that she tells about Officer Lowe, Officer Harold Lowe, who was Titanic’s fifth officer, who captained the lifeboat that went back and ultimately picked up Fong Wing Sun, where there’s this whole sort of dialogue that he has with himself about, “oh, I don’t wanna rescue him. I don’t need to rescue him. You know, he’s just a…,” I forget what epithet that he uses in that case. 

He says, “He’s dead likely, and if he isn’t, there’s others better worth saving than a Jap.”

Right. I mean, frankly, that all goes against Harold Lowe’s character. I mean, Harold Lowe later has to apologize for comments that he made about Italians during his inquiry testimony, but he had spent some time on ships in Asia and he actually rescued two Chinese passengers in an incident where he had to jump into the water to rescue these two people. So, that seems a little bit farfetched.

It does have a sort of cutesy ending as well where, Fong Wing Sun starts to man the oars as soon as he gets in the boat, and then she has Harold Lowe saying, “by Jove, I’m ashamed of what I said about the little blighter. I’d to save the likes of him six times over if I got the chance.”

Indeed. I mean, it just seems very out of character for Lowe, especially at that point in the night. Earlier in the night when he’s trying to keep people out of boats or keep men from storming boats and firing his gun and so forth. You know, that’s a bit of a flash of anger, but once he’s in the boat, he’s completely in command and is very focused on picking up any survivors that they can find. And really, it’s Harold Lowe who does the only rescuing. He’s the only boat that goes back. So it’s, you know, it’s, unfortunate that that’s part of the historical record, but because of it, we do know about Fong Wing Sun’s rescue. Lowe actually says less about it in his testimony. He doesn’t say whether Fong Wing Sun was the first person he picked up or the third or fourth. We don’t actually know, but he does refer to rescuing him. 

Everything about the Titanic is infected by fiction, especially after Cameron’s film. It’s hard to think of it as an historical event without conjuring images like that.  

Well, absolutely. When we approached this we thought this is an opportunity to do something fresh on Titanic history. I don’t think that Arthur or I specifically set out to tell a Titanic story. We were interested in the Chinese side of the story and in the immigration side of the story. It just happened to have this very nice historical peg of Titanic to hang it on. And we thought, if we’re gonna do this, there’s no need to regurgitate the same kind of myths and nonsense that have survived for over a century. If we’re really gonna do this, we need to strip it down to the facts, the actual statements that were made by various people.

And when you get into Titanic testimony, and especially once you start to get away from primary sources, and you start to get into letters and who saw what and when. You really kind of need to put your white cotton gloves on and get your tongs out and go in almost line by line because not only do you have to look at the veracity of people’s statements, but could they even comment on what they’re saying? In other words, if they say, well, “I saw Titanic split in half” or “I heard the band play this song.” Are they actually in a lifeboat a mile away and this is something that they heard on Carpathia, the rescue ship while sailing back to New York? You really need to take out almost figures and place them on the map and say, where was this person? If this person claims to have seen this or said this, were they even on Titanic at that point? Were they even on the deck? How could they possibly have seen the people that they claim that they saw? So, you know, Titanic has a very strange nature in that way. The other thing about Titanic is that on one hand it is so well-researched and so well documented because so many people have spent just hours and hours and days and years on it. But once you get off the map, once you get off the trodden path, then you know, it’s here be dragons quite quickly. And that’s where we were, you know, we were, we were dealing in the history of the Chinese passengers was really not a known quantity at all. And that’s what made us wanna do it. 

So the Titanic sunk on April 15th. The survivors arrive in New York on the Carpathia on April 18th. What happens to these Chinese survivors when they get to Ellis Island, was it?

So Titanic skipped Ellis Island because of its special circumstances. Because it had injured and sick people on board. So it came directly into on the Hudson side of, I think it’s Pier 57.  I can hear the Titanic community screaming that. I don’t know the number off the top of my head, but it’s, it’s fifty something. It’s still there. It’s where the little island is. That structure…

I know it, yeah.

That used to be the old Cunard wharf. And of course, Titanic was not a Cunard ship, but Carpathia was a Cunard ship. The rescue ship was a Cunard ship, so that’s where they docked. So actually, our Chinese passengers got special treatment, and by special I don’t mean good, because they were not legally permitted into the country at that point. They spent an additional night on Carpathia. Everyone else gets off. First class survivors are met by family and others. Second, third class are met by either relatives or in some cases the Red Cross or the Salvation Army and then third class kind of fend for themselves. And then our men get to stay on Carpathian another night because they’re not admitted into the country.

And then the following morning representatives of the Donald Line along with what were the sort of early U.S. immigration officials show up and escort them over to, then it was Pier 9. Pier 9 doesn’t exist anymore. If you go over there now on the East River side, there’s Pier 11, which is where I catch my ferry back to New Jersey sometimes. But there’s also a heliport there. So if you’re sort of standing there that’s where Pier Nine was. And because they were coming to meet a work ship that’s exactly what they did. They came across lower Manhattan. They got on their ship and they sailed away for, I believe their first port was Philadelphia.

And that was really sort of the end of their story. In the meantime, the Brooklyn Eagle and other newspapers are just absolutely maligning them, left and right and saying, you know, they were stowaways, they stowed away in the lifeboat. They denied, women and children entry into the lifeboat by their presence. They were threatened with guns and told to get out, and they didn’t. They were dressed as women so that they could sneak onto the boat. You know, just all these really vicious things that were said about them. Of course, nobody waited around to try to interview them. But you know, that was the story that was being told about them as they very kind of quietly left New York.

Right, because this is happening not just in the context of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, as you mentioned, which makes it impossible for them to immigrate, but also the suspicion, the yellow peril, the racism that engendered that act in the first place. So it’s a story, not so much of survival at sea, but prejudice at home. 

Well indeed. I mean, everything about Titanic really relates to class. The story we know best is the first class story. John Jacob Astor, you know, the richest man in the world, stepping back from the rail, kissing his new wife goodbye, and saying, no, no, don’t worry, I’ll get the next boat. And things like that. You know that’s really the story that’s been documented the best. But as we go forward, into a period of Titanic research where not only do we not have the survivors, but in most cases we don’t even have the children anymore, the stories that still haven’t been illuminated are those of third class passengers and specifically Chinese passengers. There were one or two black passengers, Middle Eastern passengers. Those are the stories that, that we haven’t looked at and potentially still could tell us more about the disaster itself.

And there’s no record of them, of course, getting any of the payout money, which was paid to the survivors either?

In the end, there was very little money that was paid out. The limitation of liability hearings were held. There was ultimately a settlement in the end. Really, not many people got very much at all, and that was it. I was really surprised in the research that they even filed claims, that they were even aware of that or that someone was aware of them and pursued them to go file the paperwork. I think in the end, five out of the six did file claims, but we don’t have any record of them receiving any of that money. Okay. 

But their stories don’t end there. With them leaving, to Philadelphia, you trace what happens to each of them after they leave New York. Could you pick a couple of those stories and tell us where they end up?

Sure. So Fong Wing Sun was really our best survivor in terms of being able to tell his story fully. Part of that was because we found someone in Wisconsin who said that he was Fong Wing Sun’s son. Now, we didn’t know him as Fong Wing Sun until much later. We knew him as Fang Lang. We started out with a list of six survivors on a passenger manifest, and these are essentially two character names, let’s call them, you know, Fang Lang, or Leng Lam or Lee Ling. Something that would’ve been very uncommon for a Chinese man at the time. Usually they would’ve had a surname, a generational name, and then a given name. And then of course, at different times in their life, they would’ve maybe had different names, used different names.

And some of the romanization here aren’t even Wade Giles. There’s Chang Chip and Cheong Foo…

I mean that we, we, we probably spent two years banging our heads against the wall just on the names. Can we accept them as they are? Where do these names come from? Do they come from some kind of travel document? Do they come from the men walking up to the counter at the white Star Line desk and saying their name and somebody writes it down and this is what they heard? So it was really, that was really difficult. And the first discovery, if you will, was that when I finally looked at the actual documents, you could see that a name that had been written for more than a hundred years as Ali Lam, A-L-I almost like Muhammad Ali, Ali Lam. It wasn’t Ali Lam, it was Ahlam. It was A-H-L-A-M. So then all of a sudden we know that that’s a Southern Chinese appellation. It’s like looking for Little Jimmy in the historical record. And so suddenly we realize we’re not dealing with any kind of given or official name, and now what do we do?

So, sometimes it helps when you look for someone that’s looking for you. In that case, we found Tom Fong who said, I think Fang Lang was my father. I don’t know how he was Fang Lang on the ship. I always knew him as Fong Wing Sun and maybe you can look into this. 

So what happened to Fang Lang or Fong Wing Sun?

So that was a matter of historical detective work. We had a fantastic research team of genealogists and historians and people in Canada and the UK and the United States, and also in China who just tried to put some of these dotted lines together. Because we had this character Fang Lang, and because we had this name, Fong Wing Sun and this real person, Fong Wing Sun, what we had to do is we had to put them in the same place at the same time, as Cynthia Lee, one of our researchers, says in the documentary. So it really was working through shipping records. Can we put him on this ship? And then where did this ship go? And then did he join another ship after that? And Tom said, well, I think he spent time in France because I have a photo of him on the Champs-Élysées.

Does that tell us anything? Okay. Well actually he was based in Le Havre for a while. And it was really just sort of narrowing the gap between New York and, you know, where we had him in Wisconsin and Chicago and then his earlier life in Europe. And finally when we got what’s called his A file, his alien file, thanks to our researcher, Grant Din, we were finally able to say, yes, he arrives on this ship in August 1920, and this ship departs New York without him in September 1920. 

So he ends up back in New York. 

Indeed, indeed. But, you know, seven years after the fact. And something else that Grant uncovered was an article, I believe the interview took place in Cleveland, and it was, a woman, a Chinese woman who said, my fiancé was lost on Titanic and now I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I just want to die. Her name was Sue Oi. But in the Su Oi story, it talks about how these three men who have names very similar to Li Ling and Lam and Fang Lang and Fong Wing Sun, that their plan was to become merchants. They were going to leave their ship in New York. They were going to make their way to Cleveland.

Su was gonna marry one of the men, not Fang Lang or not Fong Wing Sun, she was gonna marry one of the other men and they were going to establish a life in the United States. And then that really, not only did that fill in a whole lot of blanks for us, but it also explained why did these two men end up drowning and why does Fong Wing Sun end up in the water? It’s because the three of them, we believe the three of them stuck together. They had this plan, we have to go to Cleveland together, we’re gonna start this business. And so that’s maybe why they don’t try to individually get onto lifeboats. They need to stick together. They all end up in the water. Only Fong Wing Sun survives. So his American dream gets pushed back eight years because he loses everything. But in the end, you know he really pursued it.

It’s interesting and telling that despite this horrific event and the racism that they suffered afterwards, it still didn’t deter them from wanting to immigrate to the U.S. and I think another ends up in Canada.

I think what the story tells us is that whereas Titanic was a life-changing moment for many of at least the Europeans who were on board, you know, if you read some of the accounts from people from Ireland or from Scandinavia, wherever, they either got some kind of religious faith after surviving Titanic, or it told them that they should go home and, you know, marry their sweetheart or that they had those kinds of cathartic moments. But I think for our survivors, one of the reasons that they never talked about it or never seemed to talk about it was for them, it was just another obstacle to overcome in a life of obstacles.

Okay. I can’t go to the U.S. legally. But I can take on another identity and I can kind of make my way and become a merchant. Oh, uh, OK. My ship just sank. But I survived and I may have lost everything, but at least I have a job on this other ship, so I’ll work on that ship. They were never deterred, they always kept moving forward. And that really, to us was the amazing bit of the story was just, how they continued going on. They never, you know, it didn’t matter whether it was an iceberg or an immigration official or whoever stood in their way, they had this dream and they were gonna pursue it. 

There’s a line near the end of the book, which really summed up for me, the sort of tragedy behind the tragedy of how these men throughout their lives were shunted around by war, by labor demand, by immigration policy, and you write, “At very few points in their lives, did they seem in control of their own destinies.” Do you think there’s a broader lesson here that we can take away from it all over a century later? And is it relevant today at all still when immigration is back in the news? 

Sure. I think they were just working kind of on a different timeline. I mean, everyone has a plan, but often things don’t go that way. You know, we encounter challenges that we didn’t expect, and, circumstances change. I mean, just looking at the way that they were pushed back and forth across the Atlantic, they come across to work on Annetta, on their work ship. But then two or three years later, almost all of them are back in the U.K. and that’s because World War I breaks out. And there’s a sudden need for merchant mariners back in the U.K. and they certainly fit that bill. One thing we learned from this was because, especially as the documentary was coming out in China in 2021 and the Chinese edition of the book, there was a lot of Asian hate going on here in the U.S. and elsewhere.

And I think what it illustrated for us was that these are not new problems, but maybe we can look at the source of them and try to improve on it from that perspective. The symptoms almost always seem to be the same. And so perhaps, the cure of combating ignorance and fighting racism can be addressed in a similar way. We like to think we’ve made progress. But maybe we have and maybe we haven’t. But certainly for us, you know, being in the middle of it and, and having finished up years of work on this and seeing this happen again, where almost the same language is used and the same epithets and the same blame and you know, it was very sad, but at the same time, it gave us a little bit of hope that it could be addressed in a similar way.

What else did you learn from the reaction to the book and the film in China? 

I mean, the thing that surprised me most, we had a full cinematic release. That means we were in 10,000 cinemas in China, which was just amazing to be able to go almost anywhere and go see your film. You know, when you’re not James Cameron, that was quite amazing. I mean, it wasn’t, it was definitely a critical success. People who saw the documentary really liked it. And similarly with the book, I don’t think either was a commercial success because, it’s just, it’s never easy to get people to read history or to read nonfiction. But the question that we never got in China, which I’ve gotten a little bit outside of China, is, why did you think that you could tell this story? Meaning why did you, as a non-Chinese person, think you could tell this story?

And part of it’s just, I never thought of that. I never thought about my ethnic qualifications to tell the story. China had been my world and my life for 25 years and to me, it was just utterly natural that I would write another book about Chinese maritime history or an aspect of it. And I think Arthur Jones, who directed the documentary, felt the same way. So it’s a little bit of a surprise, you know, here when I get those occasionally curled lip questions from audiences, but it’s a legitimate question and I’m happy to answer it. It was never something that came up in China. People just came up and expressed their gratitude because they felt like we had given the men some of their dignity back.

They had been pilloried for over a century in historical record. And we were finally able to say that they had not acted ignobly, that wanting to survive is not an ignoble act. I just wanted the facts to speak for themselves, and I think we, in some cases, were the first people to put the facts to the test. We put the facts and the historical record to a physical test and that tells you a lot, you know? When you say that people stowed away in a collapsible lifeboat, well, how can you flat pack yourself into a flat piece of IKEA furniture? You can’t do it. And I don’t, you know, a lot of Titanic history is based on interpretation of statements and we took it off of the page and actually put it to physical tests, and, made a determination based on that, which I think was a lot more objective, a lot more fair.

You are quite good at uncovering submerged stories. You did it in your previous book, Poseidon, about a sunk British Navy submarine, the HMS Poseidon. you’ve also literally uncovered submerged things as a scuba diving instructor and founder of Sino Scuba in Beijing, where you’ve discovered wooden shipwrecks in a Mongolian lake, sections of the underwater Great Wall of China, a sunken Ming dynasty town. Tell us a little bit about that, about how this all relates. 

I mean, I’m a native of New Jersey. I grew up along the shore. I always loved the ocean. I didn’t like getting my hair wet when I was very little. I just didn’t like the feeling. And then at one point my grandparents bought me a diving mask. And once I could see underwater, I didn’t care what happened to my hair. It didn’t, you know, it was just so fascinating that you could see underneath the water that there was this whole world that was otherwise concealed.

That shaped so much of my growing up, just diving and wanting to be on the ocean and wanting to be under the ocean. And even when China sort of lured me away from those underwater pursuits, it was always sort of lying there dormant. And then later on when I had the opportunity to start diving in and around China, that was all reawakened. And the idea that that suddenly this whole maritime history, that, of course, is well-documented in China. But if you ask the average person, you know, tell me something about Chinese maritime history, they don’t really know anything. It was believed that China was only a land power for centuries, and that just simply isn’t true. The idea that, I could kind of stick my hands in the sand and, you know, start pulling out some of these stories was just so compelling and still is. Chinese maritime history is so poorly known and understood in the English language, that I will run out of days before I’ll ever run out of stories that I might want to tell. These are just two, you know, Poseidon was one, the story of The Six is another. And hopefully there are more to come.

But is it being told in Chinese? Are there Chinese books and Chinese scuba divers and researchers telling these stories, which occur in Chinese waters? Poseidon was pulled out of the East China Sea in Mao’s China. 

Sure. Well I mean, we’ve seen the popularity of the documentary, The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, which was a Japanese ship that’s actually based on a book by an Englishman who lives in Hong Kong, Tony Banham. But now there is an interest in those stories. You know, most of what we see is still sort of these grand Ming fleets that are going out across the world and bringing back elephants and things like that. And those are wonderful stories. We don’t have as much of an archeological record to back that up yet but there are discoveries being made in Kenya and, other places that, tell more of that story.

China spends a lot of money now on underwater archeology. In fact, I would argue that some of the best trained underwater archeologists are now working for the National Museum in Beijing. They’re trained as scuba divers. They’re trained as archeologists. Many of them go through the Texas A&M program, which is probably the best in the country, if not the world. We’re seeing China’s interest in its own maritime heritage being reignited. Fifteen years ago, you know, it was just sort of whatever washed up or whatever, a bunch of pirates pulled up from somewhere off of Fuzhou. But now, you see really well-organized and well-funded expeditions to wrecks all over the South China Sea. So I think, more to come in that sense.

So you’re now based mostly in New Jersey, another eastern seaboard of a major continental power. Any good scuba and shipwrecks along that coast? 

Yeah, I mean, New Jersey, New York, is really a target rich environment in terms of wrecks and it’s an area that I really like working in this kind of thing because I think there are a lot of divers out there who will tell you that all the big discoveries have been made and all the stories have been told and it’s not really that interesting. And I think that’s absolutely dead wrong. Which just means that for me, you know, there’s a whole new realm of exploration. I think China’s stories, especially today, die on the vine quite quickly. You can’t hold on to a China story too long before it really starts to wither.

China changes so quickly, that if you don’t do a story right away, then it withers a little bit. So, as much as possible, I’m trying to sort of port the things that I did in China to where I live now, and New Jersey serves that task quite well. There are some historical shipwrecks there where the story hasn’t really been told, where it hasn’t been subjected to that physical test. What do currents do with a body and how far do they take them away? Where could something wash up? Why is a mass grave in this particular site? What does that tell us about the original wreck site? Things like that. That’s really where I think, this kind of historical exploration goes forward, because you can only reread the initial texts so many times. The survivors are gone. The physical evidence is gone in many cases, but what can the physics and the science actually tell you about something? You know, that’s something that hasn’t been applied to New Jersey maritime history in the same way. And so that’s what I’m hoping to do, at least for the next couple of years.

Wonderful. Well, there’s always more untold stories to be told, and we’re certainly glad that you dredged this one out of the depths. Steven Schwankert, thank you so much. 

Thank you. ∎