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2. Vessels of Exchange: The Global Shipwright in the Pacific
- University of Hawai'i Press
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TWO Vessels of Exchange The Global Shipwright in the Pacific Hans Konrad Van Tilburg M aritime ethnographers and archaeologists have always held the ship to be more than a simple inanimate object. Instead, it is a complex cultural artifact, a record of specific seafaring traditions and regional variations. And ships, which carry numerous items of trade, can themselves be traded, altered, and redefined. The transoceanic exchange in this case is the adoption and continued use of traditions in nautical technology , in shipbuilding. The ships are signposts of sailors on the move across the Pacific. The focus is on two case studies of the vessel as artifact—Chinese junks in California and Japanese sampans in Hawai‘i. As these examples will make clear, this process of nautical exchange involves deeper questions of identity not only for the sailor migrants, but for the ships themselves. For, unlike many other objects, ships (which so easily cross national boundaries ) have an almost human-like aura, and certainly a recognized international status. They are born or launched, have working careers, and then are decommissioned and oftentimes sent to the great beyond—Davy Jones’s locker. Many are spoken of in almost biographical terms. The phenomenon of the seemingly animate vessel and its nationality plays an important part in the process of the cultural exchange of vessels. The first example comes from the West Coast of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Overseas Chinese laborers, most often credited with mining operations and railroad construction, also opened the fishing industry on the California coast. No one knows who the first shipwrights or fishermen were in this case, but junks were being constructed in California as early as the s. In San Diego and Roseville, where fishermen sailed coastal waters between abalone camps, the two- or three-masted hong xian tuo style predominated. In the San Francisco Bay area, where the shrimp grounds were within the close protection of the bay, the single-masted cao chuan style was more familiar.¹ Like many coastal fishing vessels from Southern China, the bows of these types were pointed, and the transoms 38 The Global Shipwright in the Pacific 39 round. Solid watertight bulkheads divided the interiors into separate compartments . All hull planks were edge-joined by iron nails, and all holes filled with a material known as chunam, a mixture of lime and fiber and tung oil. Sails were lug designs with bamboo battens.² These were the same vessels the shipwrights in China were used to building; the only difference was in the type of material (redwood) used in construction. The styles represented relatively low, open vessels built for the nearshore and protected waters fisheries . Ironwood for masts and rudders, and other implements such as anchors and nets, were imported directly from China. Of course, their builders would not have referred to them as junks, but as specific regional types of fishing craft or fanchuan, sailing vessels. What is a junk? The term junk may be a derivative of jong, a Southeast Asian word for small craft recorded in the sixteenth century by European sailors. Operating from small fishing villages and camps, the Chinese exploited the relatively untouched and abundant squid, abalone, fish, and shrimp resources in the shallow inshore waters of California. Much of the product was sent back to China, as American tastes at that time did not tend toward such items. Instead of competing for diminishing resources in crowded Guangdong province waterways, California’s Chinese migrants found themselves amid a fortune of some of the most prized delicacies of the Asian market. No doubt the work was hard, and immigrants missed their homes and families, but one can only imagine what the transition from China to the untapped riches of California’s shores was like. One author attributes the rapid success in the new fishery to the fact that fishing represented the one sector of the economy where there were few race-based restrictions and only minimal competition with white Californians.³ In there were twenty-six separate Chinese shrimp camps circling San Francisco Bay.⁴ These camps, early in the history of this industry, mainly benefited the Chinese homeland. Thousands of tons of dried fish, abalone, and shrimp, and the shells of the shrimp for fertilizer, along with abalone shells for beads and buttons and jewelry, were exported to China by the fishermen and their agents in San Diego and San Francisco. Products flowed from the junks to the...