Steamboat Excursions on the Hudson for Chinese Americans, 1883

February 2021

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  Sam Willis

  From the Society for Nautical Research, in partnership with Lloyd’s Register Foundation, I’m Sam Willis and this is the Mariner’s Mirror Podcast, the world’s number one podcast dedicated to all of maritime history.

  Hello, everyone, I hope you all enjoyed the break in our normal proceedings for the Great Sea Fight Special on the Battle of Cape St Vincent. If you haven’t listened to it, please do so. There are three separate episodes, one explaining the events, one offering an analysis of the battle, and a final one offering the Spanish view. But now things are back to normal. And we begin as ever, by catching up on the poor sailors of the whaleship Swan, trapped in the ice of the west coast of Greenland in the New Year of 1837. This reading comes from a transcription of her logbook made especially for the podcast. So, as you listen to each small reading, do bear in mind that you’re creating a little bit of history in your own right as you’re the first people ever to hear this being readout. The original logbook is kept in the collections of the Caird Library in the National Maritime Museum in London. Life trapped in the ice is as awful as ever. But it’s possible that the first breath of spring is in the air.

  Whaler Swan

  Monday the 20th of February. The whole of these 24 hours light winds and clear weather with the same intense cold. What degree of cold we are unable to ascertain not having a spirit thermometer on board. But 37 degrees below zero being the farthest limit that we know. The land has shown itself very plain this day the ship not being more than 30 miles off Fore Island point, Mare Island, Disko and other places being quite bold and distinct to the view. A 180-gallon shake cut up for fuel. Sunday 26th of February. Strong breezes with the same intense cold the fore part of this day. At noon, the mercury in the thermometer rose to 25 degrees below zero, a change that is felt by each of us. The ship has drifted during the last breeze, but it is now brought up very probably by the bergs off Hareoen Island. As soon as the weather gets clearer we expect to see this reef not far off. Divine service performed between decks morning and evening as usual when the labours of our pious shipmates are duly appreciated by the thoughtful part of the crew. Thermometer 25 degrees below zero. Latitude by observation 70 degrees by 30 north.

  Sam Willis

  This week we are tackling the important history of race relations in America through the lens of riverboat excursions for the Chinese community of New York in the 19th century. It’s a truly fascinating subject and I spoke to the excellent Dr. Marika Plater. To find out more. Marika studies what low-income New Yorkers did for fun outdoors during the 19th century. In this era of staggering inequality, working-class and impoverished people and people of colour often lived amidst biological and industrial pollution that wealthier and whiter urbanites were increasingly able to avoid. Her research considers ways that the most vulnerable of New Yorkers use their limited free time to escape to environments that contrasted with their daily conditions. She follows the city’s workers as they walk to public parks in their neighbourhoods, took ferries and streetcars to beer gardens and pleasure grounds and boarded steamboats headed to waterfront excursion groves. By recovering these sites and how urbanites use them. She’s able to broaden the story of nature’s role in human life. Here she is.

  Hi, Marika.

  Dr Marika Plater

  Hi Sam.

  Sam Willis

  How are you doing? You alright?

  Dr Marika Plater

  I’m doing all right.

  Sam Willis

  Well, we’re talking today, aren’t we, because I came across a wonderful little article you wrote, and I’m actually – just for everyone listening – I’m going to read out the beginning of this article because it’s an amazingly alluring start: ‘On a bright June morning in 1883, a boat flying the red and yellow Chinese flag left a pier in lower Manhattan and steamed up the Hudson River. On board were hundreds of Chinese American men who attended missionary Sunday schools.’ It’s such a brilliant opening sentence because it opens up like a ridiculous amount of questions, which I was hoping you’d be able to help me answer. What’s going on here?

  Dr Marika Plater

  Great. Well, that is why I’m here. So, these men were taking what was known as a steamboat excursion. These were trips that were leaving from New York City, lower Manhattan generally, and travelling up to 50 miles on the waterways around the city. And so, this is one of those. And this particular excursion was hosted by Chinese American Sunday school students. And they were, they organized this trip as a kind of thank you for the white women who taught them English and Bible studies, as part of these missionary Sunday schools.

  Sam Willis

  You say, students – are these adult students, are they kids, what age group are they?

  Dr Marika Plater

  They are adults. Yes. But I’m glad you asked that question because the newspapers often infantilised them; talked about them as kind of young and naive. And part of that was to kind of make it a little bit less taboo that they were forming relationships with these white women.

  Sam Willis

  Ok, that’s kind of a complicated by-story. So, the first point I think we need to pick up on is, so we’ve got these students, adult students going out on a day trip up the Hudson. And you mentioned newspapers there. So how do we know about this?

  Dr Marika Plater

  Newspapers are the main way that we know about these trips. Excursions were in the news, all the time; they were kind of working-class holidays, and all of the newspapers loved to write about them as kind of drunken and boisterous affairs. They would write about riots on board, sex at the parks, the groves, where these boats would dock and then these excursions by

  Sam Willis

  Who paid for them? If they were for the working class who paid for them? Were there people, wealthy people putting up the cash?

  Dr Marika Plater

  No, it was actually cheap enough. If you had enough people on one of these boats, it could be very affordable to rent the boats. So pretty much these steamboats would be just crammed full of people; this is a time before regulations. So, there are people just, they’re way too many people on these boats. But because of that, the trips could be very affordable.

  Sam Willis

  Okay, so we’ve got a boat full of Chinese people. So, it’s been, it’s newsworthy, not just because of an excursion, even though you said excursions are newsworthy, so it’s double newsworthy this one because it’s full of Chinese people.

  Dr Marika Plater

  Absolutely. At this time, white Americans are really, they are fascinated by Chinese people. They also – this is the era of Chinese Exclusion, so there’s this extreme hatred and xenophobia that’s mounting. And so, these particular excursions had extra extra print.

  Sam Willis

  So, let’s go back to that Chinese xenophobia. So, it’s the 1880s, and there is a serious political problem in America isn’t there between the Americans and the Chinese. What’s going on there?

  Dr Marika Plater

  Well, this had been, this xenophobia had been growing for quite some time. there had been Chinese people living in New York, since at least the 1820s. But as time passed, there was more and more animosity growing. When we hear about xenophobia against Chinese people, the story is generally located in the American West, where there were massacres, massive mass expulsions, and the working-class movement (the labour movement) really targeted Chinese labourers as kind of scapegoats for all of the economic problems that white workers were facing. So, even though this is a complicated time, industrial capitalism is rising, mechanization is breaking up the labour process so that workers are indispensable, there are immigrants from all over the world coming to the US. And employers are taking advantage of that to hire whoever they can pay the least. So, this is a complicated problem. Wages are being driven down. It’s not because of Chinese people. But Chinese people were

  Sam Willis

  But they are getting the blame, aren’t they?

  Dr Marika Plater

  Absolutely! Right, so they are totally scapegoats. So, they’re a smaller population of workers, but white workers are aligning against them. And politicians are taking advantage of this also because it’s sort of displacing economic problems on to this other group. So, there are these stereotypes at the time that Chinese workers are like machines; they eat rats; they will sleep anywhere. And so, employers are hiring them because of their, just their willingness to accept no wages, terrible living conditions. And then there’s also this idea that people from China could never be Americans that they were kind of permanent aliens, they were never going to be part of this society; they’re never going to belong. So, these ideas are raging in the West but they’re also moving east, especially as more and more Chinese people were moving away from all this violence and discrimination and trying to find a safer place to be. New York didn’t end up being that place because these ideas followed. And Chinese people in New York were facing attacks, just general harassment and degradation in the press and from other people on the street.

  Sam Willis

  And this leads to the Chinese Exclusion Act, doesn’t it? I mean, actually, they make a political point, it reaches a kind of crisis of Crux and laws are passed. So, tell us about the Chinese Exclusion Act.

  Dr Marika Plater

  Right. So that was, the first one was passed in 1882. And it really, it brought together Democrats, and all but the most radical Republicans, sort of united in this act. Radical Republicans recognised anti-Chinese sentiment as a form of racism. But most of both political parties really joined together against Chinese immigrants. So, that act was passed in 1882, then it was expanded and made harsher in 1888. And I should say that both of these acts really focused on labourers. So, intellectuals and scholars and merchants from China could come over, but it was labourers who were really kept out. So, with the passage of this 1882 Exclusion Act, people from China became the first undocumented immigrants in the US. This is the first significant exclusionary immigration law.

  Sam Willis

  What does it exclude them from; they’re not allowed to do what exactly?

  Dr Marika Plater

  They are not allowed to even come to the US. So, this also caused problems for people of Chinese descent that were born in the US, and if they went to visit China, they had a lot of trouble coming back. But they’re not supposed to even enter the US. And so that also caused problems for sailors in New York’s court. If there was a boat from China that had Chinese sailors on it, they weren’t allowed to even touch American soil, they have to stay on the boat. So, this was, this is a very high barrier for anyone who didn’t have paperwork to show that they were a scholar or an intellectual or a merchant, or one of these higher-class positions.

  Sam Willis

  So, what’s fascinating about this moment in 1883 then, it’s a year after the first Chinese Exclusion Act. So, everything is mounting against the Chinese. And yet here they are all crammed on a boat going up the Hudson on a bit of a jolly. It’s a bit weird, it’s not what you’d expect at all. How did that come about?

  Dr Marika Plater

  Well, you know, the story got even weirder when I started looking at the people who were on the trip. And that’s sort of how I figured out what this even was. I was looking at the invite list, and so there are Chinese American students, these adult students, their teachers are there, their teachers’ families are there. But then there are also some very strange guests. There’s a merchant, a white merchant who spoke Chinese and Cantonese, I think, and he was there, he was an advocate against Chinese Exclusion. So, he was an advocate for this community, and he’s on the boat. And then also on the boat is a Chinese professor named Professor Shin Chin Sun. So, there’s professors on board, and there’s also the person who managed the port, his name was Robertson. And so, he is on this ship also. And I realized that he was in charge of enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Act. So, the person in New York who is in charge of keeping Chinese labourers out, he’s on this boat with someone that he’s detained, he detained the Professor Shin Chin Sun. And so, these two people on the opposite sides of the Exclusion Act, are there on this boat, along with a white advocate against exclusion, so this is not just an event that has to do with fun and games and getting out of the city and celebrating these white women teachers. So, I started to see this event as a way of pushing subtly against the Chinese Exclusion Act that had been passed the previous year.

  Sam Willis

  It’s clearly carefully orchestrated, and there are more layers involved, aren’t there. Where did they go?

  Dr Marika Plater

  They went to Iona Island, which is about a 49-mile trip from lower Manhattan. And it’s an island that now has the archives for the Palisades Interstate Park Commission. It was a naval base for a while. But at this time, it was a former orchard and sorry, a vineyard that had been turned into an excursion grove. So that meant it’s this green place, it’s on the water, there are salt marshes all around, there’s a kind of large cliff that’s overhanging it on the other side of the Hudson River. And it’s full of – it has a merry go round, it has a lot of space for sports and games. So, it’s a place where many excursions would dock so that people from the city could come and get out of the city and experience nature.

  Sam Willis

  Okay, but you know, having a boatload of Chinese people, I’m sure their experience of that grove was unusual, was different to what others had done there. What did they get up to?

  Dr Marika Plater

  Yeah, well, all excursions had music and food and games. But this excursion, there were very particular kinds of music, they’re bringing Chinese music there, which, by the way, American listeners would always write about how much they hated Chinese music. So, there wasn’t, there wasn’t a great place to play this music in the city. And so, being at Iona Island, having all of these acres of space, being far from the city was a chance to play music as loud as they wanted. So, they played music, they flew kites, like very realistic looking kites. At one point, they had a kite shaped like a hawk and two hawks came to attack it, so it was that lifelike that it would trick a real bird. They’re setting off fireworks. So, one of the newspapers at the time said that they turned the atmosphere of the island blue with all of these fireworks, smokes. And so those are the kinds of things that they’re doing. They’re having fun, but in a way that there wasn’t really space for in the city.

  Sam Willis

  And they’re having fun in the Chinese way. And these are kind of key aspects of Chinese culture. However, we know we can’t forget the presence of the white Christian women, who are such a key part of this excursion. It’s very much bound up in Christianity in the Sunday schools, isn’t it?

  Dr Marika Plater

  Absolutely. There were some prayers and religious songs. And the way the newspapers reported it, which of course, is very much through the white gaze, but the journalists were saying that these women were sort of overseeing the games and making sure that nobody got too rowdy. And so, there is this level of kind of like surveillance and control, and this idea that the presence of these white women is sort of shaping the behaviour of the Chinese American men who are participating in the event.

  Sam Willis

  So, I found that whole story fascinating in its own right, but there’s another side to it as well, because there’s another trip, which I really, really liked. And there’s one that’s not subconsciously different, isn’t it? It’s, it’s not linked with Christianity. It’s not linked with Sunday schools, and a group of Chinese decided to go and do it themselves do their own trip, which I like, tell me about that one

  Dr Marika Plater

  Yeah, absolutely. So, I know about this trip through one of its organizers, whose name was Wong Chin Foo. And he’s a kind of famous guy in Chinese American history, he was the first person to call himself a Chinese American. And he started a newspaper in New York of that same name in 1883. He was on the first Sunday school excursion, which became an annual tradition, by the way. So, he was on that excursion, but he was not a Christian at all. He had had terrible experiences with Protestant missionaries in China; he was very opposed to the idea of missionary-ism. And so, he was part of an organisation in Chinatown that was called The Knee Hop Hong. It was a Mutual Aid Society, and that meant that members would join together, pay a fee, and then if they got sick and couldn’t work, or they died and needed money for burial, or the families needed money for burial, that this mutual aid association could take care of them. It’s kind of like a pre-insurance organization. Anyway, he’s a member of this group and the group organises another excursion in 1888. And this one Wong called a “heathen picnic”.

  Sam Willis

  A heathen picnic, that’s an amazing thing to call a trip out.

  Dr Marika Plater

  And he’s saying this, you know, he is using language that was often leveraged against Chinese people, but he’s like, no, this is a heathen picnic, it’s for the anti-Christian element of the Chinese. That’s what we’re doing – we’re not a Sunday school excursion.

  Sam Willis

  It’s quite a political move, isn’t it? He’s actually, he’s embracing the narrative language. And fair enough, that’s exactly what we’re going to do!

  Dr Marika Plater

  Exactly. And they do that more than once, actually, because, well, first of all, once this boat reaches – this grove was in Staten Island, Bay Cliff Grove – once they reach the grove, there are a bunch of speeches that members of The Knee Hop Hong gave. And one of the speechmakers, (actually Wong) he called the excursion a festival to celebrate the birthday of Chinatown, or the founding of the New York colony. And by saying the word colony, he’s really using a word that was really important in the lead up to the Exclusion Act, but he’s using it another way. In 1876, when Congress was debating exclusion, one representative said that people from China were, quote: “by nature, disposition and habits incapable of assimilating within our laws and customs, and tend to establish a foreign colony in the Republic”, and so this idea that Chinese people would colonize the US this was a founding fear that motivated the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Wong’s like, you know, “yes, we did it”, like, “here’s Chinatown, it’s our colony, we’re going to take over this place” like he was playing with these fears.

  Sam Willis

  How important do you think it was that all this happened in a kind of a maritime theatre setting? Was it, you know, sort of fundamentally important to what happened?

  Dr Marika Plater

  It’s a great question. I’m thinking about how the sort of area around New York was really crucial to the rise of environmental thought. There was in the early 19th century, wealthy people would take steamboats up the Hudson especially, but all around these watery areas. And they were developing ideas about the American environment being this uplifting, inspiring place that was really crucial to national identity. And at the time, when this was happening in the 1820s, only very wealthy white people could access these important landscapes. And so, what I’m seeing with the excursion industry in the late 1870s, to the turn of the century, is that working people, people of colour, people from all across the world, they are gaining access to these crucial areas, and that’s their landscapes, their waterscapes. And so, to me, as an environmental historian, I’m interested in what that means for new groups to access places that are so crucial to how the nation imagined itself.

  Sam Willis

  It seems to me that those paddle ships had become a sort of stage upon which significant political movements, comments, had to be made. So, if you were going to say something important, like, for example, okay, Chinese Americans have power of their own making, then they do kind of need to do it, or not necessarily need to do it, but it’s certainly more powerful if they can make that point on the ships.

  Dr Marika Plater

  I think that everyone involved with these excursions understood that the news would care about these events. And so, journalists reported on the speeches, they reprinted some of these radical things that members of The Knee Hop Hong were saying. And so, it was a kind of platform, just the fact that it’s more interesting to cover an event that’s on a boat than something that’s in like a lecture hall and so I think that they were taking advantage of this for sure.

  Sam Willis

  Yeah, I mean, you could get that with the imagery as well. I mean, the anti-Chinese imagery to start with is very shocking, isn’t it from that period, but also the way that the newspaper articles are illustrated because a lot of them are framed around these beautiful paddle ships, it gives it a kind of a structure for them to actually work from.

  Dr Marika Plater

  Right. I was struck by comparing images of the Sunday school excursion to Iona Island. Comparing an image from that trip with just the generally horrifically racist caricature images of Chinese immigrants. And so, when journalists were draw, or I guess illustrators were drawing the Iona Island excursion, they’re at least like trying to capture individual features. They’re trying to draw human beings; they weren’t very good at it, unfortunately, the white people in the photo, in the image, are drawn much better. But this image was very different than most of the images circulating at the time.

  Sam Willis

  Yeah, fascinating, isn’t it? When did these excursions end – and why?

  Dr Marika Plater

  Yeah, that is telling too. First of all, I should say The Knee Hop Hong excursion seems to have only happened once. So, it was this kind of amazing act of resistance basically where members of this organization are saying, you know, we don’t need to bow down to anyone, we don’t need to defer, Chinatown has its own power. So that was just one amazing year. But the Sunday school excursions happened almost every year until 1907. But there was one year when the excursion didn’t happen and that was in 1892, right after the passage of the Geary Act, which extended the Chinese Exclusion Act for another 10 years. And the people who would have organized that excursion, they said, you know, we can’t celebrate the daughters of the men who passed this act, like we don’t know where we stand. They are also concerned that if anything went wrong on the excursion, that it would really provide fuel for people who hated them. So, there was a pause for that one year that sort of shows how tied excursions were to the politics of the time. And then when the Sunday school excursions finally stopped, was also a telling moment. So, Sunday school excursions finally came to an end in 1909, when the body of a Sunday school teacher named Elsie Siegel was found in a trunk in Chinatown. And so, after her body was found, the city was sort of plunged into chaos, there was a lot of concern about Chinese American men who attended these Sunday schools. In the past, the excursions had been covered as kind of sweet events between these kind teachers, and these childlike innocent students and sort of missing the fact that both of these parties were adults, and they often did have relationships. But once Siegel’s body was found this illusion totally shattered. And so, because of that, the Sunday schools knew that they could not have an event like this. In the past excursions had been ways to sort of showcase friendship and good relations between Chinese Americans and white Americans, but the threat was just too big at that point.

  Sam Willis

  It’s an extraordinary story, isn’t it? And it’s clear there was no escaping the xenophobia even when they’re out on a nice day trip. And also, that this all comes down through the stage of the maritime, of the maritime world. Marika thank you so much. I’ve got so many more questions that I want to ask and find answers to. I want to do a PhD in this – it’s fascinating. Thank you so much for your time.

  Dr Marika Plater

  Thank you so much.

  Sam Willis

  Thank you all very much for listening as ever do please find us online @snr.org.uk. Follow us on social media, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, and do check out our new YouTube channel. It’s got some magnificent stuff on there not least our video we’ve made by bringing Nelson back to life from a plaster mask held in the collections of the National Museum of the Royal Navy. It really is quite an amazing thing to watch. Do please check that out at Mariner’s Mirror Podcast on YouTube. And how can you help? Well, please leave a review on iTunes, but best of all, please just subscribe to the Society for Nautical Research, and your subscription fee will go towards publishing the most important maritime history and to preserving our maritime past.

Category: Research