Childhood Journeys Across Colonial Seas: Locating Children in Maritime Archives

The presence of child passengers in increasing numbers on board steamships travelling to, from, and within Asia in the early twentieth century shaped shipboard socialities and spatial arrangements in distinctive ways. Yet, the historical record of children’s experiences of sea travel is usually filtered through the representations and agendas of adults. Structured around the story of a journey from Manila to Boston made by two unaccompanied Filipino American children in 1912, this paper considers the methodological challenges and possibilities of writing a history of childhood mobilities in Asia when children’s voices are often absent from colonial and maritime archives.

Adult experiences of ‘passengering’ have so far dominated the historical literature, yet as the extensive newspaper coverage of the trans-Pacific journey made by these two young siblings suggests, maritime voyages made by children were an enduring source of public fascination. This paper suggests that reading against the grain of newspaper reportage and shipping company records provides insights into the profound emotional, intellectual, and physiological effects of long-distance journeys for child passengers. Over the course of a voyage, children’s perceptions of global space were expanded, their understandings of class and racial distinctions were sometimes elided and sometimes reconfirmed in the compressed and segregated on-board space, and they encountered unfamiliar peoples and cultures at ports of call. Applying age as a category of analysis can lead to a more textured understanding of shipboard socialities and of the state and institutional management of maritime mobility.