Kanrin Maru

Type

Corvette

Period

19th Century

Nation

Japan

Overview: The Kanrin Maru was Japan's first sail-and-screw-driven steam corvette, ordered from the Netherlands by the Tokugawa shogunate and delivered in 1857 under the temporary name Japan. She is best remembered as the ship that carried the first Japanese diplomatic embassy across the Pacific to the United States in 1860, a voyage that symbolized Japan's emergence from its long period of seclusion (sakoku). Specifications: Built by the Fop Smit (later L. Smit en Zoon) shipyard at Kinderdijk, she was a Bali-class sloop/corvette of roughly 300 tons displacement, about 50 meters long with a 7.3 meter beam. Propulsion combined a coal-fired 100 hp steam engine turning a single screw with a three-masted sail rig, and she mounted 12 guns; she was capable of about 6 knots. Service History: After delivery she trained Japanese officers in Western navigation and engineering at the Nagasaki Naval Training School. In 1860, under Captain Katsu Kaishū with John Manjiro and Fukuzawa Yukichi aboard, she escorted the first Japanese embassy to the United States alongside the USS Powhatan, becoming the first Japanese-crewed vessel to cross the Pacific. During the Boshin War she took refuge at Shimizu harbor in 1868 under a white flag, was nonetheless bombarded and boarded; by her final years she had been stripped of guns and machinery and used only as a transport, and she was wrecked in a typhoon off Hokkaido in September 1871. Notable Facts: As an early screw-driven steam warship, she represented technology that had existed in the West for barely a decade (comparable to HMS Rattler of 1843), making her a landmark design for modelers interested in the East-meets-West transitional era of naval architecture. Her 1860 crossing is commemorated on Japanese postage stamps and by a monument near San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, and despite several modern surveys, including a 2019 joint Japanese-Dutch effort, her wreck site has never been conclusively located.