With Leona Kearns I could sense her excitement as she bounded out the door onto the ship’s promenade deck. She was finally going home, crossing the stormy North Pacific. Likewise, as a parent, I could imagine her mom and dad of West Union, Illinois, looking forward to their seventeen-year-old daughter’s safe return.
Leona was one of many people I discovered while researching and writing Oceans of Fate: Peace and Peril Aboard the Steamship Empress of Asia, a book about how one ship touched the lives of passengers and crew during thirty years of tumultuous world history.
Tall and talented, Leona was a semi-professional pitcher for the all-girls Philadelphia Bobbies baseball team. The Bobbies were so good they had been invited to play in a tournament in Japan. Oceans of Fate explains how things fell apart for the Bobbies soon after the team’s arrival, how Leona and two other teammates had been left behind with no money to get home, and how Leona’s father, Claude — learning of the situation—made arrangements for his daughter to board the Empress of Asia at Kobe, Japan, bound for Vancouver with a call at Yokohama.
But it was not to be. On January 21, 1926, while the Asia was two days out of Yokohama — punching through a massive storm — a towering wave swept Leona overboard. Efforts were made to locate her, but it was too rough to launch a rescue boat. She was gone.
Much research went into piecing together Leona’s nearly one-hundred-year-old story, especially her last movements on the ship. Researcher Nelson Oliver, whose father served on the Asia during the Second World War, assisted greatly with the “deep dig” into her life. Together we looked at what had been written about the tragedy, including the ship’s logbook. However, the most important moment came when we tracked down Leona’s surviving relatives, which led to the sharing of old letters and photographs, along with other details of her life.
The letters from Leona gave voice to the girl while the photos gave her a clear physical form; how she might stand on a pitcher’s mound or while bounding through the door that fateful day on the Asia.
Her story — and there are many others — is emblematic of what I set out to do with the book. I didn’t want to write an operational history of a ship. I wanted to focus mostly on the people on board, and the circumstances they found themselves in, whether against the unpredictable forces of a North Pacific storm, manmade terrors such as war, or happier times.
As one reviewer succinctly wrote, Oceans of Fate is about the “flesh and bone” of passengers and crew—a culmination of years of research leading to a remembrance of individual lives that rose again from three remarkable decades.
— Dan Black
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