Korean Passengers Arriving at Honolulu, 1903-1905

About is List
this list of korean passengers arriving in
Honolulu by steamship from 1903 to late 1905
was compiled from microfilmed copies of passenger
manifests held by the National Archives
and Records Administration.* e compiled list
includes the names of passengers on sixty-four
voyages aboard eleven ships: the America Maru,
China, Coptic, Doric, Gaelic, Hongkong Maru,
Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, Nippon Maru, and
Siberia. e earliest voyage included in this list
arrived in Honolulu January 13, 1903, and the
latest, August 8, 1905.
e documents from which this list was compiled
bear the title “List or Manifest of Alien
Immigrants for the Commissioner of Immigration.”
ese are large columnar forms, completed
by hand. e handwriting and the quality of the
microfilm reproductions sometimes make it difficult
to interpret individual entries. Hence, the list
below includes an occasional incomplete item or
question mark to indicate unclear information.
e present list is a subset of the information
contained on the original manifests. Listed here
are name, age, marital status, last residence, ship,
and date of arrival. e original forms also include
columns for a variety of information about each
passenger, including occupation, ability to read
or write, residence, landing port, and final des-
tination. e form also has columns to indicate
whether the passenger held a ticket to the final destination;
who paid the traveler’s passage; whether
the passenger carried money; whether the passenger
had been in the United States before; whether
the passenger was joing relatives; and whether the
passenger had ever been supported by charity or
was a polygamist. In addition, there are columns
for notes about the passenger’s physical and
mental health and any physical deformities.
In most cases, the answers to these questions
are uniform for all passengers, and there is little
value in including them here. For example, with
few exceptions, each person’s occupation is listed
as farmer (later farm laborer). e exceptions are
six persons identified as clerks. eir names are
marked by asterisks in the list that follows.
A similar example is the information on literacy.
All the arriving passengers are listed as being able
to read and write. Only on the earliest manifests
are there any notations that this refers to literacy
in Korean, not English, though that must certainly
have been the case.
Yet other examples of omitted entries with
marginal value to the historical researcher are
those on final destination, money in the possession
of the traveler, and items related to health and
character. Honolulu is invariably given as the final
*Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1783–1983 (Record Group 85), Inbound Vessel, Passenger Manifests, Port of
Honolulu, Box 536.
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