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Autograph Letter Signed (“Clarence”). Stationery of TKK Oriental Steamship SS America Maru.  “On the Deep Blue Sea near Honolulu, the Crossroads of the Pacific”, Sept. 1, 1903. 4pp. With original mailing envelope, to his brother Paul in Oregon.

At least half of the Chinese immigrants to America remained only a few years and then returned to China.  Clarence Harriott, the son of a prominent  California clergyman, remained as a missionary in Hangchow, China, with his sister and her husband, from 1904 to 1911. 

“I have just witnessed the Surgeons inspection of all the Chinese steerage passengers…He took their temperature and pulse. One man screwed his tongue in all sorts of contortions trying to take the clinical thermometer under his tongue and a Chinese interpreter had to assist the surgeon with his difficult patient.  Some had fever… One of the Chinese in line for inspection spoke to me in English and so I had an opportunity of speaking to him of our Savior. He said he would become a Xian… had been to a Xian school. I hope he was sincere. The Chinese can endure far more than we can. If it were not for famine, flood and plague, they would overrun the world no doubt as this rate of mortality would be so decreased…”

Clarence’s brother Paul, in college when he received this letter, later became private secretary to Sen. Hiram Johnson, but was killed during the World War while training to be an aviator.