Hakone Maru II

In response to a comment to my earlier post from a reader about whether there are passenger lists, I looked some more and sure enough one can access passenger list. In particular, I need to find the one for my father's trip, which, according to the UK National Archives, landed in Liverpool on 17 February 1940. Looks like Ancestry.co.uk has all the passenger lists. Also, check out lists here

My Father Travels on the Hakone Maru in 1940: My Internet Travels From 1921 to 1943

Unlike my other internet wanderings and wonderings, the following will not flow from stream of consciousness. Rather, it presents some of my fascinating discoveries after cleaning up some memories my father put down in 1994. Specifically, these track his escape from Europe after World War II began and his travels from Italy (where he had been at university) to the United States, highlighted by several months in jail in limbo in Lisbon. For this wandering, the important point is how he got from Italy to Portugal:

Being stranded in Trieste where we did not know anyone was a serious predicament. We had wasted precious resources on the trip, lost time and parted with some of our belongings. We made the rounds of shipping agents and talked with all sorts of persons in the port. I cannot remember precise details - but somehow we learned that Japanese freighters passed through Naples on their way from the Orient to England and that they might offer an escape route. The information seemed reliable enough to justify the trip by train to Naples where, sure enough, we ascertained that the "Hakone Maru," a Jap half-freighter, was scheduled for arrival from Singapore in early February with final destination Liverpool and intermediate stops at Marseilles, Gibraltar and Casablanca.

Dad writes about his travel on this ship and concerns the ship's purser had with taking several German refugees, but my immediate goal was to see what else I could find out about the ship, and find out I did. My immediate objective to find some pictures was easy:

But looking for more, I found more. See after the jump: