Qualla: Twenty Years on the Seattle Run

Twenty Years on the Seattle Run: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Navy, Public domain. For nearly two decades, the Atago Maru was a creature of routine. She loaded cargo at Yokohama or Kobe, steamed across the North Pacific, and unloaded at Seattle -- one of a fleet of Nippon Yusen freighters that stitched Japan to the American West Coast with regular sailings through the 1920s and 1930s. Built in Glasgow by Lithgows & Sons in 1924, she was among the first diesel-powered cargo ships under Japanese registry, her twin Sulzer engines a sign of the industry's shift away from coal-fired steam. Nobody building her on the Clyde would have guessed she would end up an oil tanker, sunk by B-24 bombers, resting on the mud off Borneo.

Image: US Navy | Public domain

Twenty Years on the Seattle Run: Scottish Steel, Japanese Flag

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Navy, Public domain. Atago Maru slid down the ways at Glasgow on 17 June 1924, yard number 762, and was completed five months later. At 134.1 meters between perpendiculars with a beam of 17.4 meters, she was a substantial vessel for her era. Her twin Sulzer diesel engines, rated at 2,000 horsepower, ...

Image: US Navy | Public domain

Twenty Years on the Seattle Run: War Reshapes Everything

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Navy, Public domain. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Atago Maru's peacetime career evaporated. The trans-Pacific trade routes she had plied for seventeen years closed overnight. By August 1942, she was sailing military convoys from Cap Saint Jacques in Vietnam. That December, the I...

Image: US Navy | Public domain

Twenty Years on the Seattle Run: Running the Gauntlet

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Navy, Public domain. From 1943 through late 1944, Atago Maru sailed a dangerous web of convoy routes connecting Japan, Formosa, the Philippines, and Borneo. Each voyage grew more hazardous as American submarine patrols intensified. In August 1944, sailing with Convoy MI-13, she watched a U.S. submari...

Image: US Navy | Public domain

Twenty Years on the Seattle Run: Last Anchorage at Lutong

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Navy, Public domain. On 28 November 1944, Atago Maru lay at anchor just offshore of the Lutong oil refinery near Miri, Borneo. Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers of the U.S. Thirteenth Air Force found her there. The bombers struck, and the ship that had survived two years of submarine-haunted convoy...

Image: US Navy | Public domain

Twenty Years on the Seattle Run: A Reef with a History

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Navy, Public domain. Today, Atago Maru is one of the most popular dive sites in Sarawak. The wreck lies about twenty minutes by boat from Miri, accessible to recreational divers of moderate experience. At 100 meters long, she is large enough to explore across multiple dives, and visibility in the are...

Image: US Navy | Public domain