A ship carrying the bodies of 499 Chinese gold miners from New Zealand that sank 112 years ago was found 20 kilometers away from Hokianga Harbor, New Zealand, by a team led by amateur documentary filmmaker John Albert back in 2012. Last week, he called a news conference to publicly announce the wreck's discovery.
The wreck was that of the SS Ventnor, a ship commissioned by Choie Sew Hoy, a rich merchant and owner of mining ventures in New Zealand, to repatriate the bodies of dead Chinese miners who paid in advance to be buried in their native land. Sew Hoy died before the Ventnor left, and thus joined the other corpses aboard.
Two days after leaving Wellington, the ship struck rocks off the Taranaki coast and limped toward the Hokianga Harbor before finally sinking. The manifest of the corpses went down with the ship, and for over a century only the remains of Sew Hoy was known to be aboard.
Following Albert's announcement at last week's press conference, the New Zealand Chinese Association released a statement formally expressing outrage that the ship had been disturbed.
Virginia Chong, an official of the New Zealand Chinese Association, told the New Zealand Herald that she and about 100 other Chinese representatives, including descendants of Choie Sew Hoy, traveled last year to the area to formally bless the souls lost on the Ventnor, to ensure they were at rest.
She said it would likely be impractical to identify individual remains after so many years at sea, and they should probably be left alone.
Choie Sew Hoy's great-great grandson Peter Sew Hoy added: "It's a gravesite. It's a spiritual site. From a moral point of view, it would have been nice to have been contacted [by Albert before making a public announcement.]"
Albert during his press conference said that while it will be up to officials, local Maori and Chinese family members to decide the fate of any remains, he thinks the bodies should go to China because that is what the miners had wanted.
New Zealand Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Devoy called for the wreck site to be protected, saying: "Just as we would never consider turning Pike River [Mine] into a tourist attraction, so too should we respect the men of the SS Ventnor and their descendants and communities. The SS Ventnor is a site of significance for all New Zealanders."