On the morning of November 16th, 1906, a man joined the crowd waiting at the dock in Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. He boarded the ferry the S.S. Bruce for the ten hour trip to North Sydney, Nova Scotia. As he walked up the gangplank, the other passengers looked at him curiously. On deck, a wide-eyed little girl in a blue woollen cap pointed at the man and stared. She pulled on her father's coat sleeve to make him look too. Her father said "hush" and looked away. The man said nothing. The girl continued to stare. She bit ice from her thick mittens and kept pulling on her father's sleeve. Finally, the man smiled at the little girl. She raised a mittened hand to her mouth, giggled and turned away.

If the man had a wife and children, they were not with him. He travelled alone. His only luggage was an old cloth bag. Around his neck hung a leather wallet containing a small amount of money.

No one knew where the man came from. No one knew why he was leaving Newfoundland. No one knew what he was going to do when he got to Nova Scotia, a province in the foreign country of Canada. Perhaps the man himself did not know.

The early winter crossing was rough. November winds blow cold and strong in the North Atlantic. The ship was not as comfortable or well built as today's vessels. The S.S. Bruce pitched and rolled. Many people were seasick. The man was not a sailor. He had made at least one long sea voyage in his life, but he too was probably seasick. It would be too bad if he was sick, because he was going to stay on the ship for much longer than the other passengers. On this voyage, he would never set foot on Canadian soil. For the next week the S.S. Bruce would be his prison.

The man was an immigrant to North America.¹ He did not look like the other passengers who hurried across the S.S. Bruce's frozen decks, or slept in their narrow bunks. Unlike them, he was not of Scottish, Irish or English background. Neither was he French, Spanish or Portuguese. He came from no European country. The man's name was Wang Lee and he had been born in Kwangtung Province in southern China. He was twenty-six years old and he needed to find work. Now, on this cold morning in November, he looked over the rail of the S.S. Bruce into the rolling fog. He wondered what lay ahead for him in Canada.