The Tyne Iron Shipbuilding Company launched her on Valentine's Day 1911 from Willington Quay, yard number 177. She was a plain vessel, fitted with a single screw driven by a three-cylinder triple-expansion engine built by John Dickinson and Sons of Sunderland. The engine gave her a top speed of nine knots, respectable for a cargo steamer of her era but nothing remarkable. Fred. Olsen & Co. of Norway operated her as Bra-Kar, the first of four ships to carry that name in the Olsen fleet. She changed hands in 1916 and became Havo, then again in 1935 when Philippine owners renamed her Mabuhay II. In 1938, Japanese buyers acquired the ship, and she became Ryusei Maru. By then she was already old, a workhorse approaching her fourth decade of service. The Imperial Japanese Army had a use for old workhorses.

On February 24, 1944, Ryusei Maru departed Surabaya bound for Ambon in the Maluku Islands. She carried 1,244 Japanese Army soldiers, 2,865 Indian prisoners of war captured during Japan's conquest of Southeast Asia, and 2,559 romusha, the Indonesian laborers conscripted by the Japanese occupation into forced work details across the archipelago. The total complement was approximately 6,600 people aboard a vessel never designed to carry anything close to that number. Ships like Ryusei Maru were known as hell ships, a term coined by the prisoners who endured them. Conditions below decks were suffocating: men packed into holds meant for freight, with inadequate water, sanitation, and ventilation. The romusha and Indian POWs had no say in their passage and no knowledge of where they were being taken. They were, in the calculus of the Japanese war machine, simply labor to be redistributed.

The convoy sailed with escorts: minesweepers W-8 and W-11, and the auxiliary submarine chaser Takunan Maru No. 5. It was not enough. The USS Rasher, a Gato-class submarine under the command of Commander Willard Laughon, had received an Ultra intelligence intercept directing her to patrol the Bali Sea. On the night of February 25, Rasher found the convoy roughly twenty-five nautical miles north of Bali. At 2045 hours, Laughon's first target, the transport Tango Maru, took a torpedo and went down. Rasher repositioned. At 2225, she fired four torpedoes at Ryusei Maru. Three struck home, splitting the old steamer in two. The ship sank rapidly. Of the 6,668 people aboard, including crew, 4,998 died. The Japanese soldiers had some chance of rescue by the escort vessels. The Indian prisoners and Indonesian laborers, trapped in the holds or struggling in dark water without life preservers, had almost none. The crew of Rasher had no way of knowing whom the ship carried. The tragedy of hell ships was precisely this: the unmarked vessels looked like any other military transport.

The sinking of Ryusei Maru ranks among the deadliest maritime disasters in history, yet it occupies a small footnote in most accounts of the Pacific War. The Indian POWs who died were largely soldiers of the British Indian Army, captured during the fall of Singapore and Malaya. Their families, scattered across the Indian subcontinent, often received no confirmation of how or where their relatives had perished. The romusha fared even worse in the historical record: conscripted from Javanese villages, many were never formally documented. They remain, for the most part, unnamed. The ship herself lies somewhere on the floor of the Bali Sea, north of the island whose beaches now draw millions of tourists each year. No marker floats above the wreck. The water is warm, the currents steady, and the surface reveals nothing of what rests below. Bra-Kar, Havo, Mabuhay II, Ryusei Maru: four names for one ship, and nearly five thousand reasons the last name should not be forgotten.