Tatsuta Maru was built to impress. Constructed between 1927 and 1929 by Mitsubishi Shipbuilding and Engineering at Nagasaki for Nippon Yusen Kaisha, Japan's premier shipping line, she was one of three sister ships -- alongside Asama Maru and Chichibu Maru -- designed for the high-speed trans-Pacific route between Yokohama and San Francisco. NYK marketed them as "The Queen of the Sea." The 16,975-ton vessel carried 222 first-class passengers, 96 in second class, and up to 504 in third class, served by a crew of 330. Her four Mitsubishi-Sulzer diesel engines drove quadruple screws at a service speed of 21 knots, completing the Yokohama-to-San Francisco crossing in about 15 days with stops at Honolulu. She even had a second funnel that served no engineering purpose -- it was added purely for aesthetics, because one-funneled ships looked less impressive. Named after the Tatsuta Shrine, an important Shinto site in Nara Prefecture, she was launched on April 12, 1929, severely damaged by fire on February 7, 1930, quickly repaired, and began her maiden voyage on March 15, 1930.

Through the 1930s, Tatsuta Maru became a floating intersection of diplomacy, commerce, and human desperation. On November 12, 1936, she became the first civilian vessel to pass under the newly completed San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, then the longest bridge in the world. In January 1940, she was scheduled to carry 512 German seamen from the scuttled transport SS Columbus, who had been interned in the United States -- but political pressure blocked their boarding. More consequentially, in June 1940, she arrived in San Francisco carrying 40 Jewish refugees from Russia, Austria, Germany, and Norway who had escaped through Japan via the overland route across Siberia. In March 1941, the ship delivered Colonel Hideo Iwakuro to San Francisco, dispatched by Prime Minister Hideki Tojo to assist Ambassador Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura in his increasingly desperate negotiations with the Americans. By summer 1941, Tatsuta Maru was not just crossing the Pacific -- she was threading the needle between peace and war.

After her final fuel-rationed voyage home from San Francisco in the summer of 1941, Tatsuta Maru was requisitioned by the Imperial Japanese Navy. The elegant liner that had served champagne in first-class dining rooms was stripped of her peacetime finery and converted for military transport, joining the vast fleet of commandeered merchant vessels that Japan's overextended navy relied upon to supply its far-flung island garrisons. By early 1943, the war in the Pacific had turned decisively against Japan. American submarines prowled the waters around the home islands with increasing effectiveness, and the shipping lanes that had once carried tourists and trade goods were now killing zones.

On February 8, 1943, Tatsuta Maru departed the Yokosuka Naval District bound for Truk, the massive Japanese naval base in the Caroline Islands, escorted by the destroyer Yamagumo. Forty-two miles east of Mikurajima, an American submarine spotted the two ships. The attack came without warning. Up to four torpedoes struck Tatsuta Maru, and the ship went down. The sinking claimed 1,223 soldiers and passengers and 198 crewmen -- 1,421 lives in total. It happened at night, during a gale, and the destroyer Yamagumo was unable to locate any survivors in the storm-tossed darkness. There were none to find. The ship that had once been the Queen of the Sea came to rest on the floor of the Pacific, 42 miles from a small volcanic island, carrying with her the accumulated weight of a decade's worth of crossings, negotiations, refugees, and confiscated bonds -- all of it silenced by the war that everyone aboard her decks had watched approaching.