Kank Maru (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Kank Maru was Japan's first steam warship. The ship was a 3-masted top sail schooner (Jackass-barque), with an auxiliary coal-fired steam engine turning a side paddlewheel. Following the forced ending of Japan's national seclusion policy in 1854 by Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States, the Tokugawa shogunate turned to the Dutch, their sole Western trading partners in the previous 200 years, for the procurement of modern ships to counter the perceived threat posed by the West and its "black shps."