Charles Jones Soong, father of Mice, Chiang Kai-shek and founder of China’s internationally famous Soong family, was, for two years, a member of the United States Coast Guard.
Soong, who then bore his Chinese name Chai-jui Soong, shipped aboard the U. S. Revenue Cutter Gallatin at Boston. Captain Eric Gabrielson, commanding officer of the cutter, enlisted the sixteen-year old boy in the Service. His name was entered on the muster as “Sun” and he was described as being five feet tall at the time. Young Soong had apparently been previously employed in his uncle’s importing establishment in Boston. It is evident that he went to sea to escape the limitations of a business that held little attraction for him. Accordingly, in January, 1879, he went down to the government pier and boarded the Gallatin, while she was in port on a routine stop. His name appears on the muster list for the first time on January 8, 1879.
The established run of the Gallatin was from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Edgartown, Massachusetts, one of the roughest stretches of coast along the Atlantic. The Gallatin, a square-rigged steamer, was a fast, smart cutter, the pride of the mariners of Edgartown, her southernmost home port. Captain Gabrielson, whose home was in Edgartown, was born in Stavanger, Norway, but had spent most of his life at sea. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and settled in Edgartown shortly after the war’s end. He married the daughter of Littleton Wimpenny, one of Massachusetts’ foremost maritime figures of the day, November 17, 1867.
Captain Gabrielson, a quiet, sea-wise man, had a profound effect upon the life of Charles Soong, and, because of him, upon the history of modern China. The old inhabitants of Edgartown still remember the Captain and speak of him with a respect bordering on veneration. It is not easy for any stranger to become a part of a small, tradition-rich town as Gabrielson became a part of Edgartown. First of all, he had to be as good a seafaring man as the best of the native mariners, and in the case of a town which has become a symbol of New England’s golden age as a maritime center, acceptance of any man as the equal of its own sons was high tribute indeed. Secondly, to be accepted a man had to know when to keep his counsel. The descendant of taciturn Norwegian shipbuilders, Gabrielson was sufficiently reserved to be trusted, and yet sufficiently gregarious, on the other hand, to join in the activities of the town while his ship was in port. In the third place, Edgartown expected a man to set up his home in a house of moderate but dignified appearance. Edgartown mariners lived amidst surroundings of restrained luxury, not in homes of passing comfort, but in stately houses whose simple, modified classical architecture was an external expression of the New England temperament. In sound orthodoxy, the twenty-seven year old Gabrielson acquired an imposing house at the time of his marriage—a house befitting the dignity of his wife, the niece of Judge Pease, the town’s squire.
What was most important of all, as far as Charles Soong’s future was concerned, was that Captain Gabrielson became a member of the Methodist Church at Edgartown and interested himself in its affairs.
The people of Edgartown, like those of all sea towns, invariably associated men with their particular ships. To recall the man is to recall the ship, almost automatically. This held true, too, of the crews, and the member of the crew of a good ship was regarded as a good man, no matter how lowly his position. This triple association led the people of Edgartown to lump together Captain Gabrielson and his ship, the Gallatin, and his crew—as though each of the three were only as worthy as the whole. And because they respected Gabrielson as a mariner and the Gallatin as a ship (the old inhabitants, when they speak of her, look steadily at their listeners and say, “Slick as a whistle, she was”), they respected the Gallatin’s crew.
And they had due reason. For those people in Edgartown who did not owe their lives to the Gallatin’s seaworthiness or her crew’s seamanship had some relative who did. The Gallatin’s log, especially throughout the winter months, constituted a continuous roll of rescue operations of craft along the rugged coastline of Massachusetts. Her biggest day came not two months after Charles Soong had joined the Service. Still a novice aboard, he nevertheless apparently went through one of the busiest days of his life with complete success. And aboard the Gallatin, the success of every individual was regarded by Captain Gabrielson as the surest criterion of the success of the ship.
Such success was achieved on the day of the famous March gale in 1879. On that day, when every ship along the New England coast was battered and tossed around by the winds and high seas, the Gallatin alone went to the rescue of no less than five widely scattered vessels. Not waiting for distress signals, she went out in search of the vessels, which Captain Gabrielson knew would inevitably meet with troubles. In quick succession, the Gallatin steamed to the aid of the Emma L. Gregory, the S. J. Lindsey, Neptune’s Bride, and the Allslon. Due to her ubiquitous efficiency, not a soul was lost. Then the Ligure, a huge schooner heavily loaded with lumber, en route from Calais to Bridgeport, ran into trouble between some shoals. All day she had beaten her way through the storm, outfighting as fierce a wind and heavy a sea as ever tested New England shipping. Then as the night approached, the strain of the fight began to tell on her. All day the sea had made a clean sweep over her. And although her pumps had been worked steadily throughout the day, she began to fill with water. Finally, she rolled over on her beam ends.
In the darkness of the night and as the gale continued, the Gallatin, four rescues behind her, was still seeking out vessels in distress. But somehow she missed the Ligure. With the crew all but exhausted, she continued her search, and every man of the crew was on the alert. It was some time after daylight when the Ligure was sighted.
In the heavy seas, and after great difficulty, a boat from the Gallatin was sent alongside the stricken ship, which had righted itself. The Gallatin’s men learned that the Ligure’s masts had been cut away and that her people had spent the night in open boats under the lee of the schooner as she lay on her beam ends. The mate had died of exposure during the night.
The Ligure's crew had boarded her again when she righted herself in the morning, but the wreck was slowly sinking, and the Gallatin’s men took them and the mate’s body off in the Gallatin’s boat. In the heavy sea, the boat was stove in before it could be taken upon the Gallatin’s davits, and all hands had to be hauled aboard the cutter.
Such a twenty-four hour stretch as this created a bond of mutual trust and loyalty between Captain Gabrielson and the members of his crew. Such a bond existed especially between Charles Soong and the captain under whom he first enlisted.
Consequently, when after serving for his full year with Captain Gabrielson, Soong’s enlistment expired, he promptly reshipped aboard the Gallatin. In July, 1880, six months after his second enlistment, Soong requested a discharge from the Service. He was still aboard the Gallatin, but unquestionably made the request because Captain Gabrielson had been transferred to the cutter Schuyler Colfax, based at Wilmington, North Carolina, two months earlier.
Had it not been for the strong sense of personal loyalty that Charles Soong had towards Captain Gabrielson, that might have been the end of his career in the Service. But somehow he made his way to North Carolina, went to Wilmington and, on the first of August, less than three weeks after his discharge from the Gallatin, reenlisted aboard Captain Gabrielson’s new charge, the Schuyler Colfax.
Captain Gabrielson is recalled by those who remember him as a stern task-master and strict disciplinarian. But he was never unmoved by such loyalty as Charles Soong exhibited. As a result, he made the boy his particular concern, and he became convinced that the lad, who had already displayed courage and resourcefulness enough to strike out for himself rather than to inherit his uncle’s business, had potentialities of a high order. Possessed of fine qualities of intelligence and personality, he seemed to the Captain to be destined to a career of unlimited importance. Captain Gabrielson, therefore, determined to help the boy get ahead. After approximately eight months on the Colfax Soong had his honorable discharge from the Service arranged through Captain Gabrielson, who wrote to the Secretary of the Treasury, commending young Soong and suggesting that he was entitled to a discharge in order that he might better himself.
Besides arranging Soong’s discharge, Captain Gabrielson, himself a religious man, introduced the eager-minded young Soong to the Reverend Dr. T. Page Ricaud, of the old Fifth Street Southern Methodist Church. He and Gabrielson and Soong spent many hours talking together, and Soong decided to be christened in Dr. Ricaud’s church.
Following his departure from Captain Gabrielson and the Colfax, Charles Soong went to Trinity College, then located in Randolph County, North Carolina, and now the Undergraduate College for Men at Duke University in Durham. He was at Trinity until 1882 and then went to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, from which he was graduated.
Captain Gabrielson, whose quick recognition of young Soong’s exceptional qualities of enterprise and brilliance steered the lad into channels through which he could best realize his potentialities, did not live to see the effect that Charles Jones Soong had upon modern world history. The founder of a great fortune when he returned to China, Charles Soong was the father of the most notable single generation of a Chinese family ever to figure in all that ancient country’s long history. His three sons and three daughters are, all leaders in modern world history.
Mei-ling Soong, besides serving China as her First Lady as the wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, is in her own right a world leader.
Ching-ling Soong is the widow of the late Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Chinese Republic and its first leader.
Ai-ling Soong is the wife of Dr. H. H. Rung, the former Finance Minister of China and a descendant of Confucius.
T. V. Soong, founder of the Bank of China and a leader in world financial statesmanship, was China’s Foreign Minister, and latest reports indicate that he is now Chairman of the Provincial Government of Kwangtung Province.
T. L. Soong has been Government Finance Commissioner, and according to present information is Director of The World Bank and an alternate Governor of the International Monetary Fund.
T. A. Soong, youngest of the family, has served as Collector of Internal Revenue in China and, according to latest advices, now is General Manager of a Chinese bank in San Francisco.
Educated at Harvard, Ensign Tourtellot was for several years on the staff of the Boston Evening Transcript as well as Time Magazine. During the war he served as an assistant to the Director of Public Relations, U. S. Coast Guard. The editor of the Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, and author of several books of biographical or historical interest, he is now on the staff of Time.