Tomo Skalica-Hawaii-1852
Professor Ante Kadic discovered the published travelogue of Tomo Skalica who
came to Hawaii several years after Captain Dominis' disappearance at sea,
Skalica was not a sailor and he was a native of northern Croatia. He was born in
1825 in Slavonski Brod. In 1851 he left Croatia to travel "to the four
corners of the world." He described his "Putovanje (Journey) in
installments that were printed in the literary periodical Neven (Zagreb) from
1854 to 1856. Skalica left the port of Bremen in Germany aboard a Finnish boat,
It sailed slowly around Cape Horn to Chile, Mexico and reached San Francisco
in April 1852. It still was the time of the Gold Rush. On the same ship he left
on April 21, 1852 for Sandwich Islands (Hawaiian Islands) which are located
"in the middle of the ocean between California and China." The capital
of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Honolulu had in 1852 some 20,000 inhabitants; it was
"so beautiful that few cities in this world could be compared with
it." Among Skalica’s remarks are some interesting observations about the
American influence and his farsighted prediction that this "terrestrial
paradise" some day will like California and Oregon join the United States
of America. Employed by the Finnish ship as a clerk Skalica left Honolulu in
July 1852 for a whale hunting voyage to Petropavlovsk in
Russian Kamchatka. The ship returned to Honolulu in January of 1853. From there
he sent an interesting letter dated April 3. 1853 to the same periodical Neven
in Croatia. He "finally returned penniless to Brod (in 1855)."