Quock Mui is an overlooked, but pivotal figure in the history of Monterey. Her parents survived a terrifying voyage of emigration by seagoing junk from Manila. Their boat was the only one of five that survived the trip. Dismasted, it washed up on the beach at the mouth of the Carmel River in 1851. Indians, who then had a village on the south bank of the river (there’s a shopping center and a gas station there now) nursed the new arrivals back to health.
The Quock family and other Chinese built little cabins on the northwest side of what we now call Whaler’s cove in Point Lobos State Reserve, where they made a living by fishing. Mui was born eight years later, possibly in the last remaining of the Chinese cabin, which is now known erroneously as the “Whalers Cabin.” If not in that cabin, it was in a similar one alongside. As California had become a state in 1850, Quock Mui was a US citizen by birth. During her childhood she lived in an amazingly poly-cultural community ringing the cove: There were her family and their countrymen, whalers from the Azores who spoke Portuguese, English-speaking Yankees who had quarried granite from the hill and later used the cove as a place to transfer coal to schooners, and Indians who spoke their own Rumsien tongue as well as the common language of Spanish.
Quock Mui learned to speak all five of these languages. She lived in town in Monterey as an adult, and her extraordinary skills as a linguist often put her in demand as a go-between among members of different ethnic groups in the city. The house she inhabited as and adult also still stands, with no special marking, near Cannery Row. Her descendants still live in California.
Photo No. 240L17 ©1999 Marc Shargel
Photographed at Cemeterio El Encinal, Monterey, CA
