What Ship Did Anna Leonowens Sail On?

The Leonowens family, who left Australia in April 1857, sailed to Singapore and then moved to Penang, where Thomas found work as a hotel keeper. Anna Harriette Leonowens was a British writer and governess employed by King Mongkut (Rama IV) of Siam (now Thailand) in the 1860s. In March 1862, Anna Leonowens sailed with her son, Louis, from Singapore to Bangkok on the steamer Chao Phya. She was slated to take a position as the Anna Leonowens was known for her books and stories about their five-year stay in Siam.

Anna Leonowens was forty-seven years old when she arrived in Halifax in 1878. At this point in her life, she was a well-received author and sought-after lecturer. Three decades after her death, in the 1940s and 1950s, the story would be transformed into a powerful Western myth by Margaret Landon’s best-selling book Anna and Anna Leonowens.

Anna Leonowens was an Anglo-Indian woman who was hired by Mongkut, King of Siam, to teach his children. She later moved to Canada and became a Suffragette. Her own account was fictionalized in Margaret Landon’s best-selling novel Anna.

On March 15th, 1862, Anna Leonowens met her firstborn son, Thomas, on the steamship Chow Phya. The basis for the 1944 novel Anna and the King of Siam remains to this day. On the evening of March 15th, 1862, the steamship Chow Phya docked in the crowded harbor at Bangkok, the capital of Siam. Anna rushes to see the King before her ship leaves, and the King passes away.