Smuggling Chinese Immigrants At Sea

       When thinking about illegal Chinese immigration, the "paper son" method usually comes to mind. The immigrant obtains the identity papers of someone who is eligible to enter the U.S. such as the son of a merchant.  Upon disembarking from the ship from China, he must undergo a rigorous interrogation by an immigration officer and must convince him that he is the person whose documents he falsely holds.
       In contrast, smuggled immigrants, illegal by definition, bypass the immigration authorities and sneak into the country with the help of paid guides, crossing the Mexican or Canadian borders or at remote locations along the western, eastern, or southern coast. Only a handful of immigrants are involved in a given smuggling attempt, as larger numbers would increase risk of detection.
        It is not known how many succeed in being successfully smuggled; some are caught and deported and others die from the many physical dangers involved in their attempts to enter.
        I wonder how those who manage to enter undetected with the aid of smugglers can escape eventual apprehension since they would not possess documents establishing their identity or proof that they passed through immigration.
       In her book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018) Professor Beth Lew-Williams describes a unique smuggling at sea on a grand scale venture involving the 1904 maiden voyage from Norfolk, Virginia around Cape Horn, as the Panama Canal was not yet built, to San Francisco before heading to China and Japan.

        Captain Rinder was given a sealed letter by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, owners of the Mongolia, with orders not to open it until after he was 24 hours at sea. He must have been surprised by the instruction to stop offshore near Manzanillo, Mexico to meet a ship arriving from China carrying 189 Chinese who would be allegedly working as crew members on his ship as it continued to San Francisco. Actually, Rinder was instructed to create "employment contracts" that falsely stated these Chinese started employment the day their ship left Hong Kong, an account he would give to U.S. authorities to justify their entry when he reached San Francisco. To the Mexican authorities when he secretly transferred the 189 Chinese to his ship, he stated that the 189 Chinese were "in transit" en route back to China.
        Unlike the "typical" smuggling operation in which smugglers are paid to attempt to help illegal immigrants cross a border, in this instance the steamship company is the "smuggler." One wonders whether this was an isolated case or if there were other similar instances.

        No evidence seems to exist about the fate of this bold and unusual attempt to smuggle 189 Chinese.  Unlike typical smuggling efforts, these Chinese must have had identity, false presumably, papers to present to immigration officers when they docked in San Francisco.  Did they all succeed or did some get deported? What happened to those who gained admittance?