At exactly 9:00 a.m. on May 5, 1989, 220 fishermen in nineteen boats sailed out from Su-ao Harbor in I-lan County on Taiwan's east coast; officially, they were going to fish the waters off P'eng-chia, an island seventy nautical miles north of Taiwan. Unofficially, however, they were charting a course westward some two hundred nautical miles toward the Fukien coast to Ma-tsu's traditional birthplace, the island of Mei-chou.