All 11 crew members aboard the sailing junk - Taiwanese Captain Liu Ning-sheng, six Americans, two Japanese, one Taiwanese and one mainland Chinese - were rescued by two helicopters dispatched by the National Rescue Center, and 10 of them were taken to two military hospitals in Taipei City for treatment at around 8 a.m. Liu, who sustained slight head injuries, was taken to Veterans General Hospital in Suao.

Two of the crew members had serious injuries to the head and neck, respectively, while the others were receiving treatment for hypothermia. Some of the crew said that during the chaos after the junk was hit, they spotted the name of the freighter as Champion Express.

A check of the maritime charts by the Suao-based CGA found that a vessel named Champion Express was indeed in the area at that time. Radar records showed that the freighter, which was heading north before it rammed into the Princess Taiping, made an abrupt turn in a westerly direction after the sailing junk broke in two. The ship then turned northward and fled, the records showed.

The Princess Taiping put out from Keelung's Bisha Fishing Port on June 26, 2008 and had made port calls in Japan, the west coast of the United States, Hawaii and Saipan over the past 10 months.

It departed from Naha, Okinawa Saturday for Taiwan and was scheduled to return to Bisha later yesterday to complete a cross-Pacific voyage that would have set a record as the first by a rebuilt Ming Dynasty sailing junk without mechanical power.