It was presented to the Tokugawa shogunate ruling Japan during the Bakumatsu period as a gift from King William III of the Netherlands to assist Janus Henricus Donker Curtius, head of the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (Netherlands Trading Society) in Japan in his efforts to establish formal diplomatic relations and the opening of Japanese ports to Dutch merchant vessels.

[5] Following the July 1853 visit of Commodore Perry, an intense debate erupted within the Japanese government on how to handle the unprecedented threat to the national's capital, and the only universal consensus was that steps be taken immediately to bolster Japan's coastal defenses.

The need for steam-powered warships to match the foreign "Black Ships" was a pressing issue, and the Tokugawa shogunate approached the Dutch for the supply of such vessels.

She was renamed Kankō Maru (観光丸), after a line in the I Ching : Kankoku shi kō (觀國之光, to view the light of the country).

Kankō Maru was a three-masted jackass-barque-rigged sailing vessel, with an auxiliary single-cylinder coal-fired 150 horsepower (110 kW) reciprocating steam engine turning a side paddlewheel.

She was used as a tourism ship in the Huis Ten Bosch theme park in Sasebo, Nagasaki, and has been sailing along the coast of Japan since.