In the year 1900, 17-year-old fisherman Nick Vilicich and three friends set off from the island of Hvar on Croatia's coast to escape their country's poverty and political instability.

Croatian nationalists at the time were pressing for independence from the Hungarian crown, which ruled over the autonomous Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia. Fearful of the growing unrest, the Croatian army was drafting young men.

Nick's son John, owner of the Marshall Boat Works, last week said the four, who also included Nick Beritich, Tony Nola, and Nick "Cosmi" Cosmitich, emigrated from Hvar "because they wanted to get out of the army.

"They wanted to be in a business and start a family. If they were in the service, that would have been out."

When his father reached West Marin, Vilicich said, "he wanted something that resembled home -- something right on the water in some cove that they liked."

"It was a region much like their Adriatic," wrote historian Jack Mason in Earthquake Bay. "Mild winters, fine weather March to October, coves and sheltered beaches."

However, Nick Vilicich and his friends arrived with "very little money," his son noted. "I think he had about $150 when he got here. We still have some receipts where he borrowed money [$250] to bring my mom over."

Like other Croatian immigrants from the rocky, hilly islands of Hvar and Iz, John's mother Nickolina, who emigrated to Tomales Bay three years later, arrived to a hard life.

"The women made do in shanties pitifully inferior to the stone, tiled-roof homes of Iz and Hvar," noted Mason. "Their children attended Pierce Point School with the farm youngsters."

The Yugoslavs who settled at White Gulch were among thousands of Croatians who emigrated to the States in the first three decades of this century.

Of the five waves of ethnic immigration to West Marin -- from Ireland, Switzerland's canton of Ticino, Portugal's Azore Islands, Croatia, and the Mexican state of Jalisco, the smallest was from Yugoslavia.

At least 14 Croatian families sent members to the Tomales Bay area. They included Nick Kojich and Tony Konatich, who together founded Nick's Cove restaurant in a onetime herring smokehouse, and John Smith (originally Smirich), a fisherman who operated a short-lived fish market in Inverness and whose son George spent his final years as unofficial doorman for the Inverness Store.

Other family names included Cosmitich, Beritich, Nola, Yankovich, Matkovich, Pusich, Marlajs, Galosich, Dulcich, and Pavich.

Today, Tony Konatich's son Felix, who with his wife Anna owns Tony's Seafood, and the Vilicich family are the only Croatians remaining in West Marin from that immigration.

Nearly a century later, Nick Vilicich's son John has retired from fishing and plans to sell the family's 50-year-old boatyard, which has also been the fishery's longtime unloading dock.

Most of the young Croatian men who emigrated to the States originally hoped to make enough money to return to home and buy a plot of land and a house in which to raise their families.

As soon as they were out of school, the emigrants typically signed on with fishing boats or the merchant marine, as the sea provided the easiest way off Croatia's Dalmatian coast.

Rusinic and his wife Svetka live on a piece of land in Iz owned by the Konatiches of Marshall. Rusinic remained on the island as a young man in part because he was lucky enough to land a good job running a hardware store.

"I had a steady job," Rusinic explained through an interpreter. "To have a job here was like winning the lottery. If we didn't have a job, either we left or we were doomed."

Although he was glad to be employed, Rusinic said he too would have gone to the US for at least a short time, "but I didn't have any [family there] to bring me in."

For those who stayed, the future was predictable. "It was like a cycle," Novoselic said. "You grow older, and you do what your parents have done before. You fish. You work on the little land you have. You marry, and you raise a family."

Other residents of Iz found work by moving to the mainland. Mile Sulic, whose wife Franceska is a cousin of Felix Konatich, managed to land a job in a Zadar boatyard, where he built repaired ships for 37 years before returning to Iz.

Not only did the exodus from Iz better the lives of those who left, it also benefitted the islanders who stayed. Many emigrants sent money home, and those who returned brought with them new ideas.

Today it is common to hear residents claim the heavy emigration helped make Iz one of the most progressive of the thousands of the islands off the Dalmatian coast.

Marijan, 31, is a professor of history and philosophy; he is also one of two personal assistants to the archbishop of Zadar. Marijan, who spent seven years of his childhood in San Pedro, said the lives of some women left behind on Iz were ruined by emigration.

"The men leave the house to emigrate and [go] to America to earn some money," he noted. "But they get married over there, and they just [abandon] their wives and children here.

"Those women were real martyrs. They were pushed around [in their husband's family's] house because their husband wasn't home. They were usually deprived of their rights. They just lived to the end of their lives bringing up their children, being faithful."

Marijan cited his great-grandmother's ordeal as an example. Her husband emigrated to Argentina, where he died. "Never he sent anything," Marijan said.

"All she had in her life was being pushed around in his house by the elders because she couldn't work as much as him. She couldn't produce and share in the house economy. All her life she lives like that, and in the end he dies.

"We never heard from him. We never saw his picture. And then a notice comes [that] he's dead. Who cares? We don't feel anything. But my grandfather was sad; he respects marriage."

But bad as Yugoslavia's economic problems had been prior to World War II, Marijan found his country's political and religious oppression under post-war communism to be even worse.

"Christmas was a day that didn't exist here," Marijan said. "It was an ordinary working day." On Christmas Eve, he said, "there were always riots...

"The young people would come out of the churches [after midnight mass] and sing Christmas songs, and then the police would just kick the hell out of them [using] dogs [and] streets splashed with water... so you would fall.

"Iz was one of the [places] where there were a lot of communists," Marijan noted. "Nobody had holy symbols in their house. Everybody had a picture of Tito or something like that.

"If you had a holy symbol, you took it up into the bedroom so nobody could see it. We were afraid of each other. You never knew who was going to turn you in."

On one of her visits to Iz, Konatich in church sang out the lyrics to a traditional Croatian national song that had been rewritten by the communists. "There is Anna," he said, "singing and saying, 'No, this is the right text.'

"Anna was one of the people who was free. She would stand up and say, 'Hey you guys, you can't let the church fall apart like this. That's our heritage.'"

How a restaurateur from tiny Marshall came to be regarded as radical voice on the island of her birth is a story that began in 1947 when at the age of 25, Anna left Iz with her mother to join her father in Pennsylvania.

Anna had not seen her father, who had become a foreman of a bridge-building crew, since she was a small child. Growing up she had attended Catholic school in Sibenik, Croatia, and then worked as a seamstress in Zagreb, the capital. During the war, she had returned to the relative isolation of Iz.

A year and a half later, the couple was married and Anna joined her Felix in Marshall, where he had been living since 1937.

While Anna's father had been successful at finding work on the East Coast, Felix's father tried his luck in Mexico but had a tougher time. Working for a full year south of the border, Tony Konatich made a total of only $60, his son recalled.

Among Croatian emigrants, "some was lucky, some was not," Felix told The Light last week. "My father was not lucky."

With his son Felix and three other Yugoslav immigrants -- Steve Yankovich, a Serb, and two Croatians, a Galosich and a Dulcich -- Tony fished for sea bass, perch, smelt, herring, and halibut.

"To set the family up in business [at their home]," wrote Mason in 1976, "[Tony] attached a seafood restaurant, which Felix and his pretty wife Anna run today."

John Vilicich noted his father encouraged his family to speak Croatian at home, but after he died in 1936, John's mother Nickolina let her children know this was no longer necessary.

Indeed, the Viliciches by then were another immigrant-success story, having bought Rancheria Point in 1927 and converted it into the Marshall Boat Works.

"My dad was a hard worker," John recalled last week. "My mom was a hard worker. My folks made a pretty good living."

Meanwhile back in Croatia, the political instability that Vilicich's father fled 95 years ago continues.