As the American merchant flotilla sank lower and lower, so too did Jack Tar. By an act of 1872, the office of Shipping Commissioner was set up and seamen were guaranteed protection by the office but it was amended into impotency in two years and, in 1888, shipping and discharging before Shipping Commissioners was made completely optional. The Supplement to Harper’s Weekly for November 27, 1875 lamented: “The poor seaman has no power in the matter; he seldom considers the age or condition of a vessel when he desires to ship; his necessities are great; he must go to sea, and he cares little where or how. Occasionally, one can be found who objects to a certain captain as cruel, or to certain vessels as unseaworthy, but a great majority ship recklessly and many never return.”
Unionization of sailors was slow and weak. The Lake Seamen’s Union got off to a shaky start in 1878, followed in 1883 by the Marine Firemen of the Pacific and, the next year, by the Coast Seamen’s Union. In 1888 the Atlantic sailors formed a union and in 1892 the various scattered groups united to form the National Seamen’s Union of America, later renamed the International Seamen’s Union. The boardinghouse keepers were so arrogant in the ‘90s that they picketed the U.S. Shipping Commissioner’s office in San Francisco to try to prevent seamen from shipping from there. The shipowners approved, believing they could get their men more cheaply through the unscrupulous crimps. Congress in 1884 made advances illegal but the shanghaiers got a “modification” of the law on June 18, 1886 which effectively nullified the legislation. This amendment allowed allotments, up to any sum, for the payment of debts.
By 1894 American sailors were signing away their wages in allotments at a rate of 15,503 notes a year. Of this total, only a handful— 732—went to relatives. The rest went to fatten the saloonkeepers, runners, pimps, boardinghouse masters and others who lived on the sailors like so many vicious remoras. The crimps had the sailors so thoroughly buffaloed that they were able to prompt and coach them through interviews with the Commissioner in getting a chance to go to sea—to their own disadvantage and to the crimps’ great advantage!
In Great Britain, Samuel Plimsoll, Lord Brassey and others protected British seamen. There was effective legislation such as the Merchant Shipping Act of 1854, further laws in 1867, and the famous safety regulations of 1876. But there was no Brassey and no Plimsoll in Yankeedom. The crimps skillfully sidestepped the various protective acts of Congress. Grinding exploitation was the rule in America. Finding it impossible to recruit competent American seamen in the open market, ship captains surrendered to the crimping system. The resultant hobo crews made hazing or buckoism absolutely imperative on board ship. Eventually the ability to manhandle became more important in a mate’s make-up than any knowledge of navigation or even seamanship.
Recruits had to be driven hard because they were poor specimens physically and mentally, and because many owners preferred to keep their ships shorthanded, because of the relatively high cost of labor in the American merchant marine. The brutal hazing drove the last of the good seamen to other pursuits, perhaps fishing or “alongshore” work. The cursed business became a vicious cycle. Poor labor drove out good labor. It became hard to find American-born mates to deal with “No-spik-Inglés” crews and the supply of naturalized Americans was soon used up. Canucks were favorites with captains, especially Bluenose Nova Scotians because they had a reputation for toughness which surpassed even that of Yankees. Shipowners pleaded also for a complete relaxation of the laws in order to allow them to ship foreigners as mates.
On shore, the crimps and some shipmasters conspired to reduce seamen’s wages (pocketing the difference themselves). Hobo crews were hazed so badly and given such slop for food that they willingly jumped ship, forfeited their wages, and made it possible for the captain to sign on cheap hands in a foreign port. (The law obligated a ship’s master to discharge his American crew only in a U.S. port and all Americans were signed on for the round-trip voyage.)
There were, of course, a few reformers who at least posed as good friends of the sailor. But most seamen, like Andy Furuseth, the “Emancipator of Seamen,” viewed them with suspicion. Furuseth was particularly disgusted with these do-gooders because they insisted on lumping together, as targets for their charity, criminals, prostitutes and seamen. Andy once wrote, “In all my life I have been looking for the person who really wanted to give something to the seaman for nothing and I have not yet found that creature in the jungle anywhere.” All his life he fought to shatter the image which society held of the sea as “the cesspool of society,” attractive only to “thieves, smugglers, and users of narcotics, dirty and crummy in person, dirty and revolutionary in speech.” But it was true that the forecastle became a melting pot of humanity. Shanghaiers didn’t really care whom they crimped. All they needed was a body to fill a bunk, a pair of hands to pull a rope. It made no difference to them if the hands belonged to a boilermaker or a bull fiddle player. Anybody could serve in the casual, outcast labor force which was the merchant marine. It was just his tough luck.
The American Line, in trying to get back in the race with Britain, was forced to buy two British-built steamers to put under the Stars and Stripes. By the turn of the century, only fourteen steamships were carrying the foreign commerce of the U.S. More than 90 per cent of America’s cargoes was hauled in foreign bottoms. We were dipping our merchant ensign to some of the smallest powers in Europe. The lot of the seaman continued to worsen although the Commissioner of the California State Board of Labor Statistics in 1887 pointed out that sailors had become “the legitimate prey of land sharks,” and although the Maguire Act of 1895 helped coasting seamen and the White Act of 1898 totally abolished corporal punishment, at long last. In 1904 more relief was afforded them with the Act to Prohibit Shanghaiing and, that same year, Senator Alger introduced a bill which made withholding of a seaman’s clothing by crimps a misdemeanor. But, whereas an A.B. would make between $25 to $30 per month in the 1860s, his wage was down to $15-$20 in the ‘90s and from this sum shanghaiers had squeezed both advance and allotment.
In 1905 the Merchant Marine Commission, reporting on the improved conditions of food, wages and quarters in the American service, was forced to admit that, in comparison with foreign vessels, “the discipline is often more exacting and the work more arduous.” (Amen!) The Spanish-American War had shaken the nation out of its lethargy and had resulted in a rebuilt Navy displayed by Robley D. (Fighting Bob) Evans in his Great White Fleet cruise of 1907, but there was no comparable renaissance in our merchant navy until miracles had to be worked overnight, and were, in World War I.
In 1898 a chief mate was worth fifty to seventy dollars a month on an American ship and a second mate drew perhaps thirty-five to forty-five dollars. British and German and Norwegian wages remained remarkably stable during the nineteenth century, a chief mate getting $35 to $45 and an A.B. about $13 to $18 per month. The higher wages and better grub attracted Europeans to American ships at the same time that the hazing and shanghaiing discouraged native-born Americans from entering our maritime trade. Hence the high proportion of foreigners in the trade toward the end of the century. With these inefficient crews (often understanding little English), costs of operating American vessels soared. A given 1,000-ton American ship would cost $1,100 to $1,250 a month to operate. The British could do it for $650-$800; the Germans for no more than $600-$700. It became harder and harder for Uncle Sam to compete. Edward Livernash of San Francisco inserted in the Congressional Record in 1904 the bald statement; “Sea life, as compared with land life, is unworthy of Americans.” A few voices in the wilderness cried out against this. One of these was that of Andy Furuseth, the old crusader for seamen’s rights. He denied that the sea was only “the domain for those who fought life’s battles and accepted defeat, of the sewage of the Caucasian race and of [only] such races of Asia as feel that their condition could be improved by becoming seamen.”
In the early 1800s, American boys ran away t
o sea for adventure. Around 1900, in Portland, Oregon, boys in trouble were sometimes given their choice of going to sea or going to jail. Ships’ masters and owners, by the turn of the century, if they did not consider their crews to be composed of chattel slaves or serfs, at best rated them as the lowest form of unskilled laborers. Their food was often unfit to eat. Their champion, Furuseth, once dramatically demonstrated their squalor in explaining the legal amount of space required per man in an American fo’c’sle or steward’s “glory hole,”—six feet by six feet. —“Too large for a coffin and too small for a grave.” Is there any wonder that only 10 per cent of a crew were Americans by this time?
As James H. Williams, the mulatto counterpart of Furuseth on the Atlantic Coast, once wrote in the Seamen’s Journal: “The wretched condition of our merchant seamen during the past fifty years is not fit to tell. It is enough to say that under the inexorable rule of the crimp, and the bloody belaying pin of the bucko mate, under the old system of chattel slavery—imprisonment for desertion, starvation, and blood money—the American boy instinctively shunned the sea; the American man fled it.
“No questions were asked of anyone who wished to ship on the terms offered by a shipping master or skipper. The more ignorant or complaisant man they found, the better the blood-money-hungry crimps liked him. The advance for a rank greenhorn was just as good as that for a real A.B. and the former was easier to handle and manhandle. Cripples and men unable to speak English were particularly easy prey. All sorts and conditions of humanity were regularly shanghaied on board outward bound windjammers and turned over to the bucko mates to be ‘combed out’ and remodelled into a sailor.”
Only where there was often a shortage of seamen, as on the Pacific Coast, did unionization and wages grow apace in this period. The quest for unity among sailors was difficult not only because of the strong forces opposing them but also because of their own diversification. They were split up into windjammermen, steamship men, officers, stewards, firemen, “Lakers,” deepwatermen, coasters, and fishermen. Faced with blackleg labor recruiters and ruthless businessmen-shipowners, the American sailor at the tail end of the nineteenth century just about descended to the stereotype of the irresponsible, drunken ignoramus which the crimps peddled for public consumption. They were thought to be skilled only in pub crawling and in rough-and-tumble fighting.
Furuseth, in describing the situation during the not-so-Gay-Nineties, complained: “The seamen must, in the coastwise and in the foreign trade, meet the world. The Japanese, the Chinese, the Malay, the European, all may come with any or no skill or experience, set a wage for which our sailors and firemen must work or they must seek other employment. Our merchant marine is therefore manned by the residuum of the population, not only of our country and race but of all countries and races.”
By reading between the lines of a volume like Walter Macarthur’s Handbook of Navigation Laws of the United States, one can gather some idea of the abuses which existed in the life of “Jolly Jack Tar.” The master of a ship had long been protected from mutiny by statutes which slapped a $1,000 fine and up to five years in prison (or both) on anyone even conspiring to mutiny. And actual usurpation of command could mean a $2,000 fine and ten years in jail, or both. Moreover, any seaman who so much as laid a hand on his commander or his cargo, “is a pirate and shall be imprisoned for life,” according to Section 18 of the Criminal Code. Actually, a fed-up sailor who might slug an overbearing captain would normally be tried for simple assault and not be imprisoned for more than two years. Just to be on the safe side, however, for his own protection and the master’s, no seaman was allowed to wear a sheath knife on shipboard.
Many people would be surprised, even scandalized, to learn that a ship’s captain may still place a disobedient sailor in irons, on bread and water, and keep him in the brig “until such disobedience shall cease.” This is about as open-ended a jail term as the most vindictive of masters could demand. The American sea captain has, thus, not lost all of his discretionary powers by a long sight. To top it off, the seaman can be obliged to forfeit twelve days’ pay for every twenty-four hours of disobedience and the court can imprison him for three months on top of all this.
But, on the other hand, the seaman today is well protected by Federal laws, unlike his counterpart of 1870. He is sheltered from shanghaiing, for example, by Section 2194 of the Criminal Code—“Whoever, with intent that any person shall perform service or labor of any kind on board of any vessel engaged in trade and commerce among the several states or with foreign nations, or on board of any vessel of the United States engaged in navigation of the high seas or any navigable water of the United States, procures or induces, or attempts to procure or induce another by force or threats or by representations which he knows or believes to be untrue, or while the person so procured is intoxicated or under the influence of any drug, to go on board of any such vessel, or to sign or in anywise enter into any agreement to go on board any such vessel to perform service or labor thereon, or, whoever knowingly detains on board any such vessel any person so procured or induced to go on board, or to enter into any agreement to go on board, by any means herein defined— shall be fined not more than $1,000 or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”
Against run-of-the-mill crimps and boardinghouse runners, today’s seaman is insulated by a section of the Shipping Code of the United States titled “Soliciting Seamen as Lodgers.” Any man who goes aboard a vessel in port, within twenty-four hours of its arrival, to solicit a sailor to take up lodging in a particular boardinghouse, or who should go so far as to remove his clothes to the lodging house without the permission of the ship’s master (no matter what the sailor may have said) is leaving himself open to prosecution for an offense worth three months of his time and fifty dollars of his cash.
Advances and allotments to crimps are unlawful. The captain must make full payment of wages to his crew and the sailor can make allotments only to his family, to bank deposits, to trust funds or for U.S. Savings Bonds. The U.S. Code minces no words in striking out at the long-tolerated abuse of allotment, advance and blood money payment: “If any person shall demand or receive, either directly or indirectly, from any seaman, or any other person seeking employment as a seaman, or from any person in his behalf, any remuneration whatever for providing him with employment, he shall for every such offense be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be imprisoned not more than six months or fined not more than $500.”
After centuries of rough treatment, sailors today need no longer fear bucko mates and masters. If one of them “flogs, beats, wounds, or without justifiable cause imprisons any of the crew of such vessel, or withholds from them suitable food and nourishment or inflicts upon them any corporal or other cruel and unusual punishment, [he] shall be fined not more than $1,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.” Chief thanks for this plank in the civil rights bulwark for seamen must go to Walter Macarthur’s “Red Record.” No longer can bloody-fisted bucko mates jump ship and get away from justice. This skipping out was de rigueur only fifty years ago or so and was done with the connivance of captains. Nowadays, if a master has received a complaint against one of his officers he must surrender the man to the authorities. If he should escape, the captain is liable for any damages awarded the complainant for flogging or other corporal punishment committed by the fugitive mate. Nor can a captain any longer abandon a worked-out or sick sailor. If be should leave a man abroad, deliberately, he is open to a fine of $500 and six months in jail, or both.
Of course, there are still plenty of penalties to keep sailors in line. A consular officer must “discountenance insubordination by every means in his power, including the calling in of local authorities.” For desertion, a sailor loses all or part of his clothes and effects on board ship and any earned wages. For being A.W.O.L. he can be forced to forfeit part of his wages.
Only in a few rare instances are officers and
men lumped together in American maritime law. In protecting passengers of the so-called gentler sex while aboard ship, everyone in a vessel’s complement from ship’s captain to wiper or cabin boy is warned that “whoever on board of an American vessel, whatever his rank, who by promises of marriage, by solicitation or the giving of presents, by threats or the exercise of authority, seduces and has illicit connection with any female passenger” can be fined up to a thousand dollars and slapped in jail for a period of one year’s meditation, or both.
Shanghaiing Days: The Thrilling account of 19th Century Hell-Ships, Bucko Mates and Masters, and Dangerous Ports-of-Call from San Francisco to Singapore Page 3