“I was told that a Spaniard, with his long spurs on, was thus shipped on the clipper Contest, Captain Brewster. It happened, however, that they had not given him quite enough and by the time they got him aboard, he recovered and showed fight, whereupon the shark knocked him down. But Captain Brewster, a humane gentleman, would not suffer such cruelty aboard his ship, nor take the Spaniard against his will. So the long-spurred hombre vamoosed.
“A man boasted that, having stabbed a fellow, he had escaped a term in the state prison by drugging and shipping his victim before the trial came on. How many homeward-bound miners have been thus drugged and robbed and shipped, eternity will reveal. Again, there are some men in California who will not drink rum and the shanghaier cannot dispense with the services of such and the question is, how will he get hold of them? Well, sirs, they have what is called the ‘shanghai cigar’ which is thoroughly impregnated with opium and other poisons. The smoking of one is equal to a dose of chloroform, with more lasting effects. I will illustrate the practical importance of this cigar by a single case.
“A landlord, lacking men to make up a crew, met a German glazier on Long Wharf with a pack of glass on his back and said to him, ‘Hi, my good fellow, don’t you want a job?’
“ ‘Yes, sir.’
“I want you,’ said the shark, ‘to put some glass in the stern of that ship,’ pointing to a ship in the stream. ‘Jump into my boat here and I’ll take you aboard.’ So off they went. As the German sat in the stern of the boat, much pleased with the prospect of a good job, the shark said to him, ‘Will you have a cigar, sir?’
“ ‘Yes.’ So the glazier sat and puffed away as he used to do in his Faderland, but before they reached the ship he tumbled over in the bottom of the boat. The shark threw his pack of glass into the bay and, running alongside, hailed ‘On deck, there, lower away and haul up this man!’ A rope was lashed around him and he was hauled up. The shark ran to the captain’s office, saying, ‘Captain, I’ve got you a first-rate sailor here. He’s a little boozy today, but he’ll be all right tomorrow.’ And he got his advance.
“The poor German waked up at sea with a longer job than he had engaged for, and the worst of the business is, he must not only work for nothing but be kicked and cuffed through the whole voyage for having the presumption to impose himself upon the ship as an ‘able seaman’ when he knew nothing about the business.
“These are the principal modes of drugging but they employ various other modes of ‘shanghaiing’ so that it is almost impossible for a man in any kind of communication with them to escape. A sailor who was well acquainted with their arts boasted that they could not shanghai him. One day a landlord said to him, ‘Tom, the clipper ship —has made up her crew and is ready for sea. I am just now going to see her off. There are some of your acquaintances aboard, Bill Evans and Jim Jacobs; wouldn’t you like to go aboard with me and see them before they leave? We’ll be back in a few minutes’
“ ‘Yes, sir,’ replied Tom, ‘I would like to see the boys. I have business with Bill’
“ ‘Very well, jump into my boat’
“So off they pulled. On deck, Tom ran into the forecastle to see the boys, and the shark ran into the captain’s office, saying, ‘Captain, I have brought you a splendid seaman, the best man in port; and that makes up the complement. Here’s his name on the articles.’ So he delivers the papers to the captain and leaves. In a few minutes Tom came on deck to go ashore and lo!, the boat was gone. He had nothing to do but to obey orders and go to work.
“Thus, to drown men’s souls in rum, to poison, enervate, and destroy their bodies and rob them of all their hard earnings, and leave their widowed mothers, wives and children, who are dependent upon them, to beg or starve, is perfect sport for the land sharks. The great man-eater of the deep is satisfied to get the stray carcass of a sailor occasionally but these dry-land monsters must take soul, body and estate of all the sailors, if possible.
“You ask, ‘Why do not the sufferers have the fellows arrested, and brought to justice?’ Because, 1. A man neither likes to confess that he was drunk, nor that he was so silly as to be duped and drugged. 2. He lost his senses so suddenly and has been absent on his voyage so long that he cannot think of one witness by which he can prove anything. 3. The whole fraternity is so powerful that the peril of an attack is more to be dreaded than a shanghaiing.
“Arrests, however, have been frequently made here, as you are all aware, and sometimes justice is, in part, dealt out to them but it is hard to get evidence to convict them. You must say again, ‘Surely, these California land sharks must be the worst in the world?’ ‘I know not, but I have heard of some very bad ones in all our large ports.’
Captain E— told me but a few days since of the mate of an English ship which came to New Orleans, who was drugged and the next day found himself at sea in a strange American ship, shipped as a common sailor before the mast. Another case he gave of a man who was put aboard, it was supposed, dead drunk and his advance wages drawn but the next morning when the captain tried to wake his man up, he found that he was dead and had been for a day or two. But you inquire again, ‘Why do the sailors put themselves in the power of these fellows, and allow themselves to be so imposed upon?’
“By the attractive power on the sailor of false sympathy, promises of money-making, liquor, old acquaintances, bad women, etc., he is induced to desert his ship and go to the home of his dear friend, the sailor landlord. According to law, as a deserter he can be arrested and sent back to his ship and made to perform the rest of the voyage for which he shipped without wages. So there the landlord gets him. ‘None of your cutting up about me. I’ll tell your master where you are and have you back on that ship before you can say Jack Robinson!’ The crestfallen sailor gives in and is as humble as a whipped dog.
“Again the landlord says to the shipping master, ‘You must ship your men from our houses. If you don’t, we won’t let you have a man when you want him. And you are to give us no trouble about those bills against the sailors.’ The shipping master is dependent and must work into the hands of the sharks or be cut out of business. Now then, if a decent sailor has independence of character enough to resist all the other snares and selects a good boardinghouse, when he goes to the shipping office to ship, the shipping master says to him, ‘Where do you board, sir?”
“ ‘Up town, at Widow-----’s.’
“ ‘We don’t need men now; you can leave, sir,’ says the shipping master.
“The poor fellow cannot ship except through the shipping office and they won’t have him there because he doesn’t board in the right place. Now, there are exceptions to the rules of the trade we have exhibited, and there are among boarding masters some pretty decent men; but we have here revealed, we believe truthfully, as the result of long personal observation and good authority, the general working of the system of shanghaiing.
“This system, the same in principle in all large ports, varies in its practical operations according to local circumstances. The term shanghaiing, as remarked in the commencement, is of Californian origin and was introduced in this way:
“A few years ago, as many of you remember, it was very difficult to make up a crew in this port, especially, for any place from which they could not get a ready passage back to this land of gold. Crews could be made up for Oregon, Washington Territory, the Islands, and the ports of South America; for, from any of these places they could easily return. Even from Canton they could stand a pretty good chance of a direct run back, but from Shanghai in China, there were seldom ever any ships returning to California. To get back, therefore, from Shanghai, they must make the voyage around the world.
That was getting quite too far away. Hence, to get crews in Shanghai, except enough of Lascars to get the ship to sea, they depended almost exclusively on drugging the men. Crews for Shanghai were, therefore, said to be shanghaied, and the ter
m came into general use, to represent the whole system of drugging, extortion and cruelty.”
Father Taylor, in this historic sermon and in his writings, was the earliest person of importance (but not the last) to attack the cruel process of crimping in San Francisco. He was also, in the above paragraphs, the first to describe the system in clear detail. Moreover, he had some remedies for the whole bloody mess. First, he wanted a good Seamen’s Home under a board of trustees. This would be a haven not only for distressed seamen—victims of shipwreck and destitution—but a real home for all seamen. Here they would be “amply protected against the sharks.” Taylor felt that the “disorderly” boardinghouses, in order to compete, would have to reform and imitate the Sailors’ Home. To the Home would come skippers for sober, reliable, expert seamen and there the honest shipping master could at last compete with the land sharks. Taylor worked hard for a Sailors’ Home and, eventually, it came into being.
The preacher also demanded reforms in American shipping laws and practice. He was particularly incensed over the misuse of the sailor’s advance. The idea of advance wages was designed originally to benefit the ship’s hands by giving them the means of buying necessary clothing for a voyage. But with his advance given in the form of a check on the shipping office, which would not be paid until he had gone to sea, the sailor was obliged to find someone who would accept his check, with a healthy discount, of course. In some cases, the advance was a dead loss to the sailorman with the land sharks making him take it all out in bad whiskey. Taylor favored doing away with the advance system entirely. He would have each captain lay in a good supply of clothing for the crew in the slop chest. He also urged that the captain of each ship be provided with a copy of the ship’s articles and that copies be placed at the shipping offices and in the hands of shipping masters. He wanted men to have the right to go aboard a vessel and hire on just as any other laborer could take a job!
The last suggestion which William Taylor made was that all landsmen, “Christian or otherwise,” should extend the hand of friendship to the men of the sea. “Let them labor as diligently for their physical improvement and the salvation of their souls as do the land sharks for their ruin. Much patience will be required for this work,” he admitted, “for the sailor, so often wronged, is very suspicious.”
The Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church did its best to carry out Taylor’s program, first on the church ship Panama, moored at the foot of Davis Street, and then at the foot of Mission Street. In 1857 the church built on its deck was taken down and re-erected on Mission Street between First and Second, where it continued to look after Frisco’s seamen as best it could.
Taylor’s bethel was joined by an ally on March 26, 1856, when the Ladies Aid and Protection Society was founded, “for the benefit of the seamen of the port of San Francisco.” Mrs. C. Thomas was its first directress with her office at 80 Davis Street—Hillman’s Temperance House. By 1858 the group called itself the Ladies Seamen’s Friend Society. It object was to establish a boardinghouse for seamen, a home for them and a place of protection from crimps. The sailors were to be surrounded by moral and intellectual influences. The destitute were to be supplied with clothing. The Sailors’ Home opened February 10, 1857, and though it wandered about in terms of location, going from Front Street between Broadway and Pacific to Davis Street between Clay and Washington, thence to the corner of Vallejo and Battery, it never lost sight of its goal. The women hired some honest seafaring men to supervise it—men like superintendents Captain W. H. Abbott and Captain James F. Stewart. Within four years of its opening 4, 975 sailors had boarded there.
The Sailors’ Home was something of a showplace of the town in the sixties and the editors of the San Francisco city directory called attention to the establishment, saying “The house has always presented a neat appearance—the sleeping rooms in good order, a well-supplied table and every comfort afforded that the income of the boarders would admit.”
The Ladies Seamen’s Friend Society was a benevolent organization, with religious overtones. The good ladies wished to ameliorate the condition of seamen in San Francisco by “affording them protection from imposition.” They were all too aware that “The men of the sea, an invaluable class to all mercantile countries, are subjected by the nature of their avocations to hardship and deprivation, moral, social and intellectual.”
Yet another ally for the seaman appeared in March 1860 with the organization of the San Francisco Port Society. This was an out-and-out religious organization rather than a benevolent or charity group. The Society’s first president, H. P. Coon, announced its object as the moral improvement of seamen by supporting the Mariner’s Church of San Francisco, at the corner of Sacramento and Drumm Streets. Their interest in sailors was limited to bringing religion to them.
The Reverend J. Rowell of San Francisco was long associated with the San Francisco Port Society and he did his bit for the sailors, as Taylor had done. But when he was in New Haven in 1898, attending the fiftieth anniversary of his Yale class, the Sailors’ Magazine and Seamen’s Friend could not help but notice and report that the tone of his talk was hopeful with the exception of his references to crimping and the failure of all efforts to suppress it in San Francisco.
Rowell expected passage of Senate Bill 95, which would guarantee the seaworthiness of vessels; offer two watches, alternating (except in emergencies), to provide the hands with comfort and rest; and prohibit unnecessary work on Sundays and holidays in safe harbor (senseless work labeled “discipline”). Forecastles would, by the bill, be improved in space and warmth.
And as for crimping? Rowell could only say, “Just as soon as enough shipowners, captains, mates, seamen and others in interest can individually be made properly indignant at the wrongs inherent in the present system of shipping sailors, an assembly will be set against them, and fancy can hear the rafters of the Assembly room ring with hot denunciation of that system. Vigilance leagues will watch the execution of the law and the systematic robbery of seamen will have an end.”
Rowell ended his talk with something akin to a prayer: “Oh, that sailors themselves, by the worst kind of ‘contributory negligence,’ would not play into the hands that throttle them!”
Proof that the ladies and Father Taylor had not by any means won their battle in the 1850s and 1860s—proof additional to that supplied by Rowell in his Yale address—is to be had in the career of the Reverend James Fell. Fell came to the Golden Gate from England to find that many of the seamen drifting about the Embarcadero were callow English boys. In 1892 he founded the Seamen’s Institute, to improve the condition of sailors on the San Francisco water front since the port had become “a special dread to the mothers of young sailors in England.”
At first, Fell’s salary was paid entirely from English Church Missions Society money but, eventually, when it became evident how dedicated a man he was, a number of shipping magnates kicked in money and also lent their moral support to the Institute. After five years of strenuous and remarkably successful labors, Fell returned to Old Blighty and his place was taken by a succession of chaplains, including Fullerton, O’Rorke, Karney, Liebenrood, Wingfield-Digby, and Allison. One of them, the Reverend Frank Stone, began the work of turning the Seamen’s Institute over to the American Episcopal Church, but the great earthquake and fire of April 1906 destroyed the Institute’s building and all plans for the transfer.
Bishop Stone then bought a lot on Steuart Street (the street of sailors’ boardinghouses), on which the ashes had hardly cooled, borrowed money and built a substantial new Seamen’s Institute. Finally, in 1913, the Institute was transferred to American hands with the Women’s Auxiliary of the California diocese giving it the necessary financial backing. Some of the old-timers still going to sea, like Captain Fred Klebengat of San Pedro, remember the old Institute with its rosy-cheeked girls—decent girls—serving sailors doughnuts and coffee, with a dash of religion, rather than th
e rotgut, fish and chips and the dollop of sex commonly encountered along Frisco’s waterfront. By the time of World War I, when the need for outside help for seamen was at last beginning to decline, the Episcopalians could proudly claim: “Nearly every ship entering the port and thousands of sailormen on board ship and on shore are cared for, guarded and benefited by it, not only in San Francisco but at Port Costa [where the English grain ships used to load] as well.”
But the Institute was James Fell’s “baby.” He was opposed to crimping in general and the shanghaiing of English seamen in particular. A particular abuse of the system was the crimping of fuzzy-cheeked “brassbounders”—apprentices in their early teens. Fell was also the devoted enemy of gouging haberdashers or tailors and of British ship captains who refused their men pocket money for shore leave in Frisco. The haberdashers, carefully selected by ships’ captains, would usually have their holes-in-the-wall on the lower end of Kearny Street near the lowest and roughest dives and, in the Reverend Mr. Fell’s words, “within a stone’s throw of the most immoral streets in the city.” These tailors, just like the crimps, regarded merchant seamen as legitimate prey, with no closed season on them and as though they were, to quote Fell again, “born expressly into this world to be fleeced and robbed.”
As soon as a ship arrived in the harbor, a uniform advertisement would appear in the papers: “Neither the captain nor the undersigned consignees of the above-named vessel will be responsible for any debts that may be contracted by the crew.” Seamen were bad risks and legitimate tailors often turned them away because their credit was no good. They well knew that British seamen, unlike American sailors, usually had their wages withheld from them until they reached home or until they had put in three years aboard a particular vessel. They simply had no pocket money to spend in S. F.
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 5