The second major writer to support American seamen against the abuses of the life in which they found themselves was John Ross Browne, one of the most popular travel writers of the Victorian period in America and the forerunner of the brand of frontier humor which Mark Twain later personified. J. Ross Browne was never to retreat from his position of defense of American seamen as Dana did, but he was guilty of overoptimism in 1846, when, in the very first lines of his book Etchings of A Whaling Cruise, he stated that “Within a few years past the condition of our merchant seamen has excited very general interest. It is gratifying to perceive that the efforts made in their behalf by the humane and the liberal have been productive of the happiest results. Facilities for their moral and intellectual improvement are now within their reach; attention is paid to their comfort; the difference between oppression and discipline is beginning to be observed; and cases of insubordination and mutiny will soon be of comparatively rare occurrence.”
Browne was indeed premature. Half a century later the “Red Record” would be calling the attention of the world to the continuing brutalization of seamen, all but unchanged since medieval times. Actually, what Browne was doing was to make as vivid a contrast as possible between the lot of the merchant seaman and the whaler, in order to win some regard for the human rights of the latter and to bring to an end what he called “the cruel and oppressive abuses in the whale fishery.” He blamed the crimes of the whale fishery— mutiny and murder—on oppression, blaming masters not only for positive acts of corporal cruelty but for “morally degrading those under their command.”
J. Ross Browne bore all of his life the reputation of an accurate and sincere reporter. His words were widely read but, like Dana’s, they had little lasting effect. He exposed the cupidity of owners and the tyranny of masters equally, proclaiming “If there be any who feel disposed to abuse me for exposing the wrongs of seamen, they may rest assured that I prefer their censure to their praise.” Browne was every bit as warm a friend to American sailors as Richard Henry Dana, whom he praised for his “noble exertions on behalf of the suffering mariner.”
In 1842, J. Ross Browne sailed to the Indian Ocean as a seaman on the whaling bark Bruce of Fairhaven, Massachusetts. When he returned, he penned his Etchings of a Whaling Cruise to show to the world what kind of captain Silas P. Alden was. Browne either could not bring himself to name the man he considered a sneaking brute or else he feared legal or other retaliation. In any case, he rendered the master of the bark as Captain A----throughout the book. Browne also disguised the identify of the Bruce, while at the same time making crystal clear his opinion of her by calling her the Styx.
Alden considered his crew to be slaves of the lowest caste and started right out to treat them as such. He would stalk the quarterdeck, exuding pomp and circumstance in Browne’s critical eyes, daring the bastard crew of Portuguese, Irish and Americans to look crookedly at him.
He would bellow, “I allow no fighting aboard this ship. If there’s any fighting to be done, I want a hand in it. Any of you that I catch at it ‘11 have to fight ME!”
“I’ll have no swearing, either. I don’t want to hear nobody swear. It’s a bad practice—an infernal bad one. It breeds ill will, and don’t do no kind o’ good. If I catch any one at it, damn it, I’ll flog him, that’s all!”
When a boy from Fall River, shipped as steward, fell so seasick that he could not do duty, the captain sent the mate forward to get a substitute. The mate picked a hand from Charleston, South Carolina, named Smith. The latter refused to act as steward, stating that he’d shipped as ordinary seaman and would remain before the mast. He was very ill at the time so the first mate did not resort to force. However, the captain came forward to the scuttle and told him to turn out.
“I’m sick; I’ll not go on deck.”
“Won’t you? I’ll soon make you,” was the captain’s answer. I’ll see whether you will or not.” He sprang down the ladder, grabbed Smith by the shirt collar and dragged him from his berth. “Up with you, now, and not another word from you!”
“No, sir, I’ll not go on deck.” The man’s Southern temperament, despite his lowly shipboard station, began to show itself. “You’d better mind how you handle me. I’m a Charleston man, myself! Let me go, let me go, sir!”
“Are you, hey?” snarled Captain Alden. “A Charleston man? I’ll let you know what I am. I’ll let you know that I am the captain of this ship!” He then hauled the seaman up the ladder by brute force and threw him against the foremast.
Now faint and haggard with weakness, the Carolinian pleaded, “Don’t choke me, captain, don’t choke me!”
“Yes, I’ll choke the stubbornness out of you and I’ll choke obedience into you,” he thundered, shaking him by the throat as a terrier does a rat.
“Great God, you’ll kill me!” The man, black in the face, was gasping.
“Do your duty, then.”
“I will, sir, I will. Don’t kill me.”
“Go aft then and act as steward till I think it proper to get one in your place, and remember, if you show any more of your stubbornness, I’ll flog it out of you with a rope’s end.”
From that day forward, recalled Browne, “he was the officers’ dog.”
Shortly thereafter, W----, one of Browne’s best friends in the crew, had a convulsion. He was suffering from seasickness badly but the captain made him stand watch for two hours a day at the masthead until he had a sunstroke. For fifty-two days thereafter he lay in his bunk, nursed by J. Ross Browne as best the latter could with nothing but hard biscuit. The captain stated that W----- could die in the forecastle for all he cared.
Another time, when the helmsman—a green hand—failed to repeat the captain’s order to luff, in addition to actually putting the wheel over, the captain ranted at him, struck him repeatedly in the face till the lad clung to the wheel to keep from falling to the deck. After calling him a sheephead, a scoundrel and a liar, he left him. And Browne wrote bitterly, “Until masters are taught by the severest punishment, that their little brief authority does not justify them in acts of tyranny and cruelty, poor Jack must quietly submit to all his woes.”
When an Englishman, Jack Smith, and another seaman named Bully Blair had a fight, the captain proved that he was as good as his word. He lashed their wrists to the ratlines and with a tarred piece of ratline, gave them a good flogging, crying out “Do you feel it? I’ll show you how to fight! And your back has been itching for a flogging!”
Near the Comoro Islands, the savage humor of the captain was again displayed. A raw young Portuguese lad from the Western Islands (the Azores) was at the wheel in a rough sea and he could not keep the head of the ship into the wind.
“Steady!” growled the captain.
“Can no keep her steady,” answered the Portuguese boy, Frank. “Steady, blast you!” thundered Captain Alden. “She no stay steady.”
The captain struck him several times on the head. The poor lad, ignorant of any wrongdoing, could only hang his head down to try to avoid the blows.
“You dumb animal, didn’t I tell you to put your wheel down? Answer me, answer me, I say! None of your whining! I’ll flog the senses into you, if you don’t understand me. That scuttlebutt knows more than you do. You’re worse, a devilish sight, than the old sow. Won’t you speak? Won’t you?”
“No savvy, sir.” was all the terrified Frank could say. (He knew but a dozen words of English.)
“You no savvy, huh? I’ll make you savvy, you blasted two pence head! I’ll see that you understand me when I speak to you!” The captain then beat the lad across the face with a heavy rope, with all his might, five or six times.
Temporarily blinded, Frank staggered back, crying “Oh, capitao, me no savvy. Oh, Christ, you kill me! What for you strike me?”
“I’ll make you savvy. You’ve been long enough aboard to le
arn English. If you don’t learn, it’s your own fault. I’ll hammer it into you. Now you know why you’re flogged, don’t you? Answer me! Speak, blast you! Say something, you dumb beast. Grunt, if you will be a hog, grunt, I say!”
Writhing with pain, the boy still suppressed his cries of agony. This further infuriated the savage captain, who shook him by the hair and raged, foaming at the mouth. “ Why don’t you answer? Have you no tongue? Are you speechless? If you can’t speak, I tell you to grunt. Won’t you do it? Grunt, you infernal blockhead! Grunt, you stupid ass! Bray, if you can’t grunt! Bray, or I’ll make a zebra of you! I’ll stripe your back! You shall make some sort of noise, I swear!”
Just then the husky boat steerer, Antonio, interfered. The captain knew that he had a violent temper and could stir the Portuguese of the crew to mutiny, if he wished. Thereupon, the cowardly captain backed water rapidly, trying to turn his sadism into a joke. “Frank all de same as scuttlebutt, Antonio. He no got plenty of sense all de same as hog. Hog can grunt. Frank can no grunt.” But no one laughed.
The entire crew was on the verge of mutiny when the Bruce reached Zanzibar and there Browne persuaded the captain to let him leave the ship, his place being taken by a South Carolina quadroon temporarily on the beach. The young writer-traveler then explored Zanzibar with only a sea chest of old clothes and ten dollars to his name. He found it romantic enough but became very disillusioned by the island’s misery and squalor.
If the lot of whalemen was hard aboard ship, it was infinitely worse on Zanzibar. Shipwrecked or distressed seamen were either ignored and left to starve or were thrown into the filthy, stinking old Portuguese fort, built three hundred years before, which served as a prison for mariners. Browne was horrified by what he saw. “I have seen so much barbarity toward the sick here, so brutal a disregard for human life, so much selfishness and cupidity, that my blood runs cold to think of the number of valuable lives that have been wilfully and purposely sacrificed to avoid trouble and expense. Great God! Are such evils to be countenanced by American freemen? Must men who, from choice or necessity, follow seafaring for a livelihood, who minister to all our luxuries and comforts at home by their daring intrepidity be treated like dumb brutes? Must a poor sailor, who has had the misfortune to be cast ashore, be browbeat, scorned and neglected when sickness and destitution come upon him, and for no other reason than because he is a sailor, who can not make direct return for the trouble and expense? Americans! Will you suffer this? I have pointed out the evil; apply the remedy!”
When back on shore, Browne—unlike Dana—did not retreat an inch from his position. He denounced flogging particularly, saying “It is a disgrace to the American flag that the barbarous system of flogging, now permitted in our vessels, has not long since been abolished.” He attacked arrogant, despotic and cruel masters. He took on the public and the country itself, in no uncertain terms: “The condition of this oppressed class is a reproach to our country—a disgrace to the age of civilization in which we live.”
J. Ross Browne went on to become one of the most widely read authors in America, with many books and articles in Harper’s magazine to his credit. Unfortunately for America’s seamen, his interests turned to the new Western frontier and it is with California and Nevada that Browne is remembered, rather than in connection with the high seas or as a masterful travel writer. He was an extremely honest and talented reporter. Had he continued his close interest in whaling or seafaring in general he might have been of great help in the battle to better the seaman’s situation.
The greatest writer of the triumvirate was Herman Melville, author of the American classic, Moby Dick. Melville had a rather varied sea career before turning to the writing of Omoo, Typee, Redburn, White Jacket and Moby Dick. He sailed in 1839 as ship’s boy on the St. Lawrence, Captain Oliver P. Brown, from New York. Brown was no brute, apparently, and Melville gives us more information on Liverpool than on the forecastle of the St. Lawrence, except to stress how often burgoo (oatmeal mush) turned up on the menu. Since fires were prohibited on board ships at dock, all American sailors had to eat ashore. Melville slept in the fo’c’sle but boarded at The Baltimore Clipper, a boardinghouse run by a Yank ex-sailor and his English wife, Handsome Mary. Melville got a good look at Paradise Street (Liverpool’s Embarcadero) and other “booble alleys” as he called the boardinghouse streets of squalid Liverpool.
In 1842, Melville sailed on the whaleship Acushnet (which he called the Dolly in his book, Typee) to the South Seas. Fed up with the quarrelsome Captain Pease, whose irritability caused both his first and third mates to quit the vessel, Melville jumped ship at Nuku Hiva and fled inland. His fine book Omoo tells the story of his adventures, with a fictionalized glaze. Melville was not too specific in Omoo about the abuses on the Acushnet but it is likely that it was not so much the attractions of the vahines of the Marquesas as much as his being fed up with the violence and arbitrariness of Pease whose “prompt reply to all complaints and remonstrances was the butt-end of a handspike.”
After escaping from the natives of Nuku Hiva to an Australian whaler, the Lucy Ann, whose captain was incompetent and whose mate was an alcoholic, Melville deserted at Tahiti, was confined to the stocks briefly in Papeete and then got to Hawaii. In Honolulu, August 17, 1843, he enlisted as an ordinary seaman in the United States Navy, sailing for home on the U.S.S. United States.
In terms of social conscience, rather than literature, it must be said that Melville’s hitch in the Navy made a more lasting impression than his experiences on whalers or commercial craft. He was hardly aboard the United States when all hands were turned to, to witness punishment. Two men were tied by their ankles to a grating on deck and by their wrists to the hammock nettings. One was guilty of striking a sentry while on duty and the other had been caught smuggling liquor aboard. The boatswain opened a green baize bag and took out a cat-o’-nine-tails and, at a signal from the captain, a boatswain’s mate laid a dozen strokes on the first man’s back. A hundred and eight bloody welts were raised on the victim. With a fresh cat and another mate, the operation was repeated on the second man. With lighter whips, or “kittens,” two little apprentices were next flogged for fighting and using abusive language.
Herman Melville was to witness the punishment of one hundred and sixty-three seamen and apprentices aboard the United States during his service but he never became hardened to it nor did he ever forget it. It has been said that it was Melville’s influence which led to the belated abolition of flogging in the U.S. Navy.
When Melville wrote White Jacket, drawing on his own naval experiences, he attacked the age-old institution of flogging. A copy of the book was placed on the desk of every United States Senator, to influence him to vote the brutal form of punishment out of existence in the U.S. Navy. And, in 1850, flogging was abolished.
Like Dana and J. Ross Browne, Herman Melville tried to awaken an apathetic public to an interest in and a sympathy toward seafaring men. There is no doubt that Melville was sincere in his sentiments but he may have borrowed somewhat from George Little, whose book Life on the Ocean was briefly popular. Little, as early as 1843, had complained: “Who goes on board of a vessel when she first arrives, and takes the poor sailor by the hand? And, when on shore, who is it that will introduce him into society and give him a place at the social board, or around the domestic fireside? Suppose...that a sailor could get from under the clutches of his landlord long enough to keep sober twenty-four hours... let him enter one of our large and fashionable churches—and how many pew doors, do you suppose, would be thrown open for his reception?”
It was Melville who, in Redburn, preserved in literature the story which pops up whenever a couple of sailormen start jawing—the matter of the crimped corpse. It is altogether likely that San Francisco and other crimps more than once put one over on a ship’s captain by shanghaiing aboard a dead man, but Melville, in his book, is not content with this macabre situation
but throws in a case of “animal combustion” for good measure. The result is some of the most terrifying and graphic writing which Melville ever did, a sort of tour de force of horror realism.
When the Highlander sailed from Liverpool, a one-eyed crimp rushed aboard from Prince’s Dock to carry an apparently drunken sailor, sallow of face, aboard. He was down on the ship’s papers as Miguel Saveda. When the crew began to notice a horrible smell in the forecastle they put it down to a dead rat but one of the men found that the real source of the smell was Miguel, dead (and for some time) in his bunk where the crimp put him.
Another sailor brought a light close to the man’s face and said, “No, he’s not dead,” and suddenly a greenish flame—like a forked tongue—darted out from between his lips. Within a moment the cadaverous face was crawled over with wormlike flames. The crew was terrified as the corpse was covered with “spires and sparkles of flame”... and the man’s tattoo burned white so the men could read his name, Miguel Saveda, against the background of flickering blue before they pitched the body into the ocean where it left a coruscating wake as it sank.
Melville brought America great sea literature and was instrumental in the abolition of flogging. But in terms of the betterment of the day-to-day shipboard or dockside life of the American tar, he was of little more help than either Richard Henry Dana or John Ross Browne. America’s seamen would learn that God helps those who help themselves. No one was going to rescue them; they would have to do the job themselves.
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 7