The mulatto business agent of the Atlantic Coast Seamen’s Union, James H. Williams, who took pen in hand to fight for a square deal for seamen—writing many illuminating articles in the Independent magazine—realized this. He wrote: “Sailors as a rule are prejudiced against sky pilots and devil dodgers... . A sky pilot is all right in a pulpit, but it takes a laborer to run a trade union.”
3. “Bully” Waterman
SAN FRANCISCO’S belated but balmy Indian summer was still flourishing on the first day of November of the year of Our Lord, 1851. That fine Saturday afternoon the Reverend William Taylor, the street preacher, and a friend, the Reverend S. D. Simonds, strolled casually down to the water front to look at the shipping which jammed the harbor. The inner bay was crowded, but they saw towering over the forest of masts and spars an enormous clipper, by far the biggest ship in the bay. She overshadowed every one of the other fifty-nine full-rigged ships in port and made cockleshells of the smaller craft. This was the clipper Challenge, the supreme achievement of American designers and shipwrights, the finest sailing ship in the world.
Father Taylor and his friend were particularly keen about having a look at the famous Challenge, as was practically every other person in Frisco. As they walked toward the water front, they noted a vast crowd gathered about the clipper, which was moored at the Pacific Street Wharf. Taylor suggested to his friend, “Brother Simonds, the deck of that ship will be a good place for me to preach tomorrow. If hundreds come to see her in the week, there will be thousands on Sunday, and I’ll have the opportunity of preaching the Gospel to them.”
“Good.” answered the other sky pilot. “We’ll go aboard and get permission from the captain.” The two clerics climbed aboard the ship and hunted from cabin to forecastle and back to cabin again without finding the ship’s master. A large and rather unruly crowd of men were crowded aboard her and, diligently and excitedly, they too were searching for the captain. It soon became clear to the two ministers that these hard-looking fellows were not seeking the captain in order to ask permission to preach the Gospel some Sunday. They had an ugly air about them. Taylor thought that he saw blood in their eyes.
Finally, the Methodist asked one of the more intelligent-looking of the lot, as he ransacked the vessel, “Why, what’s the matter here?”
“Matter enough.” the man growled. “Captain Waterman has killed several of his crew. If you’ll look into the forecastle, you’ll see such a battered set of men as you never saw before.”
Another rough-looking type volunteered, “We’re after the captain. We’ll hang him from the yardarms!” He then described to Taylor and Simonds the octagonal-shaped stick, some four feet in length, which the captain of the Challenge called his “persuader.” According to their informant, it had persuaded more than several men of the crew to shuffle off these mortal coils.
Both Taylor and Simonds sensed an ominous, ugly electricity in the air. They had the feeling that the beautiful fall day might end hideously with cracked skulls, blood on the cobbles, and corpses dangling from Judge Lynch’s tree. The uneasy churchmen quickly but quietly left the Challenge as the others continued their search. They pushed their way through a crowd of seamen, “along-shore” men, dock loafers, and assorted scapegraces and gutter rats vomited out of water-front saloons, and left the wharf.
As the two friends walked up Pacific Street, they stopped, turned and looked back at the majestic ship surrounded and overrun by the mob. They knew nothing of the technicalities of naval architecture, but they knew a thing of beauty when they saw it. And the Challenge was a beauty. Built especially for Captain Robert H. Waterman by William H. Webb, she had cost a neat $150,000—no mean sum in 1851. The Challenge was not only the largest merchantman yet built. In terms of design she was a marvel, the most extreme clipper ever built.
William Webb’s work of art had been launched only five months before Father Taylor boarded her, on May 24, 1851, at Webb’s Shipyard at the foot of New York’s Sixth Street. Her launching attracted the largest crowd ever gathered for such a ceremony in New York. She appeared to carry acres of sail; so much canvas, in fact, that it had to be reduced three times by the captains who followed Robert H. Waterman in command of her. One of the thousands of spectators who came aboard her at the invitation of owners N. L. and G. Griswold—nicknamed “No Loss” and “Great Gain” Griswold— put his feelings into writing, after eating and drinking his fill: “I have seen many launches, including that of the U.S. Ship Ohio, but never have I witnessed such interest and excitement before as attended this launch.” Another rubbernecker commented, “She is certainly extreme in every respect—even to her commander.” By this he meant that Waterman had had much to do with her radical design, her apparent top-heaviness—she carried almost 13,000 running yards of canvas—and the enormous size of her black hull with its gold stripe and its gilt eagle figurehead. Her lower masts were painted black to match her hull. Every cathead was carefully decorated with the representation of an eye. The London Times swallowed its British pride and admitted this Yankee craft to be the best, if not the fastest, clipper in the world. The Griswolds acknowledged this tribute, but, being businessmen, prayed that she would prove to be the fastest, to boot.
The day after Taylor and Simonds beat their retreat from the mob, a young Argonaut, just about to sail for India as second mate on Captain Merril’s St. Thomas, wrote in his diary: “The ship Challenge from New York came in last Thursday. She is the largest clipper and most splendid merchant ship ever built. Her tonnage is two thousand and six tons and she is a monster indeed. After she had come to anchor in the bay, many people boarded her to look and it soon became known in the city that the crew had been treated in the worst possible manner ever since leaving home. Some of them had been lost by the meanness of the captain and of the mate, and some of them were lying in the forecastle disabled from the blows and the inhuman treatment of the master.
“Captain Waterman was well-known to seafaring men as one of the hardest men that ever commanded a ship and before the ship was hauled into the wharf on Friday, the excitement was so high that could Waterman have been found he would have been gibbeted in five minutes by the exasperated sailors on shore. His friends, becoming aware of these intentions, took the precaution to remove him and secrete him in some safe place till the excitement should die away.”
Captain Waterman had sighted the Farallones, the islands lying off the Golden Gate, on the morning of October 28. He made his way through the Gate into the bay that same day and anchored off Alcatraz Island, which he called “Bird Island.” (The word alcatraz means “pelican” in Spanish.) He had made the trip in one hundred and eight days, fair enough time for a ship like his old command, the Natchez. But this was not the Natchez. The Challenge’s builders had expected a record; her owners anticipated one; Waterman demanded one of his shiftless crew. But it was not to be.
Waterman obviously had no inkling of the danger he would be in once he was ashore. He could not know the sympathy which would be generated along the Embarcadero for his battered crew. After all, crews were customarily treated roughly in mid-nineteenth-century America. He was preoccupied with the fact that a rival clipper, Grinnel, Minturn & Company’s Flying Cloud, had beaten him in. Instead of taking precautions to safeguard his skin and that of Mate Douglass, he broke into a lively quarrel with the mate, cursing him and blaming him for treating the crew so roughly. He was angered because their subsequent unfitness for work had meant a slow passage to Frisco for the crack new Challenge and had sent aglimmering any hope of a bonus for him from the owners. The fact that the Challenge had beaten the Boston clipper Telegraph was small solace for his bitter disappointment in not setting a new record for the trip from New York to San Francisco. He felt that he had let the Griswolds down, and badly. Owners had grown to expect miracles of Waterman; now, for the first time, he hadn’t delivered.
Bob Waterman thought that he had control of
the situation on October 29. He called his crew aft and read them the riot act. He threatened to have arrested “every living son of a bitch who had taken part in the mutiny” which had occurred on the passage to San Francisco. He would see to it, he said, the moment he got ashore. But the crew beat him ashore. They jumped ship, almost to a man, while the Challenge lay in the stream unable to get to her wharf. The men were helped ashore by the crimps, boardinghouse runners and curious seamen who had come to see the beautiful clipper. By that night she was labeled a “hellship” and her officers, murderers. The story spread faster than the fire of that May which had leveled the city. San Francisco had never been so outraged since the notorious exploits of Sam Roberts’s Hounds had called into being the first crude Vigilance Committee under Sam Brannan’s leadership. Frisco was a city where mob violence had already established itself as a quasi-legal tool for the enforcement of law and order in both the Hounds affair of 1849 and the recent outbreak of violence in 1851 which culminated in the Vigilance Committee hanging of John Jenkins, Samuel Whittaker, Robert McKenzie and James Stuart and the banishing of other blacklegs.
It was October 30 before the Challenge was warped up to the dock. Whitehall boatmen and sailors clustered about the clipper like sharks closing in on their prey. The wharf was thronged with bloodthirsty ruffians and drunken sailors. Word had reached Waterman of the ugly attitude of the people and he had quietly slipped ashore to the Customs House, first, then to his agents, Alsop and Company, where he went into hiding. He was secreted in a vault under a staircase and later mounted to the roof of the building by a ladder which he drew up after him. From there he escaped to the roof of the next-door building. When night fell he made his way out of the city.
Either Waterman neglected to warn his mate, “Black” Douglass, or the latter refused to be bamboozled by the mob he obviously underestimated. In any case, Douglass was trapped aboard the ship as it was hauled in toward the foot of Pacific Street. The angry, animalistic roar from the crowd on Pacific Street Wharf finally warned him of his danger. As the clipper was warped nearer and nearer to the mob, he quickly scrambled over the side into a waiting small boat, piloted either by Captain John Land or Commodore T. H. Allen. Whoever his savior was, that brave soul dug into the bay with his oars and soon outdistanced the surprised Whitehall boatmen who put up a tardy pursuit through the hulks in the cove. Douglass and his rescuer passed Commercial Street Wharf and Market Street Wharf and landed at Rincon Point where they disappeared into the brush. The screaming mob ran along the tidewater in vain pursuit and searched the area of Rincon Point desperately. Dusk fell before they could find Douglass and his friend for their lynching bee.
Ironically, the San Francisco Daily Evening Picayune, the bilingual paper published by Samuel Sanford, Charles S. Biden and Andrew M. Macy, chose the very day of the siege of the Challenge to piously proclaim a new state of affairs in the city of St. Francis: “Since the sailing of the last steamer the city has remained quiet to a most gratifying degree. The nervousness of the people which has been so remarkable among our people and which is exemplified in the facility with which a crowd can at any time be collected in our streets, is evidently giving place to a better feeling and a confidence is being engendered that our darkest days have passed and that hereafter order and quiet will prevail.”
Sanford, Biden and Macy did not even wait until the next issue of the Picayune to swallow these words. They killed some routine copy not far from the above and inserted a late “flash” about the Challenge in its place: “As soon as the vessel reached the wharf, a rush was made on board by a crowd of boatmen, sailors and others, and there can be no doubt that the lives of both the officers would have been sacrificed had they been caught.”
Those who knew Waterman guessed that he had fled with Douglass and his second mate to the ranch house he maintained in the Suisun Valley, where he would be protected by his friends, especially his ranching partner, Captain A. A. Ritchie. Apparently, Waterman did make his way to Solano County, coolly stopping off at Benicia to visit with an old chum, Jules Pfister, to hoist a few in the latter’s bar. One rumor had Captain Waterman fleeing the country and the Picayune reported that “Captain Waterman has not been arrested and it is probable that he escaped on the last steamer to Panama.” Another story had him hiding in the city, a third on the grounds of the Presidio, and a fourth aboard some ship or hulk in the bay.
Such rumors persisted until about the beginning of November. On November 3, the Frisco Alta editorialized in a story under the headline “Captain Waterman and His Men”: “Several stories were noised about the city yesterday, evidently fabricated to give added impluse to the strong feeling of popular indignation which has been created by the reported cruelties of Captain Waterman during the recent trip of the Challenge.”
Among these wild tales to which the Alta referred were accusations that the forty-three-year-old Waterman had shaken four men from the topmasts, had shot men off a yard with a pistol and a Winchester rifle, and had cleared his deck of crewmen by training a loaded swivel gun at them. Five men were claimed to be dead of wounds or of ill treatment at his hands. Five were mangled or bruised, and one dying. Not only did he carry a heaver tied to his wrist by a thong, like a policeman’s billy club, but with it he beat into insensibility, on just one evening alone, three seamen. Why? One of the men had dirty hands. The other two did not understand the compass. Finally, as a topper, someone started the rumor that he had shot down his own son in cold blood.
Incredible as it may seem, the witless mob swallowed these fantastic yarns as though they were Gospel and asked for more. The only truth among all this fantastic bunk was that Jim (Black) Douglass, Waterman’s mate, had learned his buckoism so well from his master that he was capable of outdoing him in shipboard tyranny. And there may have been a grain of truth to the pound of rumor that Waterman always left his ship before it came to anchor in New York harbor and always boarded her when, outward bound, she lay off Sandy Hook—to avoid writs made cut for his arrest on charges of cruelty to seamen. But going aboard ship in a bosun’s chair to avoid process servers did not automatically make the captain into “Killer Waterman” as some would have it.
The public’s anger was fed by a sensationalist, irresponsible press, particularly James M. Crane’s California Courier. That yellow sheet on the first of November carried a wild and inflammatory story given them by some drunken fo’c’sle roughneck which described Captain Waterman as “a vile monster,” a “bloody murderer,” and “certainly one of the most inhuman monsters of the age.”
Probably the Courier’s informant had had his dirk or pepperbox pistol tossed over the side or had felt the lash of Douglass’ tongue if not his horny fists. Waterman and “his guilty mate,” as the Courier prejudged him, were accused of wholesale murder. The paper listed nine seamen as missing, one dying, and four as “mangled.” Finally, the California Courier reported that five more men were expected to die at any moment as a result of Waterman’s brutality—“He is known for his cruelty everywhere.”
The public lapped up this sort of nonsense and cried for more. They turned a deaf ear to the appeals of the Alta California for reason, order and justice. In vain the Alta remonstrated, “We have made particular inquiries respecting some of the stories and will state that, however true a certain portion of the reports may be, there are many that are absolutely false and it would be well for the public to reserve their opinion at least until it is known which of the stories can be relied upon.”
The Picayune chided the Courier for going off half-cocked in “completely demolishing Captain Waterman” but did not go as far as the Alta in condemning the Courier for stimulating “extravagant stories” and “unfair excitements.” The Alta never gave up trying to see justice done in the face of this extra-legal witch hunt fostered by irresponsible elements of both the public and the fourth estate.
Again it appealed on November 3: “It should be t
he duty of all order-loving citizens, but particularly of the press, to put down this attempt to forestall judgment in this case and we cannot but deprecate the course pursued by one of the city papers [the Courier] in the matter. The veriest crime-hardened transgressor is entitled to a suspension of public opinion on his acts when the law has taken full cognizance of his offense—real or fancied—and it is asking no more than justice that Captain Waterman should receive the full benefit of unprejudiced and impartial public opinion in his case.
“Besides, we well know that many of the stories that are put in circulation are utterly false, while others are so greatly exaggerated as to scarcely bear a semblance of truth. Let it not go abroad that a shipmaster and his mate arriving at this port were hunted down, if not by an incensed population, at least with its weight of preconceived judgment and the wrath of the multitude, to magnify his offense.”
To which the California Courier replied, “That monster Waterman should never be allowed to leave this city alive and should receive the same treatment as he gave some of his crew—murder!”
It was not sufficient to call Waterman a brute—and from this day forward he was known as “Bully” Waterman, though never to his face—he must also be made a coward. His defamers painted him as a despicable poltroon who had been buffaloed by his mates. In some versions, Second Mate Coghill surpassed both Waterman and Douglass in brutality and, in a sort of ship’s officers’ civil war, had whipped both men with his fists in one fictional encounter. This was the man accused of sewing up in a blanket a sailor, whom he had kicked off the weather footropes, and then burying him alive at sea, while the poor fellow groaned inside his coarse winding sheet. In any case, the hunt was now expanded to include Alexander Coghill among the quarry, for the murder of a seaman named Stevens.
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 8