Shanghaiing Days: The Thrilling account of 19th Century Hell-Ships, Bucko Mates and Masters, and Dangerous Ports-of-Call from San Francisco to Singapore

by Richard Dillon

  A real deepwaterman followed the boy to the stand, Charles Pearson, a veteran of about forty years at sea. He had served in the United States Navy on a frigate, under Stephen Decatur. He said, “I knew of no attempt to revolt or create a mutiny. Yes, I have been frequently struck myself.” Cross-examined, he admitted, “We had a miserable crew on board the Challenge. We had not more than eight or ten good men. Most were miserable trash.” This kind of testimony was Waterman’s cup o’ tea.

  Coghill was a strange case. It is hard to figure just whose side he was on. His testimony does not make his position any clearer. “I knew nothing of any revolt, mutiny, disobedience of orders, or attempt to do so. Before this occurrence, on one Sunday morning, I saw Captain Waterman strike down Smith, who was at the wheel, until the blood ran down the deck.” He volunteered that Birkenshaw was not only a good seaman but one who was always obedient to orders.

  Irving, Randolph and Ely defended Birkenshaw and Coghill and they did their job well. The penalty, upon conviction, would be a $1,000 fine and up to five years in prison, or both, at the discretion of the Court. But the January 21, 1852, Alta California reported the jury as bringing in a Not Guilty verdict on Birkenshaw. As for Coghill, in order for him even to be implicated in the mutiny with Birkenshaw, it was necessary for the confession allegedly made by the Englishman, of a plan to seize the ship, to be admitted as evidence. The Court ruled against its admissibility and a nolle prosequi being entered, the second mate was set scot free in this case.

  The United States Attorney asked Captain Waterman if he would testify against Birkenshaw and Coghill if a new trial were granted. Bully Waterman snorted, “No. With the type of jurors available, it seems utterly useless to continue the matter. The plaintiffs as well as the witnesses in this case have all been placed on the blacklist in every port in the land and will never again be able to ship with any company—except maybe some pirate crew.”

  The next case was open and shut. Second Mate Alexander Coghill was tried for his alleged assault on John Brown. Coghill had kicked Brown, for being dilatory, so severely in the stomach and groin that, according to Dr. Lamar, Assistant Surgeon of the Marine Hospital, the injured man suffered emasculation. A speedy verdict of Guilty was returned by the jury before the noon hour. Brown himself and Alex Nicoll were witnesses; their testimony was conclusive.

  On and on went the marathon trials. Next in order was the case of Waterman and Douglass for beating Alex Nicoll. A jury was impaneled successfully and sworn in. But, as one paper put it, “The principal witness called for the prosecution being so drunk as to be unable to testify, and the U.S. District Attorney being satisfied that there was not sufficient facts to justify a prosecution of the case, he entered a nolle prosequi.” Another reporter stated, “He [Nicoll] betrayed manifest symptoms of intoxication and he declared that Birkenshaw [also a witness for the prosecution in this case] was as drunk as he was.” The case was dismissed in an alcoholic haze.

  It definitely appeared now that even the court and the prosecution were tiring of the circus of trials, which appeared to be interminable. In the case of the U.S. v. James Douglass and Robert Waterman for beating Thomas Cleaver, witnesses Thomas Johnson, Alexander Nicoll, George Smith, Alex Coghill, Michael Gallagher, and William Masten were sworn. This was a formidable array of witnesses and their testimony, particularly that of Johnson was seemingly damning: “Cleaver, who was known among us as Dick, was one night rolled on deck [by Waterman and Douglass] in the water and snow. Then the captain covered him with slush and put it on his chest. The captain kicked him in the head, too, and later, around 9 or 10 a.m., tied him in the rigging. He was still there at 12 when I went below.” Cleaver, like Miti, was lame from swollen legs. According to Johnson he was beaten frequently with sticks, heavers, ropes, and he died soon after the ducking, supposedly from diarrhea. The testimony could hardly have been more damning and yet the jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty.

  On the motion of the U.S. District Attorney a nolle prosequi was entered against both defendants for all the other indictments, except the case of James Douglass for the murder of Pawpaw. With the four indictments quashed at one blow, Waterman was discharged on his own recognizance. Ten days later, Douglass was also discharged from custody on his own recognizance when the decision was made that the U.S. District Court had no jurisdiction in such a case under any existing statute.

  The Herald had sniffed the wind and reported a day or two before Waterman’s release, “It is understood that the proceedings against the officers and crew of the Challenge will be dropped for the present, at least. The trials have been attended with very considerable expense to the Government and no pains have been spared to give the history of the voyage a thorough and impartial investigation.” The Herald might well have added, “And good riddance!” It and the public had been living with their cause célèbre for more than three months now. They were, frankly, tired of the whole affair.

  On February 10, Waterman was sentenced by the court to pay a $400 fine for cruel punishment of John Smith. Douglass, although Waterman testified he was under his orders, was guilty of beating Gallagher and Smith and was fined $50 for the first instance and $200 for the other. Alex Coghill, convicted of assault on Brown, was given thirty days in the county jail. His term was considered to have commenced when he was convicted of the crime, however, January 27, so this was but a mild rap on the wrist. All in all, the master and mates of the hellship Challenge were dealt with leniently after an ominous “public trial” in the streets and on the docks of San Francisco.

  The Challenge lay at her moorings until after the New Year. A storm in November had not bothered her and when the big blow of December 17th, a sou’-sou’easter, came, she was not fazed by it a bit, though much property ashore and shipping was destroyed—to the tune of $200,000. But if the clipper stood up well to Mother Nature, she was still given a bad time by her crew of riffraff. On Tuesday night, December 16, 1851, Sparks, the new third mate, replacing Patterson alias Coe, received an ugly knife wound in the arm during a struggle with one of the crew. He was trying to enforce a superior’s order, although “somewhat intoxicated at the time,” as the police blotter had it, when the man drew a heavy knife and cut him severely across the arm, just above the wrist. Arteries, muscles and tendons were severed. Sparks was rushed quickly to the office of Dr. Geary who skillfully dressed the nasty gash.

  A few days later, Judge Waller of the Recorder’s Court, attended to George Lewis and his cohorts. They had attacked, in turn, the man who had cut Third Mate Sparks. Lewis defended his action by claiming that his victim was a “Sydneyite,” that is, a Sydney cove, or Sydney duck. These were the men who migrated to San Francisco from New South Wales after having been transported Down Under for various crimes in the United Kingdom. Judge Waller’s Court did not choose to consider Lewis a self-appointed officer of the law and, for taking the law into his own hands, he was fined $25 and put on bond to keep the peace.

  The master and mates of the Challenge were not to walk her decks again, unless they visited her when Captain John Land brought her back from China with a load of 553 coolies. He had only been able to take out the Challenge—now labeled a hellship—by paying a colossal $200 advance to each of the forty men he shipped. They proved to be a rum lot, so mutinous that he did not sail directly to Shanghai as planned, but put into Hong Kong where Commodore John H. Aulick of the U.S.S. Vincennes, Matthew Perry’s predecessor, had to march a squad of U.S. Marines aboard to restore order. It had been a tedious, seemingly endless trip of fifty-four days but her return passage to San Francisco was but thirty-four days—only one day off the record. Her run of eighteen days from off Japan to San Francisco has never been equaled by a sailing vessel. Land stayed in Frisco but seven days, then whipped her out for China again. He was off Honolulu on his eighth day but adverse winds eventually ruined this brilliant start.

  Captain Land died at Hong Kong and th
e former mate of the clipper Witchcraft, Mr. Pitts, was given the quarter-deck. The Challenge made the shortest run of the season with a cargo of tea from China to London, beating the times of the American clippers Nightingale, Surprise and Race Horse and the British clippers Challenger, Stornoway and Chrysolite. Her builders had been right. She was a speedy ship. She logged 360 miles in less than twenty-four hours on her run to England. In London she attracted a great deal of attention and the Admiralty copied her lines as she lay at dock. In the two years in which E. A. Wheeler shipped on her, she outsailed everything in sight including the steamer which towed her from the Downs to London. She had to lower sail to keep the towlines taut.

  The Challenge led the fleet of tea clippers on her return to China but, coming back to England, sprang a bad leak which forced her to put into Fayal in the Azores. Both crew and passengers had to man the pumps to keep her afloat and her cargo was damaged by water. She went to New York and then to San Francisco again under the command of Captain J. Kenney. By now she was in the dirty trade of hauling coolies. After several passages, she put into Havana short on water, and in need of medical attention—seven of her crew and 150 of her 900 coolies were sick, a man had committed suicide, and she had had another mutiny.

  Light winds continued to plague her and on a trip to China she lost all three topmasts in a typhoon and Captain Fabens had to bring her in under a jury rig. (As Wheeler had written so long before, with the Challenge it was either no wind or a gale.) She was laid up until sold to Captain Haskell for $9,350. On June 13, 1861, she visited San Francisco for the last time. Captain Thorndike took her into Bombay leaking badly and she was again sold, for 78,000 rupees. The hellship had become a jinx ship. Docked, repaired and renamed the Golden City, her owners employed her in the China-India trade out of Hong Kong. In 1866 Wilson & Co. of South Shields, England, bought her for the Bombay-to-Java trade. Misfortune continued to follow her. En route to Java and off the Cape of Good Hope, she had a heavy sea break over her quarter. Seven seamen were killed as were all officers except the third mate. She made port but, in 1876, on the very next voyage, she was wrecked on the French coast.

  So the end came for the proud clipper turned hellship. Perhaps when Waterman read of her fate he recalled the enthusiasm of the Boston Daily Atlas when she was launched in ‘51: “Like the knights of old, who threw their gauntlets down to all comers, her owners send her forth to challenge the world afloat.”

  Douglass was a frightened man after the trials and he quickly dropped out of sight. He apparently minded his shipboard manners, for he did not make the news during the remainder of his life. Alex Coghill, however, had not yet learned his lesson. He returned to his bucko ways. John B. Urmy reported in his California Police Gazette on Sunday, March 20, 1859, that Coghill, chief mate of the Adelaide —another hellship—commanded by Captain Ned Wakeman of San Francisco, was fined $50 in the U.S. Circuit Court in San Francisco on March 18 for cruel and unusual punishment of a sailor named José Maria.

  Waterman, though he was whitewashed and acquitted of practically all brutality charges, was a marked man—“Bully” Waterman —in 1852, and he swallowed the anchor again. He began his ranching career in earnest at Fairfield. Although he gave up blue-water sailing for good, he did not abandon the sea entirely. He did some buying of vessels and of wrecks for salvage. It was Waterman who bought the extreme clipper San Francisco, which on its maiden voyage from New York to San Francisco had “safely” arrived within the Golden Gate on February 8, 1854. With the pilot in charge, Captain Sitzer already on his way ashore in a small boat, the clipper missed stays and rammed onto the rocks of Rialto Cove, just inside Point Bonita on the rugged Marin shore of the Golden Gate. The wreck was plundered by scalawags from San Francisco and soldiers from the forts, many of whom paid for their sins when their overloaded skiffs were swamped in the heavy swells of the Gate. Waterman paid $12,000 for ship and cargo. Before she broke up he took out $20,000 of cargo.

  Waterman worked for Howland and Aspinwall as their San Francisco agent, tried to start an opposition line on the Sacramento River with the little Dashaway and was bought out for his nuisance value. He was associated with John Parrott in the building of a steamer for Yukon duty for the Alaska Commercial Company and with the firm of W. F. Babcock and Tiburcio Parrott, too. As Port Warden and U.S. Inspector of Hulls in San Francisco he won a (not surprising) reputation for efficiency. When E. A. Wheeler saw him in 1855, his buckoism had already been forgotten and he was again “about the most popular man on the city front.” Mostly, he was a gentleman-farmer of Solano County.

  According to his biographer, Waterman threw a big New Year’s Eve Party (1858) to which were invited not only local Suisun Valley folk but Judge Ogden Hoffman, who had tried him, and the guest of honor, Jim Douglass. Also “aboard” was another of his ex-mates, Hugh Patterson alias Hugh Coe. After wining and dining, and dancing to the music of a band imported from Sonoma, the guests were taking their leave. A rifleshot rang out in the blackness of the night and Hugh Patterson sagged to his knees and then fell on his face in the dirt, dead. Waterman and Douglass mustered a search party but they found nothing.

  It sounds apocryphal but there is a story that Bob Waterman, tormented by the murder of his ex-mate, hired San Francisco detectives who found only an ejected rifle shell. Then he and Douglass tried to narrow down the list of suspects and got it down to two men. On a tip from a sailor in Frisco, Waterman is said to have gone to England in 1861 where he found his man, McCorkle, in the Staffordshire Café in London. After he had tricked a confession out of McCorkle, Waterman is supposed to have turned him over to Scotland Yard.

  In 1884 Robert H. (Bully) Waterman died of peritonitis on, his ranch between San Francisco and Sacramento. The New York Times did not forget him. A series of articles paid tribute to the driving, record-setting skipper of the clipper-ship era. Nor did the Times overlook his record for buckoism: “It was never disputed in Captain Waterman’s lifetime that he was the most tyrannical and demanding sailing master who ever took a vessel out of the port of New York. Certainly he never disputed it but, on the contrary, seemed to glory in the distinction.

  “Yet, hard a man as he was on shipboard, people who knew Captain Waterman on shore and came in frequent contact with him, declare that he was sound and good at heart. At sea he had no mercy. On shore he was among the first to contribute to the relief of a poor sailor’s widow. Once out of sight of land, however, he knew no such sentiment as pity. Sick or well, a man must be at his post. Painful punishment awaited the sailor who failed in even the least of his duties. He paid his men well and fed them well and in return, he expected—he demanded—of them constant, grinding toil.”

  In another New York newspaper story, in an obituary for Waterman, his buckoism is forgiven: “There was a good deal of excuse for brutality on the part of sea captains in those clipper ship days. Seamen respected him only who ‘bullied’ them.” This is not exactly the truth, of course, and even if it were it would not excuse Waterman, Douglass and Coghill for the excesses of buckoism in which they indulged. It was men like them who gave the American merchant marine a bad name, who caused it to draw only misfits and criminals, because decent men gave merchant marine service a wide berth as the result of the attentions of bullying masters and mates like the trio from the Challenge.

  Although the three men were let off lightly by Hoffman and the San Francisco juries, a warning was sounded by the Challenge trials which caused skippers and mates of hellships to ease up a bit. Eventually, of course, they resumed their old habits and it was necessary for Walter Macarthur of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific to arouse the public again, with his “Red Record” to the brutish existence of America’s merchant sailors.

  4. Bucko Mates and Masters

  “THERE was fresh blood on the deck every day during the voyage.”

  This shocking statement by a tough young third mate sounds like testimony from the C
hallenge case of 1851. But it is not. The declaration was made as late as 1882 and it demonstrates eloquently how little the lessons of the Challenge were remembered by the public. Apathy quickly replaced shock and anger, and the sailor was returned to a life of deprivation and brutality for another fifty years after Bully Waterman’s conviction.

  For buckoism was not put out of business by the Challenge convictions. Not by a long shot. During the latter half of the nineteenth century there were a dozen or more flagrant cases of shipboard brutality and God-knows-how-many more which were not severe enough to attract the attention of the fourth estate. Of these dozen, at least four—the White Swallow, Crusader, Sunrise and Gatherer cases— attracted world-wide attention. Public indignation in each of these affairs reached heights rivalling that of 1851 and the Challenge case. But, in each instance, it was short-lived and it lapsed into indifference within a few months.

  It finally took the phenomenon of Walter Macarthur’s “Red Record” to jar the people, the Congress, and the courts into permanently protecting Yankee merchant seamen.

  Of course, the Challenge-Bully Waterman case of 1851 must not be thought to be the first incident of buckoism. Even in America, not to speak of other lands, hazing and torture on shipboard already had a long, if not honorable, tradition by 1851.

  For example, Richard Henry Dana’s first piece of writing, of his more than two hundred works, was an article titled “Cruelty to Seamen” published in the October 1839 American Jurist. His classic Two Years Before the Mast was published the following year. Dana, a Harvard Law School student in 1839, protested in his article the lenient sentences handed out by Judge Joseph Story—ironically, one of his own law professors at Harvard—to defendants Captain William Nichols and Mate William Couch of the Caravan for maltreating their crew. Already Dana had allied himself firmly with the cause of seamen—“If God should ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and sufferings of that class of beings with whom my lot had so long been cast.”