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

  “Well, butcher away! Here’s a heart that can stand it!” cried Bill. But it was all sham. He had not the guts to face Dow. When Second closed with him he became meek as a lambkin and surrendered his knife. He made no protest as he was dragged before the captain and then given an unmerciful hazing all day long as he pounded the rust off the fore-topsail halyards.

  Abbey got off the Surprise as fast as he could and shipped on the clipper Charmer. As he walked along the deck of his new ship, Captain Isaac H. Lucas’s dog bit him. He tried to pass the cur but it made for him again, fangs bared and snarling. Abbey raised his sea boot and kicked the mutt aside. The captain roared at him, “What are you kicking that dog for?” Then, to the animal, “Sic him!” Once again Abbey booted the cur and this time the dog bounced off the booby hatch. The animal-loving captain tried to kick the boy but he barely grazed Abbey’s arm with his boot. Later on, he called Abbey aft to look at his dog bites. As he examined them, the blood oozing from them, he called Abbey a liar and swore that they were not bites at all.

  Finally, in 1858, Abbey found what every sailor was looking for, a good ship and decent officers. It was the Henry Brigham on which he sailed. He never forgot the vessel. When he wrote home from her, he used to say, “The officers are very kind and considerate. They ask after a person as if he were somebody and not a dog. The captain is as good a man as ever lived and there is not one in the ship but that would do anything for him.”

  But unfortunately, and disgracefully, ships like the Henry Brigham were rare in the U.S. merchant service and the Westervelt was more typical of conditions afloat. John Gallijan was so taken with the gentlemanly bearing of Captain Austin in Liverpool that he decided to sail as a passenger on the Westervelt for his health. But once the towboat was astern, Gallijan found that Austin transformed, Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion, into a demon. He wasted no time with his steerage passengers, “Go forward there, God damn you, or I’ll put you where the dogs won’t bark at you!” He disfigured his first mate in a scuffle and replaced him with an ex-captain, a Scot named McDonald, among the passengers. Supposedly, Austin burned himself and his ship to a crisp in a drunken stupor while the vessel lay in the lower bay of New York. Hundreds of sailors who heard the news must have wished him ill luck on his last cruise, on the River Styx.

  That same year, Captain Ned Wakeman sailed the medium clipper Adelaide into the Golden Gate with a full crew (twenty-six men) of Negroes. As the ship was in the very process of docking, Mate Lewis knocked a man from the topgallant forecastle into the bay where he drowned. Lewis was arrested but cleared of all charges. He was not cleared by the crew, however, and at the miserable guano island of Elide off the Baja California coast, he was murdered by one of the hands. A drumhead court-martial was organized of officers of various ships lying off that godforsaken Mexican island and the murderer was tried, convicted and hanged aboard the Adelaide.

  Other “hard” ships included the Herald of the Morning, whose mates, William Brown and George Field, fell into the clutches of the law, and the clipper Gauntlet, renamed the Sunda, commanded by Bully Boggs who had learned his craft as a notorious mate under James Nicol (Bully) Forbes of the Lightning and Marco Polo.

  But they were pikers compared to Captain Ephraim Pendleton of the bark Sarah Park. Pendleton was arrested on April Fools’ Day of 1859, less than a month after the U.S. Marshal took one of Pendleton’s peers, James Cotter, to San Quentin for nine months on a cruelty conviction and at about the same time that Alexander Gallagher got Mate Henry Sherman of the bark What Cheer indicted for cruel punishment. Pendleton’s disciplining of three men on his ship was considered “excessive” cruelty because one of his “patients” died. His punishment—banishment? His belaying-pin arm chopped off, à la Chinois? No, the captain was given just twelve months in the county jail and assessed a fine of $175. Editor John B. Urmy of the California Police Gazette noted in disgust, “This is light punishment when we consider the heavy charges made against him and that he was convicted on some of them. We presume that he is well satisfied with the result.”

  The memory of the Challenge indignation was fading fast. In 1864 Michael Murray and John Cosgrave were found innocent on charges of beating John Gayon to death on the steamer Panama; Captain Paul of the Great Republic was convicted of shipboard brutality but pardoned by the President. But in 1865 another major case made the headlines and this one favored the crew over the quarter-deck. This was the White Swallow case.

  The name on everybody’s lips in 1865 on the embarcaderos of the world was the White Swallow. This extreme clipper, launched in 1853 at Medford, Massachusetts, was very sharp in design and quite fast. However, by ‘65 she was in rum shape with rag-tag rigging. Her crew was accordingly hard worked and, according to them, also forced to do much unnecessary work. Moreover, they were often cajoled into doing it by a few strokes of a belaying pin. Once, when the ship was rolling and pitching in a heavy sea, the captain had some men put over the side on stagings. Two men were lost in this fashion.

  The crew finally took matters into their own hands. They “arrested” the captain and mates and confiscated their weapons but did the officers no harm. For three days they kept them in irons but allowed Captain Elijah E. Knowles to walk the deck to direct or supervise—if not actually to command—the ship. All his orders were obeyed.

  The crew drew up an agreement which they presented to Captain Knowles for his signature. It absolved the crew of all blame and of intent to do any harm or damage to either ship or officers. The men were promised good treatment, no extra work or hazardous work such as had cost the lives of their two comrades, and they were to be given watch-and-watch whenever possible. Under this truce, the voyage was continued under the captain and mates. Once safely in the lee of Telegraph Hill, Knowles tore up this treaty. He had six of the ringleaders arrested and prosecuted with vigor. Much to his surprise, however, the court’s decision was in favor of the crew, thanks in good part to the fact that the testimony of the “neutral” passengers backed them up. For a brief time this enlightened attitude of the court was much remarked upon by seamen and landsmen alike. But it did not last. It was but a ray of light and hope in the midst of a storm.

  In contrast to the White Swallow victory for the sailors was a whole series of cases in which bucko masters and mates got off almost scot free. One of these cases was that of the Great Republic, mentioned earlier. Captain J. M. Paul, Mate Lot Walls, and Third Mate Coe made her a real hell afloat. They practiced cruelty—“too revolting to print.” the newspapers said—on all the crew but particularly George Daggett, Manuel Rodriguez and John McClaren. These three men were dragged about the ship’s deck, like dumb animals, by ropes tied about their necks. For no reason, the captain ordered Daniel Gillipson to lie across a barrel. Then Walls whipped him with a rope’s end. When Gillipson cried out in pain, Walls threatened to shut him up by stuffing a deck scraper in his mouth. The captain stood by, an interested spectator. At the trial, despite the hard work of the St. Andrews Society and Hall McAllister in prosecuting the brutes, a pious deacon on the jury held out for mercy so that Coe and the captain got only six months in jail while the professional sadist, Walls, drew six months in state prison. Friends of Captain Paul got President Lincoln to pardon him the very day before he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Coe dropped out of sight but the tough Walls soon turned up in Frisco again as mate of the ship Three Brothers, formerly the Vanderbilt.

  One of the most flagrant cases of babying the sadistic brutes called buckos was the case of a mate McCausland, alias McCortland, who arrived in the Bay in 1868 or 1869 from Boston. He had dreamed up new humiliations and tortures which he carried out on the ship’s boys. For one thing, he forced them to eat large chunks of tobacco washed down with water. He had his own crude but cruel version of the Chinese water torture, forcing men to sit on the deck and drink and drink until their stomachs were distended. Then, when it seemed they would burst,
he would force them to carry heavy planks about the deck, willy-nilly. The exquisite agony of the men apparently amused the Scot and afforded him a pleasant diversion from the boredom of the long voyage.

  Arrested in San Francisco, he drew eighteen months in the state prison at San Quentin but Warden Holden took pity on the beached bucko. He placed him in command of his yacht and soon gave him all but complete freedom. When he was not busy taking the Warden’s or Governor’s lady friends on a bay cruise, he would loaf the days away at the saloons which sprang up just outside the gates of the penitentiary at Point San Quentin. The papers remarked that “he lived more like a captain of the guard than a felon condemned to penal servitude for infamous atrocity.”

  Brutality was not limited to the long coast-to-coast passages, of course. Captain Thomas McPherson of the whaler Ansel Gibbs left New Bedford on December 31, 1871, bound for Hudson Bay. In 1873 a handful of men, rotten with scurvy, straggled back to Boston to report the shipwreck of the Ansel Gibbs on Marble Island in September 1872. However, they considered the wreck as more of a blessing than a disaster. At least it put an end to the life of hellish treatment on board. The poor food and resultant scurvy caused fifteen of the crew to sign a protest. The captain called this action mutiny. When Charles Kugler, the ship’s German blacksmith, was ordered aloft, he refused. He was not a sailor. Taking in sail was not part of a blacksmith’s duties. The captain then hauled him aloft on a rope. John Marshall, one of his shipmates, was tied to the rigging by his thumbs for a trivial offense and knocked about, while thus suspended, like a bloody punching bag. When Francisco Antonio got back to New York he showed the bloody handkerchief he had had to use to stanch the flow of blood from wounds given him by a belaying pin wielded by the captain.

  All in all, the year for hellships was 1873. Besides the Ansel Gibbs, there was the Crusader and the Sunrise. A key date was June 2 when Seifert Nelson of the Crusader died in San Francisco’s U.S. Marine Hospital from the effects of beatings administered by Captain Lewis and Mate Henry. On the 24th the Crusader’s officers were formally charged with manslaugther.

  The Crusader sailed from New York on October 22, 1872 under the firm hand (fist) of Captain Lewis. One of the crew was Seifert Nelson, an ignorant but strong and healthy Norwegian. To pass the time away, Mate Henry began to work him over. By the time the Crusader reached San Francisco, Nelson was not only a physical wreck but was a gibbering idiot as well. Sent to clean out a coal locker, he accidentally tossed over the side with some bits of coal a holystone. For this he was slung over the bows in the teeth of a howling snowstorm off Cape Horn. At the very water’s edge he was required to scrape rust off the chains. With each lurch of the ship, Nelson was plunged into the icy sea. After two hours of this, he was hauled on deck where he swore to his mates that if Henry had kept him there but five minutes more he would have committed suicide.

  Nelson was too feeble to work, so the officers let him lie in his bunk, unattended, for almost three weeks. The steward was given orders not to feed him until he came on deck but the kindly Cookie smuggled grub to him. Weak as he was, he was soon forced to parade back and forth on the deck as a ludicrous “lookout,” carrying on his shoulder an unloaded musket. When he could not obey orders fast enough, the captain had him stripped stark naked and forced another sailor, named Grant, to rub him down with ashes and canvas. When the Crusader docked on the Embarcadero, Nelson was dying of TB. He was carried to the Marine Hospital but soon passed away.

  The press called the attention of the public to this case and the Swedish Consul was able to get a trial. The Coroner’s Jury found a verdict of manslaughter against the captain and mate. This was due mainly to the untiring work of Col. W. H. L. Barnes, a rare man for that day—one with a social conscience. He represented the Swedish Society of San Francisco and aided U.S. Assistant District Attorney Morrow in the preparation of his case. U.S. Marshal William Gouvernor Morris undid their work, however, by picking his jury from the city front. With many veniremen entirely dependent on the goodwill of ships’ captains and shipowners, it surprised no one when Lewis and Henry were let off gently with fines of only $100 and $300 respectively.

  The Scandinavians did not forget the good work of Barnes, however. In March 1874 he received from the Consul for Norway and Sweden the Gold Cross of St. Olaf, awarded him by King Oscar.

  With it was a diploma appointing him Chevalier of the Order of St. Olaf. The California Mail Bag commented, “Such an honor has been very rarely, if at all, conferred on a foreigner. It is signal evidence of high appreciation on the part of King Oscar of services rendered in the cause of his humblest subjects.”

  Things kept popping in 1873. Joseph McArdle, mate of the Undaunted, was fined $250 and handed two years in the state prison for cruelty and Charles Brooks, mate of the Anahuac, got his comeuppance in the form of a $200 fine and thirty days in the pokey for mistreating his crew. But the real news was the Sunrise case, the only one which really rivaled the Challenge affair in public and newspaper attention.

  If the public and press were split into two camps in 1851 over the guilt or innocence of “Bully Bob” or “Killer” Waterman of the Challenge, there was no such divergence of opinion in the Sunrise case. Public opinion was overwhelmingly, almost unanimously, against Captain Clarke and Mate Harris as the facts came to light. When the Alta got hold of the particulars of the voyage of the Sunrise, it gave the story page-one, column-one treatment under a grim headline which read “A Floating Hell.” But it was the San Francisco Evening Post which, even more than the Alta, championed the sailors and denounced their oppressors. The Post, the first penny paper published west of the Rockies, appeared for the first time in 1871. Henry George, of single tax and Progress and Poverty fame, was editor. As a boy, he had sailed before the mast on the Hindoo in 1855-1856. He knew the hard life of a sailor. His paper was a Democratic, liberal, reform organ. He liked to fight all kinds of evils with it, from socio-economic inequities to the carpetbaggers of Grant’s administrations. George had more than enough reasons to interest himself in the Sunrise case. The Post eventually became the champion of sailors’ rights and although Henry George left the paper in 1875, it continued his fight against buckoism and pressed for a trial in the Gatherer case in 1882, just as George did in the Sunrise matter of 1873.

  The ship Sunrise, built in 1860 in East Boston, Massachusetts, was thirteen years old when she became famous—or infamous—as a hellship. About 1 p.m. September 27, 1873, she arrived in San Francisco. Her log excited some interest among the newsmen who boarded her for they found that three men had been lost at sea. But casualties aboard windjammers were common enough, so this was not really a story.

  When the story did break, it came from a strange quarter—boardinghouse runners. These crimps and pimps in the pay of Frisco’s shanghaiing shipping masters could hardly be called the sailors’ best friends, or tenderhearted social critics. But these toughs were horrified by what they learned in the forecastle of the Sunrise as she lay off North Point Dock. At least two and possibly all three of the men who were lost had committed suicide by jumping overboard. This was the only way they knew to escape a life no longer tolerable for them. The crewmen’s stories of cruelty were reinforced by the fact that the second officer, Dennis Maloney, had jumped ship at the eight-mile buoy and fled via a Whitehall boat to Meiggs Wharf, to disappear into the city. It looked as if he feared punishment for his deeds aboard ship.

  Frenchy Franklin, keeper of a Vallejo Street sailors’ boardinghouse and an influential man on the city front—he was a member of the Republican County Committee—met a fellow countryman on the Sunrise who begged to be taken ashore. He was completely demoralized, in filthy clothes, his face black and swollen. Franklin took the Frenchman, Charles Belle, to his boardinghouse and cleaned him up and clothed him. Captain Robert Clarke and Mate Frank Harris soon called on him to demand the surrender of Belle, the only man from the Sunrise who had manage
d to get ashore. Franklin told them to go to hell.

  Even though only one seaman made it ashore, the Embarcadero was soon boiling in anger much as it had done when the Challenge arrived more than twenty years earlier. The Alta reported: “After the seaman reached shore, and the cruelty of the officers was bruited along the City Front, a general and very decided feeling of indignation was expressed, even among runners. It would not have been safe for Maloney to put in an appearance about that time. He would be forced to stand some severe retaliatory measures or go overboard.”

  An Alta reporter secured the first interview with Belle. He found the sailor a young man, about twenty-one, with his face and body bearing “undoubted evidence of the brutal treatment to which he was subjected.” Belle told the newsman that master and mate began their tyranny the very first day out from New York, a tyranny they did not cease until the mud hook touched bottom in San Francisco Bay. But Maloney was not responsible for any of the barbarity, explained Belle; he had jumped ship in order to escape from Captain Clarke and Harris, not the crew. He had often intervened to protect the crew from the other officers.

  It was Harris who had made the men work till they dropped from exhaustion, who ordered them out of their bunks at night to wash the deck, who struck them with a belaying pin if they failed to keep moving fast enough to suit him. He knew but one way to arouse a watch. He would kick the men awake. Clarke struck the men only occasionally, Belle told the reporter, but condoned Harris’s brutality.