Peter Johnson repeated his account of the beatings he had suffered at Harris’s hands and added that the mate had tarred his face and greased it. “I did not complain to the captain because I thought him just as bad as the mate.” According to John Egalen, Lejude was also daubed with grease and tar. He, too, had seen young Brand, “covered with blood.” about 5 o’clock of the day the boy went over to the side to escape Harris. Ernest Lejude testified in French via an interpreter that between beatings with Harris’s fist or an iron scraper, he was made to clean the deck with his hat while he himself was smeared with molasses. Eusebe Sagerson, the carpenter, testified that Harris beat him for using a lamp to work by. Finally, Judge Hoffman suggested that not so much time be consumed in getting more particulars, mainly repetitious, of beatings from witnesses.
Public interest quickly revived in the case and by the sixth day the courtroom was jammed again. More and more seamen testified, adding their bits of damning evidence to the mounting total against the mate. When Richard Sides testified, he was asked for the dates of particular beatings. He replied, “It was such a common occurrence that I could not have kept count without paper and ink. It was common to see blood from one side of the deck to the other…. Brown came into the forecastle, wiped the blood off and lay down. I saw him bleeding out of the mouth, ears, and nose. He went overboard when a few days out. He came out of the forecastle, took off his jacket, and went overboard.”
“I saw Condiff licked on the starboard side of the mainmast harder than any brute I ever saw. He staggered into his berth, black and blue, the skin all off his hands, and vomited black. When Condiff went over the side, Harris cried, ‘There! One man gone!’”
Captain Clarke was called. He claimed all deaths were accidental, all charges trumped up. But he admitted striking some of the men. He flatly stated that Harris had, indeed, shipped as Frank Farrell to New York. And he admitted paying Captain Scott $50 for each sailor and $300 for Furt, but insisted this was to evade civil suits, not bribe them to duck out on the criminal action. His wife backed him up nobly: “I was on deck most of the time and I never saw a particle of blood on any member of the crew.”
Harris, of course, did not testify for or against himself but many in the courtroom remembered what he had told interviewers after his capture: “Brown was a stupid man. He shipped as an able seaman. He was not treated badly. He might have been hit with a rope’s end, as all sailors are liable to be when they don’t move quickly. I ordered Condiff aloft in fine weather to learn how to do it. I used to tell him, ‘You’ve got to learn to go aloft or I’ll keep you up from your watch below.’ When he didn’t move quickly enough, I would strike him gently with a rope’s end. I will swear I never used a capstan bar nor a heaver on him nor on any man in the ship.”
The tension of the trial was relieved slightly when John Egalen came to testify, reeling into the room, drunk as a lord. But, after hearing all the damning testimony of Furt and the others, Colonel Barnes, sotto voce said to the person beside him in regard to Harris, “If one half of this is true, that fellow ought to be crucified, head down. He combines the mercy of a shark with the forbearance of a famished Bengal tiger.”
Sunrise Harris was not crucified, but he was convicted and on a near-record number of counts, twenty-four of the seventy-one charges still against him. On November 28 he and Clarke were sentenced, although thirty-five shipmasters made affidavits to convince the court that Clarke was really a kind and gentle soul who had been wronged. They were silent on Harris. Clarke drew fourteen months in the county jail and a fine of $1,000. Harris got four years in state prison, without hard labor. Dennis Maloney, the second mate, was handed sixty days in the county jail.
When the sentences were announced, Clarke paled visibly but said only, “If I have erred, it has been an error of judgment.” Harris angrily stated, “I never struck any man with intent to hurt him, except Wittpfennig, during the whole voyage!” But he showed no emotion as the judgment was actually pronounced. Maloney said not a word. He took his sentence, which was a light one, of course, in a stoical manner.
Frank (Sunrise) Harris was received at San Quentin on December 1, 1873, where he became simply #5806. Like more than one other bucko, he received a presidential pardon. On November 14, 1876, President U.S. Grant pardoned him in full. He is said to have then joined the San Francisco police force under an assumed name!
Captain Sunrise Clarke returned to the sea after serving his time, and in 1885 made the news again. On November 1 of that year he took the Frank N. Thayer out of Manila for New York. The crew of Malays grew disaffected and were punished, as might be expected with Clarke in command. One night, two of them ran amok, stabbed the two mates to death and cut Clarke up so badly that they left him for dead. But he was a tough old fellow. The watch on deck fought the two knife wielders with capstan bars but were routed when two of them were stabbed. The helmsman, lookout and carpenter were murdered. The rest of the crew fled to their quarters and barricaded themselves inside. For two days no one made a move. Then, on the third day, a bloody Clarke got a sailor, hiding in the cabin with him, to fire a pistol at random around the deck. A lucky shot hit one of the two Malays, who jumped over the side. His companion, when he saw this, ran forward and set fire to the cargo of hemp before jumping overboard himself. Clarke released his crew and they fought the fire but could not stop it. The captain got two boats provisioned and launched, but one capsized. Clarke, his wife and young daughter then joined the remains of his crew in the single boat and cast off from the flaming Thayer. He may have been a brute but he was a real sailor. In six days, with an improvised sail, he brought the crowded boat across seven hundred miles of open sea to the island of St. Helena where all the wounded recovered. He eventually retired from the sea to Port Chester, New York, and to San Diego where he died about 1910.
Dennis Maloney cheated the courts, although he drew only six months in the county jail. He took sick and died in the county hospital on December 22, 1873. He had served less than a month’s incarceration when a flare-up of his old Civil War wound caused him to decline and, eventually, die.
“Sally Gabbleton,” the nom-de-plumed reporter who wrote the Town Talk column in the Alta, spoke the truth in musing during the Sunrise trial that “We shall get a dose of cruel captains now, for the reporters, having got on a new scent, will follow it up and never a ship will enter port but her commander will get an overhauling.”
This certainly proved to be the case. During the Sunrise trial, Captain Phillips of the Topgallant—described by his crew as “one of the worst captains that ever sailed into this port”—was arrested for withholding proper food from his scurvy crew. The Post, in running the crew’s description of the man, noted that “No class of men are better able to judge than they.” Edward Larkin, second mate, until disrated by the captain, was released on brutality charges though Phillips called him “the most consummate damned villain that ever trod a ship’s deck.” Charges against both captain and Mate Smith were also dropped eventually. Apparently the sailors were overworking a good thing in their new-found position of being top dog.
Another case of phony charges involved the Herald of the Morning. Some crooked crewman blabbed that in Captain McLaughlin’s bringing her to Frisco in October 1873, “One sailor was shot down and one hewed down with a cutlass.” The story was pure bunk.
When the St. Charles reached San Francisco that year, her second mate, John Wright, skipped out like a rocket. He had used a rope overly much on his crew on the passage. But he was arrested by U.S. Deputy Marshal Carver in Jim Nolan’s Front and Vallejo corner saloon, where he was embarking on a grand drunk. During his speedy trial, it came out that his abused crew had been shanghaied in New York in the first place. Judge Hoffman let him off rather easily —with a choice of a fine of ten dollars or ten days in jail. The Post, which had denounced Captain Smalley of the St. Charles for letting his mate escape (in contrast
to the captain of the Northern Light who brought his Second, Shiel, into port in irons for shooting at the crew), was horrified by this wrist slapping of Wright. The paper called it shocking and accused Hoffman of mocking the law. But the Alta took a more reasonable view, noting that Wright’s acts were not stamped with “that systematic brutality which merits Harris the title of First Brute of the Sunrise”
Only a day or so after Harris and Clarke were sentenced in the windup of the Sunrise affair, cruelty charges were filed against Captain Charles W. Fisher of the whaling bark Alaska for beating, choking and tricing up a sailor who committed the shipboard breach of etiquette in suggesting, to the captain, that the bully beef smelled bad. Another whaling bark, the Mount Wollaston, Captain William Mitchell, brought more tales of brutality, with one man lost overboard and another dead of galloping consumption. Richard Sides, one of the Sunrise crew, brought a crewman, Richard Sennett, of the Thatcher Magoun, to the Post’s office to tell a tale of brutality on her Liverpool to Frisco run.
The colored cook of the S.S. Thomas was the next in the long parade of complainants. He told the U.S. Commissioner that the second mate struck him at Callao and that Captain Eastman did not interfere. It was quickly shown that the captain had, indeed, interfered and stopped the row. Alfred White, seaman on the British ship Durham, was next to make hay out of the cruelty charge. He swore out an assault and battery warrant against his captain in November. Captain Charles Hamil of the whaling bark Midas was the next shipmaster to be grabbed by the law in this rash of arrests of 1873. His crime was applying a “knuckle poultice” to one of his crew. There was no malice in the punishment, it turned out; the man deserved it—he had broken a shipmate’s arm. The complaint was dismissed. And the public and courts began to tire of this seemingly endless flood of complaints, some half-baked, some patently false.
Almost unnoticed in this juridical floodtide was the quashing of the indictment against Captain A. F. Scott for bribing the crew of the Sunrise. Scott got off, “scott free,” on a legal technicality. Two more arrests, that of Mate Hugh Coslin of the bark Camilla and James M. Ferguson, second mate of the Seminole, wound up the parade of cases for the year 1873, and the whole flood began to ease up.
In 1876, however, another “strict disciplinarian” ran afoul of the law. He was Captain Thomas Peabody, master of the C. O. Whitmore. His second mate died on a Cardiff to Hong Kong passage, apparently from starvation, abuse and confinement. Peabody and his chief officer, John H. Snow, were accused of murder, and feeling in the Crown Colony ran about as high as public opinion in San Francisco had in 1851 or 1873. But both men escaped from the Chinese port and were not brought to trial until three years later—the captain in Boston and the mate in San Francisco. Both were acquitted for lack of evidence.
Two years later Captain David J. Hodgman and his officers of the Loretto Fish were tried for cruelty and neglect but they escaped punishment. And now things began to taper off. Brutality at sea went into a decline until 1882, when all hell broke loose again. And, as usual, the San Francisco Post was right in the thick of it, though Henry George was no longer editor. The paper called the story of the hellship Gatherer, the last of the major buckoism cases, “a tale of the sea surpassing the Sunrise cruelty.”
The Gatherer, built in Bath, Maine, in 1874, was commanded for most of her life by humane masters. But in 1881 she sailed from Antwerp with a load of railroad iron. Her eighteen-man crew was commanded by Captain C. N. Sparks. William Watts was first mate; George (often rendered “Cornelius,” for some reason) Curtis was second mate; John Driscoll was third officer.
Watts and Curtis formed a hellish team. They had hardly left the waters of the Schelde behind before they were efficiently pummeling Clark, Turner and Hansen of the crew. Curtis beat the latter so severely that he almost put his eye out and cut his mouth so badly that he could only speak with difficulty. Driscoll was friendly to the crew but did not dare show it. He tried to protect them when he was on watch but otherwise, he admitted, “I am powerless.” Watts, when beating the men, would joke, “I am king of you low beasts.” And these were not brawls. They were merciless, sadistic assaults, even worse than those of the Sunrise. There was little anger and no drunkenness about this swinish team. Gustave Adlung, nearly blinded by Watts, said, “I never saw the captain or mates under the influence of liquor.” The beatings of men rendered defenseless (even had the mates been unarmed) constituted torture by a rigid sea code of centuries.
Watts once lashed John Burns to the rail; then the cowardly bully hit him with his brass knuckles, broke his nose, and disfigured him badly for life. The sadism of the two mates took an even more sordid tack when, as the papers delicately put it, “the first and second mate compelled two men to disrobe for a purpose that cannot be hinted at.”
On October 1, Mate Watts lashed a heavy capstan bar to John Burns’s back and forced him to pace back and forth on the deck. As he would stagger past him, Watts would kick him. McCue and George Loucher were forced to engage in a brutalized tug of war, pulling one another across a punishment line until they were exhausted, as Watts indulged his gruesome sense of humor by organizing a “game,” Loucher lost, but he “won.” He escaped—to eternity, by going over the side. He was soon followed by John Hansen. It was the same old story of the Sunrise all over again; men too degraded to care about living any longer.
In mid-November 1881, the mate stripped McCue to the waist, fastened a strap around him and hoisted him, upside down, to the mizzen stay where he remained suspended until his face turned black. According to sailor Gustave Adlung, the captain joined the circus of horrors by persecuting the steward. The latter, an inoffensive Chinese whom the crew called Tommy Ar Ket, already beaten by the mate and confined without food for five days, was dragged from his bunk by his queue, beaten with a knotted rope, called all the filthy names in the book and some not there, then thrown down to be stomped on and left for dead. Some of the sailors carried him to his bunk which he was not able to leave again until the Gatherer reached California, when he was landed at San Pedro to be sent to an asylum in Los Angeles, for he had lost his mind.
When the Gatherer arrived at Wilmington, the U.S. Shipping Commissioner lost no time in issuing warrants for the arrest of all officers, but Watts jumped ship and sailed, as “Jim Watson” on the Imperial to Queenstown, Ireland. He was arrested in Great Britain and detained in Clerkenwell Prison until officers could arrive from San Francisco to take him back to California for trial.
According to Adlung, nearly blinded by Watts’s kicking him in the eye, Watts came up to him once on the voyage to ask, “Why did you spill paint on the deck?” He had answered, “I didn’t know I’d spilled it. I’ll go clean it up.” But Watts halted him, “Not before you get this, you son of a bitch.” Then he beat Adlung so severely that he was confined to his berth for four weeks. When he asked the captain for medicine, that worthy said, “Go to hell, you son of a bitch!” When he was finally able to come on deck, Watts immediately sent him aloft, saying, “I wish you would fall and kill yourself.”
John Anderson was the third man to go over the side. He was second mate Curtis’s particular prey. Curtis used to beat him about the head, shoulders and legs with knotted and tarred ropes. Chunks of flesh were cut from his legs by these whippings and he was one mass of bruises and sores. Henry Mills saw him on the topgallant crosstie, bent over, “so weak from the beatings he’d got, that the poor fellow fell, striking the forward chains and bounced into the sea.” According to Adlung, for some reason (a flicker of remorse?) Watts wanted to launch a boat but the captain ordered him not to, saying, “No, let him go. He’s dead, anyway.”
According to the young German, “Even after these men met their deaths, we were treated as brutally as ever. Our diet consisted of hard tack and water most of the time.” Third Mate Driscoll agreed.” “The treatment of the men on the Gatherer was the worst I’ve seen in my life.” The Norwegian
ship’s carpenter, Carl Thomsen, added, “I saw blood on the deck nearly every day for three months and a half.” No wonder the Call described the voyage as “a carnival of cruelty.”
Eventually the crew got ashore at Wilmington and all but three A.B.s and the carpenter deserted. Captain Sparks got six men from the Belvedere and sailed to San Francisco. Word of the horrors preceded the vessel and when she arrived in the bay, U.S. Marshal Favor went aboard to arrest captain and mates. But second mate Curtis had skipped out, a la Watts. Sparks refused to submit to arrest until Favor convinced him by flashing a pair of pistols.
Someone passed a tip to Favor that Curtis was hanging about the area of the San Francisco cattleyards at the foot of Fourth Street. (He had come up from Los Angeles ahead of the ship.) Favor, with drawn revolver, trapped Curtis on a streetcar after he had just signed to sail on the P. N. Blanchard. It turned out that he had shaved off his side whiskers and spent five weeks in town incognito. He was surprised when Favor greeted him on the streetcar, “How do you do, Mr. Curtis? I’ve got you at last. If you jump the car, I’ll shoot you.”
Curtis, of course, denied all accusations, threw all blame for cruelties on Watts—his bitter enemy, he said. (For three months he had refused to speak to the man.) As for beatings? “There was some trouble with the sailors but not to amount to anything.” He’d never struck the men severely, though he once had to take a drawn knife away from Peter Clark. He had just broken off the point and returned it. No men were ever lashed to the rail. He had not carried a pistol in two years. On and on, he denied everything.
Sparks was held on $20,000 bail and Curtis on $10,000. No one rushed to help Curtis, but that old friend of shipmasters-in-distress (like Bully Waterman and Sunrise Clarke), Captain T. H. Allen, and others, posted bond for Sparks.
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 21