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 Danish boy who had deserted the Gatherer in Wilmington to sail on a lumber schooner to Big River on the Mendocino Coast was brought to the U.S. Marshal’s office by the Danish consul. He corroborated the earlier statements of crew members, adding that he himself had been hit on the ear by Watts’s brass knuckles. They not only cut a piece out of his ear but deprived him of hearing on that side. Another time, Watts hit him in the face with a marlinspike, cutting his cheek to the bone and discoloring both eyes. They turned black and green. Then Watts tried to lance them, using a sharpened nail! The pain maddened the boy, Rasmussen, so much that he tried to jump overboard but Driscoll prevented him. Rasmussen also reported that he saw Watts kick Hansen in the face with his heavy boots until the lacerated flesh hung in strips.

  Third Mate Driscoll had kept a secret Journal of the cruelties but had lost it. However, his memory was excellent. “I saw Watts knock down Gustave Adlung with his fist and kick him in the eyes. The captain stood about one hundred feet away. When Adlung fell his head hit upon a spar and he made a loud outcry that could be heard sixty yards distant. He got up and wiped the blood from the deck and from his face. Before that his eyesight was good. Now he could not open his eyes until after this witness left the ship and he has hardly been able to see out of them since the occurrence.

  “He was laid up below for months from his injury. The captain made no inquiry into the matter nor supplied any medicine for the boy, so far as I know. I did not see the captain pay him the slightest attention after he was beaten. I saw Jack Broyer beaten on the 24th of December. The captain was at the wheel sixty feet away. The second mate beat Broyer first with his fists and then with a belaying pin over the head.

  “There was fresh blood on the deck every day during the voyage. Every man had to clean up his own blood. I saw iron rings put on Carl Anderson’s wrists. His face was badly cut up by the mates. He attempted to jump overboard but I prevented him. Archibald Turner and George Loucher were beaten by both mates with their fists and with a rope’s end. The third day after leaving port, the second mate called William Ohlman down out of the rigging and kicked him on the head and he bore the marks for two or three weeks. I saw him beaten by the mates three times during a single watch….”

  The trial of Sparks was a repetition of the Sunrise case. Endless documentation of horrible beatings, redundant testimony from Driscoll, Adlung, Mills, Brown—almost monotonously the same tallying of fearful beatings. William Ohlman’s description of the nightmare voyage, as translated by his interpreter, Henry Hesbeck, was particularly graphic: “The mate hit me four blows with the fist on the nose, and kicked me three times on the side of the head and on the back. My face was cut and it bled; blood was falling on the deck. The captain and all hands were on deck. The pilot was with the captain. The pilot said ‘Jesus Christ!’ when he saw the blood dropping on the deck. The pilot was about fifteen feet from the captain, who was walking up and down. He saw what the mate was doing but said nothing.”

  The next day the mate had met him with “Come on you——Dutch son of a bitch,” and struck him so that he made an outcry which could have been heard for three ship lengths. The captain paid no attention. Ohlman’s face was so swollen he could not sleep. He was beaten almost every day from Antwerp to the Horn. “Blood could be seen on deck almost every day. The crew was shrieking with pain almost always so that it was difficult to sleep...”

  Captain Sparks testified himself in the Gatherer case. He said he had never seen any blows struck, never said “Go to hell!” to anyone, but gave bread and linseed poultices to Adlung for his injuries and threatened the mates with being relieved of duty if they hit anyone again. His delivery was straightforward and voluble but the sentiments of his audience were reflected in their suppressed hisses and groans. He insisted the cruelty charges were cooked up by “outsiders” who had worked on the crew to take action. He even whitewashed Watts—“The mate was a small man, and couldn’t hurt anyone much, even if he struck him as hard as he could.” He said he did not like Curtis and would have replaced him but he could not promote the third mate to Curtis’s deck-officer rank because Third had lost his voice.

  District Attorney Teare accused Sparks of crimes of commission and omission in summing up the Government’s case. He reminded the court of the case of the U.S. v. W. P. Breen in which it was held that the jury must (at long last) judge the credibility of sailors’ testimony just as they would that of other men. As Teare put it, “The testimony of Gustave Adlung is as worthy of credence as that of king, or prince, or even the captain of the Gatherer”

  Although he vividly described the blinded Adlung going to his captain for medicine and being told “Go to hell!” and although Teare asked rhetorically, “Is this the humanity that should come from the lord of the quarter-deck?”—fantastically, the trial ended in a hung jury and no decision. Hisses filled the courtroom when Sparks appeared but hisses do not win law cases. On the motion of D. A. Teare, a nolle prosequi was eventually entered and all charges against Sparks dismissed. The reason Sparks was not judged guilty was that most of the atrocities had actually been committed by either Curtis or Watts. The Post was aghast at this “woeful failure of justice,” and said:

  “Captain Sparks is a ‘gentleman,’ the commander of a ship, a man of some property, and of reputable and influential associations. His accusers are merely a lot of broken-nosed, half-blind sailors. Though half the life and all the spirit was beaten out of them during the fearful voyage of the ship from Antwerp to this port, and though Captain Sparks was aboard and in command of the vessel all the time, and although such cruelties were practiced upon the crew that some of their number actually jumped overboard to escape further torture, yet a jury of American citizens fails to discover any responsibility in the captain for the outrages…. Surely it is a hard fate for poor Jack that he must be pummeled nearly to death throughout a long voyage and when he comes ashore at the end and exhibits his wounds, must be told that he has been kindly treated and his commander is to be commended that he has spared their worthless lives.”

  The next day, there appeared this short-but-bitter editorial: “San Francisco juries are in evident sympathy with brutal shipmasters and their officers. No wonder that the American merchant service has gone to the dogs.”

  Captain Sparks did not live long to enjoy his “undeserved freedom,” as many put it. Given the command of the ship Red Cross in San Francisco, he followed the example of Loucher and Hansen of committing suicide by jumping overboard en route to Liverpool.

  Testimony in the trial of George Curtis, the Gatherer’s second mate, was a rehash of what had been said in Spark’s trial. On the ninth day of Curtis’s trial, he was convicted on six charges and judged not guilty on the seventh. Judge Hoffman cut off the audience’s attempt to cheer the result. Curtis did not seem affected in the least, even when he was sentenced to six years in San Quentin.

  It was not until 1884 that Watts, finally caught up with, had his moment of truth. On February 26 of that year his trial began in San Francisco’s U.S. Circuit Court, with Judge Sabin of Carson City presiding. The same witnesses—Adlung, Alden, and others—gave the same testimony for the third time over. There was some thought of bringing Curtis down from San Quentin but it was decided he was no longer a competent witness for the prosecution. The defense got one man, Carl Johnson, to say a good word about Watts. He could speak no evil of the man; he said the mate treated men well, did not use vile language, did not beat the crew. He painted a prettier picture of Watts than did the mate himself, when he was called. He, himself, at least admitted striking McCue, whom he had found asleep at the wheel. As he explained it, he had taken him to Driscoll and asked Third, “What shall I do with this man?”

  “What is the matter now?” asked Driscoll.

  “I found him asleep at the wheel again.”

  “Trice him up,” suggested Driscoll.

  “No,�
�� countered Watts, but struck him and let him go.

  Watts admitted striking one man with a belaying pin, but only when that man was threatening Curtis with an iron pin himself.

  Mate Watts was found guilty on but two of the fifty-one charges of cruelty, but they were the most serious (excepting the suicides)— blinding Adlung and deafening Rasmussen. There was a murmur of satisfaction at the verdict, for the room was packed with seamen hostile to him. But he took the sentence calmly, as if expecting conviction. On March 5, 1884 he appeared before Judge Sabin for sentencing. His counsel, W. W. Bishop, pleaded for leniency and Watts’s wife, with an infant in her arms, occupied a conspicuous seat in the courtroom. The judge intoned, “It is the sentence and judgment of this court that you be imprisoned in San Quentin for a term of six years.” This was a light enough sentence for the brand of wanton inhumanity for which he stood.

  So ready were press and public now to jump on any roughneck mate or dictatorial captain (Joshua Slocum, the famous lone navigator, for instance, was placed in custody and fined $500 in 1884 for alleged cruelty on the Northern Light), that Captain Edward P. Nichols of the Frank Pendelton suggested to the sensationalist press to make something of the fact that one of his sailors had turned up missing on a San Francisco to Liverpool voyage…. “Cannot some of our most worthy emblems of peace and quiet, with their vivid imaginations, picture something horrible in this disappearance? We mean the papers which said, ‘The Captain was not killed but the public would not have many regrets had he been one of the victims’ Let them picture the man fleeing from a brutal captain who is chasing him with a royal yard in his grasp; picture that spar as it breaks over the man’s head; show how the captain in a fiendish rage, then grasped a spare topsail yard and hurled it at the man, who, rather than be killed ran out on the spanker boom, jumped over the bow and was drowned. Sketch the man as the ship passes, catching the end of the jib sheet which is towing over the stern, put in a few wails of agony and cries of ‘help!’ Paint the captain calmly walking on the deck, eating peanuts, heedless of these cries; then continue on in that style. It will be just as sensible and only a slight change in form from the usual!”

  It must not be thought that the Gatherer case was the last shipboard brutality incident, but the incidence of such cases declined after 1884, however much Captain Nichols and others might ridicule the new respect for the lives and liberty of American merchant seamen. There were always cases, such as those tallied in Macarthur’s remarkable “Red Record.” There was always at least one second mate ready to throw a captain overboard, as in the October 1887 scuffle on the Marianne Nottebohm; or a resentful crew ready to burn up their ship, like the Frederick Billings in Pisagua in 1891; or the Iceberg at Iquique in 1895. In some cases, the change in social climate enabled crews to successfully buffalo the afterguard. In 1897 Captain D. A. Scribner brought the Henry B. Hyde into San Francisco with the “permission” of his crew, a bunch of Bowery pugs and thugs, semimutinous for the whole run. There was not a real sailor among them and captain and mates were at their mercy.

  All laws sanctioning or regulating imprisonment or the use of force to compel involuntary servitude by seamen in American merchant vessels were repealed and abrogated by act of December 21, 1898. (Disobedience at sea however could still be punished by confinement in irons and a diet of bread and water.) A new age was dawning and the few buckos who persisted into the twentieth century—like “Plug Ugly” Murphy of the Star of Greenland, who threw buckets of water on his men (buckets and all!), were really throwbacks to an earlier time.

  Probably the last men who really earned the title of bucko were Arthur E. Cuvall, mate of the barkentine City of Galveston, who earned in 1918 the sobriquet of “the human gorilla,” and Captain Adolph C. “Hell Fire” Pedersen, master of the barkentine Puako, who got eighteen months in Atlanta for his monstrous treatment of the crew.

  By the end of World War I, the bucko mate and bullying master were as defunct as the Mauritian dodo. Most thanks for this situation must be paid to men like Henry George, Andy Furuseth, Waiter Macarthur, Colonel Barnes, and Robert La Follette. They were men who had the guts to fight for seamen’s rights even when it was not always the most popular or successful cause.

  5. Shanghaiing Days in Frisco

  PIECING together the puzzle of America’s shanghaiing “industry” of the nineteenth century is no easy task. No crimp, runner or bloody-fisted mate left his memoirs for us to peruse. And mighty scarce are accounts of “shanghaiees.” if we may coin such a term for the unfortunates who were flung aboard outbound ships against their wishes. One of the major detailed accounts of crimping has been pretty well pinned down now as fiction, though library catalogues still carry the book as factual, by maritime historians of the cut of John Lyman, Jack Kemble and Karl Kortum. This volume is Hiram Bailey’s Shanghaied Out of Frisco in the Nineties. Supposedly written by an English engineer, it details Bailey’s experiences and those of a pal, Ben MacFarlane, when shanghaied by the Chileno crimp, Calico Jim. According to Hiram Bailey the brutal mate of the General Gordon met his match in fisticuffs when he took on Shorty MacFarlane, and went overboard when he tried to brain Mac, aloft, with a belaying pin. It is a wonderful story but John Lyman points out that there was no such vessel as the General Gordon or even one remotely resembling her which sailed from San Francisco for Sydney via Mazatlán and Iquique in 1899. Some have claimed that Bailey’s General Gordon was actually the Lord Shaftesbury but she did not make such a passage until 1910. So, it would appear that Bailey’s account is about as dependable as Halliday Witherspoon’s Liverpool Jarge. Alas, the literature of both shanghaiing and buckoism is not large.

  As a matter of fact, it’s skimpy. For, atop the obvious autobiographical reluctance of the principal actors in this drama of America’s seaports, is the fact that few of these men were what we might call excessively literate. Even if they had wanted to leave a record of their misdeeds (which the more honest police officer or occasional reform politico might use to throw them in the calabozo), they were too illiterate to do so.

  Finally, in the world’s capital of shanghaiing—San Francisco— the earthquake and fire of April 1906 did such a thorough job of annihilation of documents, manuscripts and other records, that the whole story of shanghaiing would be a mystery to us today were it not for the survival of newspaper files and, in the first place, the prying, news-hungry men of the fourth estate a hundred or so years ago. Thanks to old newspaper files (and British consular reports), and an inordinate amount of research, digging and fitting together of pieces, the story of the dirty business of crimping begins to take shape.

  One of the few dependable personal accounts of a shanghaied seaman is that of Bill Coffman. Still active in San Francisco business life, Bill can tell you all about his experiences around the turn of the century. One day he was drugged in one or more Frisco saloons and collapsed in the middle of Jackson Street near the Embarcadero. When he awoke, he was, literally, a prisoner in a sailors’ boardinghouse. Still sick and woozy from the drugs in his drinks, he was dumped aboard a Britisher, the Belfast, where he was speedily sent into the scuppers by a blow to his tortured stomach, delivered by the tough second mate. Coffman stuck it out on the Belfast with the four other men—all raynecks or joskins (hicks, landlubbers) who had been shanghaied in San Francisco with him—for whom Captain J. E. Davis had paid $75 a throw, blood money. He managed to stay clear of fist-conscious Mr. Atkins, the bellicose second mate, and in general kept his nose clean till he was paid off at Cork. Coffman got just $36, American, to show for almost six months of backbreaking toil at sea. When he got back to S. F. he made only a few more passages before swallowing the anchor and settling down to become an outstanding figure in both business and sports. (He is the founder of the Shrine East-West football game.)

  Surprisingly, one of the best, most detailed and yet succinct case studies of crimping was contained in a letter sent in November 1873 from
, of all places, Memphis, Tennessee, to the editor of the San Francisco Daily Alta California. George W. Gift, of the Volunteer State, included in his long letter an exact quotation of Nick Nickerson, the onetime mate of an unnamed clipper ship in San Francisco in the 1860s.

  We were laying off Clark’s Point, in ballast, bound to Calcutta. Do what we would, no crew could we get. Day by day, we swung to our anchors impatiently trying to coax a crew aboard. Not a Jack would come. One day the runner came aboard and said that, if we had the pluck to do a pretty desperate thing, a crew could be had and for which he would charge us only $30 a head blood money….

  A little whaling bark lay off Rincon Point with a big crew of kanakas on board. She was bound to the Arctic and the kanakas wanted to go home. The proposition was to send a kanaka runner amongst them with a story that a bark bound to the Islands would give them a chance to work their passage home. If they accepted we were to go under the bows of the bark about two o’clock in the morning, on the last of the flood tide, and take them and their dunnage out to our ship. After we got them on board, we would see to it that they were useful on the passage to Calcutta. I liked the adventure and so the bargain was closed. Two o’clock next morning found me under the whaleman’s bows, in a big plunger. The kanakas had their dunnage ready and in a few moments I had twenty-four strapping fellows stored away under the forward deck of the sailboat and was stretching out toward Goat Island with the young ebb just making.

  In an hour I ran alongside our big ship, which loomed up like a mountain out of the water, and hailed the second mate (I was mate) to heave me a line. I had the runner with me as a matter of course and he caught the line and made it fast. As bad luck would have it, we had got a tremendous big darkey in with the kanakas and he was pretty smart. This rascal poked his head out and saw we were alongside a big ship instead of a bark and he became very suspicious and commenced chattering like a monkey to his shipmates. A devil of a racket set up instanter and I knew I must be quick or the game would get away from me. I ordered them on deck, but not a man would stir.