“On deck there!” I cried. “Get a whip on the main yard quick and send me the end down here!” Up went the second mate and soon the end of a rope, rove through a block on the main yard, came down. I seized the big nigger and, in spite of his kicking and sputtering, got a turn under his arm and sang out to them on deck to “Whip up!”
It would have made a dog laugh to have seen that fellow kick and squirm but up he went. As he was “civilized,” the Old Man, who was on deck superintending the job, let him remain at the gangway whilst we were whipping the kanakas aboard, which latter we stuck down on the ‘tween decks, and, to make sure, put them in irons. I sent up every bundle and every chest and, handing the sailboat over to the runner, I climbed on board myself. I never felt so thoroughly satisfied with a job in my life.
I knew that the boarding masters had a fashion of drugging old Jack and sending him away in tight times. But here was a whole crew corralled in one swoop and every man of them was sober. I rubbed my hands with delight and was just about to make a pleasant remark to a person I saw standing on deck in the dark when, to my surprise and mortification, that person squared away and struck me the most terrible blow I ever got in my life. I was standing near to, and with my back to, the quarter-deck capstan and the first thing I felt, as an ocean of stars rushed past my vision, was the rim of that capstan strike the small of my back and then my head hit the deck and I remained quiet.
The Old Man, second mate and bos’n interfered and saved me from a terrible licking, for it was that cussed big nigger who had waited for me on the quarter-deck. It takes more than one lick to whip me, so I peeled for that fellow on the spot and when I put the irons on him down below, he was satisfied to quit.
Next day, when the ebb tide made, a big gang of boatmen came aboard and I got the ship under way and worked her outside the bar. In the afternoon the captain came and we discharged the pilot and I let my crew on deck. I never had a bit of trouble with them from that moment until we parted.
Of many of San Francisco’s most proficient shanghaiers we know little more than their names. These land sharks were shy violets when it came to newspaper publicity. They knew how to keep their mouths shut. There are few old-timers left who even remember exactly where the shanghaiing boardinghouses and saloons were located, much less the names, or exploits, of their proprietors. There were many sailors’ houses on Steuart Street, just one block west of the Embarcadero, in the area now hidden under the end of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. There were others on Clay, Sacramento, Davis, Drumm and Pacific streets where these thoroughfares approached tidewater, and on East Street (the Embarcadero) itself.
Whalers were always in short supply, so Jimmy Laflin and Bob Pinner specialized in shanghaiing men for whaleships from their place at 35 Pacific Street. Lightship men were also hard to sign on, for the work was monotonous and few liked to ride at anchor in the choppy seas off the Golden Gate with the constant din of the fog warning signals in their ears. William (Billy) Wilson, of the Lighthouse Service, did not always inquire too closely into just how his hands were recruited. More than one down-and-out Scandinavian was supplied by crimps for this offshore duty via the shanghai route.
Shanghai Brown was one of the bigger operators until 1896 when he was kidnaped and shanghaied himself by some of his erstwhile victims, the brassbounders (apprentices) of the British windjammer, Springburn.
According to the old Examiner waterfront reporter, Eddy Coblentz, another notorious crimp was Hangman John Rogers. Born in the cattle country of Sonoma Valley—Jack London’s Valley of the Moon—he learned early to handle a rope, even before he took to rowing a Whitehall boat on Sonoma Creek. He drifted away from ranching to the city and began to hang around Meiggs Wharf or Crowley’s Boat House at the foot of Howard Street when he was not busy with his job of hangman and jailer for the city of San Francisco. One time, posing as “Captain Rogers,” he married a couple beyond the three-mile limit and, after a few too many drinks, demonstrated his skill with a rope to the impatient newlyweds. He even went so far as to tighten the noose realistically around his neck. Unlucky Hangman John! Without warning, the launch was hit by a huge following sea. It jacked the stern up suddenly and catapulted Rogers overboard until he was brought up short by the rope, its end tied to a bitt. When Crowley and his engineer-deckhand, Jim Sinott, hauled him aboard, he was dead. Sinott laid him out in the cockpit and pronounced over him an epitaph (more than most crimps got): “Them what lives by the rope, dies by the rope.”
This writer’s mother, Mrs. Alice M. Dillon, had a girl friend in 1900, named Alice McDevitt. Miss McDevitt’s father ran a saloon on the Embarcadero near Clay Street, from which men were said to be shanghaied. Another saloon and sailors’ boardinghouse, run by William Paupitz at Jackson and Front Streets in the ‘90’s, had a similar reputation. Arthur Oliver, who came to San Francisco around the Horn as an apprentice on the Crompton, remembers yet another shanghaiing saloon, complete with trap door, at Broadway and Battery.
At the head of Napier Lane, where it dead-ends against the bulk of Telegraph Hill, was a house used for “cold storage” of seamen being readied for a berth on some outbound windship. Bill Coffman was kept prisoner in such a place. Another “inmate” was a young Swede by the name of Olson. He was a friend of Captain Otto Lembke. He told the captain how he, too, had been put on ice for a time in such a place. Only sixteen or seventeen years old at the time, and of a good family—his sea chest had his family’s coat of arms and crest on it!—he had come to San Francisco on his first voyage from Sweden. His vessel was boarded in the bay by a number of runners including a confidence man who called himself The Parson. These rogues climbed up the forechains from their Whitehalls, passed whiskey around freely and made all sorts of alluring promises. Although the captain withheld their pay to discourage them from deserting, young Olson and some others of the crew yielded to the frock-coated con man’s blandishments. Once ashore, he would not let them go uptown at all. Instead, he marched them, under the heavy guard of an escort of toughs, to a house at the foot of Telegraph Hill near the ballast quarry, perhaps the very Napier Lane building of ill repute. It was a boardinghouse but it was built like a jail and had a stout board fence all around it.
Olson and his comrades were fed well there but confined to their quarters by bullies armed with clubs. When one of the sailors pleaded to be allowed to go uptown, promising to return, one of the guard mount hauled off and hit him so hard he knocked him off a bench and onto the floor, out cold. Olson and one other man managed to escape from this crimp’s dungeon by piling barrels and other junk against the wall, climbing on top of it and jumping down outside. They then ran as fast as they could toward the Embarcadero. Several of the shanghaiers pursued them and were gaining on them when they reached the Ferry Building. His friend was caught, but Olson jumped on board an Oakland ferryboat and hid out in Alameda for a time, working for a man for nothing just to have a safe place to stay. He had to leave his hideout when he got dirt in the barrels of his benefactor’s shotgun on a hunting trip, blew it up and ruined it. Once again Olson had to hide out, this time from his employer. When the young Swede felt that things had cooled off on the water front, he returned to San Francisco but kept his distance from the base of Telegraph Hill and the rock quarry.
The talented Walter Macarthur, of “Red Record” fame, made artistic drawings of a number of the turn-of-the-century Steuart Street boardinghouses and saloons, like the Finland Exchange between Howard and Folsom Streets. The pictures are preserved in the Bancroft Library. The 200 block was solid with houses and bars for Jack Tar, like Three Fingered Jack’s place. But we have no picture of Chloroform Kate’s squalid lodgings on Davis Street. Catherine Johnson got her nickname from her habit of sniffing—or even swigging— chloroform as a sort of chaser for the raw whiskey she so freely swilled along with her sailor customers. From time to time the paddy wagon would haul her to Harbor Emergency Hospital w
here she would have her bilges pumped. Her name appeared on the hospital register thirty-two times in one year. The entry was always the same (it would have saved money to have had a rubber stamp made), “Catherine Johnson, aged 55, acute chloroformism.”
Chloroform Kate’s itinerary was always the same—from her saloon and boardinghouse on Davis to Harbor Emergency Hospital; then, after sobering up, to Harbor Police Station in the Black Maria; next, to the Hall of Justice on Portsmouth Square, to Police Court for a lecture and her rote response—always the same, a promise to hew to the straight and narrow—thence back to Davis Street and her whiskey, laced with chloroform, as she celebrated her release.
Kate was the widow of another crimp, Shanghai Johnson. She had been barmaid when he was flourishing and she took over after his demise. Like Laflin and Pinner he had specialized in kidnaping whalers. Apparently one of them had an elephantine memory. Shanghai Johnson’s body was found floating in the bay, shortly after he had delivered a helpless, drugged seaman to a lime-juicer in the stream off Alcatraz Island. For practically every week of each year in the 1860s and thereabouts, the chronological history of the year contained in the annual City Directory would have an entry like this: “The body of an unknown man was found floating near India Dock...” More often than not, these were sailors, victims of footpads or bungling crimps. Rarely did a shanghaier let down his guard long enough for anyone to make bait out of him, such as happened to Johnson.
Although Kate would drink and carouse with her customers, she was unresponsive to the passes made at her by tipsy tars. Perhaps she was still in mourning for her largely unlamented husband. In any case, she answered fresh seamen not with kisses but with a crack on the head with a bung starter. In her way, however, she was kind to sailors. Some of the regulars she mothered like a hen with a brood. In this fashion she could keep brawlers like Harry the Ape in line in her place.
One day a Royal Navy seaman lurched into her barroom, three sheets to the wind, and tried to embrace Kate. While Harry the Ape used his fists on the R. N. man, Kate belabored him with a club or belaying pin. The Royal Navy sank by the stern but was soon followed to the floor by Kate. The exertion plus the choloroform-spiked beer she had been tanking up on all day were too much for her heart. The drunken, tearful customers tenderly picked her up and placed her on a table where they splashed water in her face (probably the first time that liquid was used in Kate’s place). These attempts to arouse her were without effect. She was dead.
The regulars decided to give Chloroform Kate a decent burial at sea, but their booze-fogged brains could not come up with any ideas as to how to get her out the Golden Gate. God knew, they had neither the money nor the pull to secure a boat to transport the body out to sea. Suddenly, Harry the Ape shouted, “I have it! We’ll take her aboard the barge at Howard Street Wharf!” A chorus of approving cries and backslaps greeted this suggestion and the men bundled the corpse up in a tarp, after having one for the road, and staggered their way under the burden to Howard Street. Red Sam, as chief mourner, followed Harry and the other pallbearers, carrying an old litho of the clipper Glory of the Seas which had graced the wall of Kate’s bar. They scooped out a shallow grave in the mass of refuse in the scow and Red Sam gallantly placed the picture with the body. They then sprinkled some brown and wilted gladioli over the tarpaulin and covered her up. When San Francisco’s heavily-laden garbage scow obediently followed her sturdy little tug out the Gate next day, Chloroform Kate made her last voyage aboard her and was consigned to the deep.
Others of the gentler sex besides Chloroform Kate engaged in crimping included such tarts as Mother Bronson and Miss Piggott.
There were no racial, language or other requirements for runners— Calico Jim was Chilean, his aide was a Negro, there were Hawaiian and Chinese runners—but Miss Piggott really had a unique one in her aide-de-crimp. Her runner was Nikko, a Lapp, probably the only Laplander in California if not in all America at the time. Some people believe he was one of the five crewmen who disappeared in 1852 in San Francisco from the Swedish Navy frigate, Eugenia.
There were few other women directly engaged in shanghaiing but a host of them in allied industries, chiefly prostitution and bartending. Hinton Helper was horrified by the young females he saw tending bar in about one fourth of Frisco’s water holes. (In the interests of accuracy we cannot call them young ladies.) He found them “of the most dissolute and abandoned character, women who use every device to entice and mislead the youthful and unsuspecting.”
Of course, Helper was pretty shocked by San Francisco in general. He was not singling out the female barkeeps. He wrote, “I may not be a competent judge but this much I will say, that I have seen purer liquors, better segars, finer tobaccos, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives and prettier courtezans here than in any other place I have ever visited. It is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable in America.”
Practically all sailors’ boardinghouses except the prisonlike, gloomy temperance house—the Sailors’ Home—had barrooms, but most of the sailors liked to go uptown to the dives and bagnios of the Barbary Coast for entertainment. Here were such wicked resorts as the Thalia, the Hippodrome and Spider Kelly’s. These dens of depravity became so notorious that San Francisco’s swells, out on the town slumming, liked to show off by visiting them in the company of their girl friends at night. However, they often took the precaution of having a Pinkerton tag along for protection.
The low sailors’ bars used drugged liquor, knockout drops or violence to snare their prey. The California Police Gazette warned seamen and landsmen alike of their “strychnine whiskey” and at one time appealed to bumpkins, who were coming to the city to see the sights and who were ending up en route to some distant port, to “beware of Shanghai whiskey, you that come from the upper country.”
According to hoary old San Francisco tradition, Calico Jim, the Chileno crimp, once made the mistake of shanghaiing six men who turned out to be plain clothes policemen. When he discovered what he had done, he fled to his patria. All the cops eventually made their way back to S. F. There they joined their brother officers in passing the hat. With the kitty thus obtained, they financed a one-man pursuit of Jim. They drew straws and the winner set out to track him down. According to the story, so encrusted with tradition that it is practically historical gospel now (or passes for such), the officer took ship to Valparaiso, found Calico Jim in Chile and let him have it with his service revolver—six times, one shot for each policeman he had shanghaied.
Of many of Calico Jim’s competitors, we know little. Patrick Foley, the Pacific Street boardingmaster, committed suicide, using arsenic (instead of his own chloral hydrate). Otherwise, he is a mystery man. Of Peter Cornynn, a runner, we know nothing except that he was beaten to death by cabmen on Jackson Street Wharf. When Captain Abel F. Scott bribed the crew of the Sunrise in 1873 to keep them from testifying about the brutality of their captain, not only was he brought to court but with him came four of the city’s major boardingmasters. Making a rare public appearance as witnesses in the case were Henry (Shanghai) Brown, John C. Price, John Hart and John Rogers. But they remain pretty shadowy figures, like the masters of Baker’s Boarding House on Steuart Street or of Sander’s Hotel, neither of whose first names have even come down to us.
Most of the men in the shanghaiing trade liked to dodge the bright glare of publicity but sometimes there was nothing they could do about it. They and their houses made the news. A case in point is that of John Ryan. His house at 409 Drumm Street was the scene of a brutal murder in October 1873, and was soon overrun with both reporters and police. Ryan and all parties in the house were embarked on a prolonged, Class-A binge and could give no information on how Owen Gillen, steamboat fireman, happened to be lying in a great pool of his own blood, his head almost chopped off with an ax.
Thieves as well as murderer
s sometimes got sailors’ lodging houses and their landlords into the press, too. Robert Shell, alias Robert Fanning, alias Robert Mitchell, liked to prey on seamen’s lodging houses. On one occasion in 1852 he put up overnight in one which had in it a sprinkling of miners also. He paid $14 for coarse food, a mattress and a pair of blankets in the “sleeping room” or dormitory. But he knew that “everybody could afford to pay it because everybody had money and the sailors wouldn’t go to sea for (even) $185 per month.” At 3 a.m. he got up and went through all the sailors’ pockets and those of the barkeeper. He apparently disdained the miners’ dust. Shell netted $818 including, presumably, his $14 investment. This bankroll he lost in just two days in the gambling saloons fronting Portsmouth Plaza before he was picked up by the police.
The police were never too concerned about apolitical, nonvoting, often noncitizen, sailor boys in town, but occasionally they took steps to protect them. In October 1873 police officers Gaynor and Smith, in patrolling their Barbary Coast beat on Pacific Street, noticed a colored man being carried out of a den called Hell’s Kitchen #2 and laid on the sidewalk some little distance from the swinging doors of the saloon. The Negro was taken to City Prison where, when he came to, he reported himself to be Ed J. Scott, a ship’s steward. He had just been paid off with $100 in gold and $50 in silver. When he came to, he had only $20 in his pockets. He had gone to the saloon but had had only a single beer before he became stupefied. When the coppers hauled in Frank Silvia, the proprietor of Hell’s Kitchen #2, he professed to be entirely ignorant of the whole matter of Ed J. Scott but he, his bartender, John Matthews, and his girls—Nellie White, Kate Cronin, and Mary Gilmore—were sent to prison on grand larceny charges.
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 23