It was obvious that crooked politicians were in league with the shanghaiers. There was a municipal ordinance which imposed a fine of $500 upon anyone who boarded a vessel without the captain’s permission but neither masters or seamen got any help from the corrupt or uninterested police. The latter, after all, were sometimes paying up to $500 for the “honor” of being assigned a water-front beat.
Runners boarding ships often carried a full kit of persuaders. These ranged from brass knucks, knives and even revolvers to bottles of rum dosed with Spanish fly, and obscene pictures. Some carried bottles of liquid soap which they surreptitiously emptied into the soup kettles in the galley. This would run a crew off a ship when nothing else would. When the Loch Err was boarded in September 1870, she had not even come to anchor. Runners in Whitehalls came alongside and attached themselves to the Britisher with boat hooks and ropes, as if they were lampreys. They towed along oblivious to the captain’s repeated commands to cast off.
While the crew was furling the sails, the runners climbed on deck and went right up into the rigging to the sailors, handing out bottles left and right. The sailors needed no urging to slake their thirst. When the captain called to them to come down or face arrest, the crimps answered him with a volley of curses and spit, and one of them pointed a revolver at him. The pistolero shouted, “You’re not in bloody lime-juice country, now, but in God’s country, where one man is as good as the next!”
The leveled pistol cowed the captain and he did not interfere as the sailors clambered down into the waiting skiffs and Whitehalls. When all hands were called on deck just one day after arrival, the mate found aboard only the passengers, the apprentices and one seaman—Old Dick, who had spent fifty of his seventy years at sea, and who knew all there was to know about shanghaiing. During the morning, two of the crimps returned and tried to drag Dick bodily off the Loch Err. When a passenger tried to interfere he was cursed and struck in the face. He reciprocated and Dick broke loose and joined him. The courageous passenger knocked one crimp down, but Dick in freeing himself from the other, stumbled backwards and fell down an open hatch. With help, the passenger subdued the two shanghaiers but when he went down into the hatch to look after Old Dick he found that he had landed on his head and was dead.
The captain hoisted a police flag and two water police took the crimps into custody. The passenger appeared as a witness at the trial and saw the shanghaiers get off lightly with a sentence of only six months at hard labor for causing Dick’s death.
Although San Francisco was changing, becoming more “civilized” in the 1870s (for instance, in 1874 several arrests were made for employing women in saloons—now illegal), it was still a rough town.
No dog fight would draw a crowd in the Golden Gate City. It took something as bizarre as the four-year-old boy of the streets who delighted in catching rats and biting their heads off before the interested gaze of spectators, in 1873. That was the year that a consumptive was almost shanghaied. The captain of a British ship had paid a $60 advance to a crimp but the sailor refused to sign the ship’s articles since he was suffering from TB. The landlord got a doctor to swear that the cough-wracked boy was in superb health. This signed health certificate did not influence the sailor. He refused to ship. He was then arrested and thrown in jail for four days and ten hours. During that time he was so feeble that he could only eat a boiled egg. When released, he was so emaciated and weak he could barely walk. The ship sailed without him, not because of any qualms on the master’s or the crimp’s part but because, to quote a reporter of the day, “an acceptable piece of human flesh having been supplied in his place.”
That year a former San Franciscan residing in Memphis wrote a letter to the Alta which that paper published. It urged that a society for the protection of seamen, along the lines of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, be organized in San Francisco...” ‘Shanghaiing’ is really a very common practice, though few believe it. Let your city appeal to other cities to organize, and then appeal to Congress to investigate, and if a committee will hail up and examine ten of the first shipmasters and mates they can find, I warrant they will get testimony enough to make their hair stand on end.” The Alta applauded the idea and published an editorial tided “Protection of the Sailor.” Nothing came of the idea, however. The sailor was left pretty much to fend for himself. This he was not well equipped to do. Captain James F. Stewart explained the situation: “The victim is left to ensnare and ruin himself. Even in ‘shanghaiing’ the cases of direct coercion are comparatively few. The experienced crimp skillfully stimulates the impulses of the passions and induces his dupe to do all he wishes.”
He described one incident. One day he met a seafarer on Battery Street who appeared to have been recently assaulted.
“This is all your fault, Captain Stewart. I’ve been drunk, got a black eye, a cut face, a night’s lodging in the calaboose and I am now without a dime of my wages.”
Since he was a complete stranger to Stewart, the captain asked why he placed the blame for all his misfortunes on him.
“Why, when I came on shore last Thursday, I came to the Sailors’ Home and you would not take me in….”
“Oh, we were chock full,” said the captain. “It was impossible to take you in at that time.” (One hundred men had had to be turned away that week.)
“I know all that. I do not blame you, exactly. I had made up my mind to turn over a new leaf and I reached the door of the Sailors’ Home. But it was shut against me and here I am in the gutter again. And I suppose I must remain so. It’s no use trying.”
In the 1880s the crimps tried some new tricks along with their old tried-and-true favorites. Stephen Kaltemeir in 1882 read an advertisement in the California Demokrat for men to go fishing. They would be ashore every ten days; would work in good summer weather only; would earn from $40 to $100 per month. He applied to Mr. Brunson at a sailors’ boardinghouse and was taken to Wright & Bowen’s office on Steuart and asked if he’d ever been to sea, ever been fishing or if he knew how to read a compass. Answering negatively to all of these questions as best he could, for he knew little English, the German was next told to sign two papers, which he did. Only when he was hustled aboard the Hidalgo did he realize that he had been tricked into signing on for a whaling voyage. Luckily his elderly mother smelled something sour and she quickly got Judge Toohy to issue a writ, or warrant, for him. He was plucked off the Hidalgo just as she was weighing anchor.
The same year an English sailor fell afoul of one of the older traps. He was persuaded to lodge at 217 Broadway by E. E. Lewis on the promise of a berth on a coasting schooner. Then the boarding master tried to force him to ship on a deepwater vessel. He refused and Lewis seized his trunk and clothes for the $20 he claimed was already due him, for only two days’ board and lodging. Jones brought suit in Justice Court to recover $200 of property and $50 damages but he did not get so much as the time of day.
San Francisco’s U.S. Shipping Commissioner, J. D. Stevenson, in his reports to Washington in 1884-1885 described the treatment of seamen in boardinghouses as worse than ever. Once again, the seamen themselves decided that they had had a bellyful. They organized the Coast Seamen’s Union. They fought back against the combine of captains, owners, shanghaiers, and “Jew slop dealers” (cheap haberdashers). The latter, they claimed, “assisted to keep him [the sailor] in chains.” They cited examples of the clothiers charging $21. 50 for a $9. 50 rig. A seaman, Alfred Reed, was assaulted by one of the clothiers, Solomon, supposedly to scare him out of the union. Reed asked for a warrant for Solomon’s arrest but this was delayed and delayed while the combine tried to get Reed to ship out. The union backed him, however, and a conviction was secured. Solomon paid his fine and never laid a hand on a union man again.
The boarding masters set up a shipping office to rival the one begun by the union. They got a Captain Mitchell to run it and soon rumors wer
e being circulated from there that Burnett Haskell of the union had been in San Quentin. Haskell marched in to confront Mitchell, gave him his choice of a retraction or a criminal prosecution. The captain wrote a retraction at once. But the smear campaign continued. The boarding masters said the union was dead, that it was full of loafers, that it was full of thieves. They published a statement in the Chronicle that the 1, 500 sailors in the union were not seamen at all but socialist agitators. But the Report, Examiner, and Alta were friendly to the sailors. The union called a mass meeting, printing 50,000 circulars headed “No More Blood Money!” They reminded the people of the Gatherer case—“Treated like brutes at sea, when we land we are swindled, robbed, drugged, and shanghaied by those brutal images of men—the sailor boardinghouse keepers and runners.” The meeting at the Metropolitan Temple was a big success and the crowd of citizens passed a unanimous resolution approving the sailors’ course. The sailors told the crowds of the boardinghouses with houses of prostitution attached, of the boarding master who spent, in one single week’s debauch uptown among the gamblers and prostitutes, eight thousand dollars. Of the other crimp, in a drunken outburst, who bragged, “I have made $12,000 out of you sons of bitches in the last year and have got brains enough to do it again next year.”
But the boarding masters played their trump card, their alliance with City Hall. Two police officers were soon stopping all union seamen from traversing the public wharves without a special permit. Men were kept from their ships; some were badly clubbed by officers. Police tried to help scabs get aboard the General Banning but a crowd of a thousand sailors and others took their clubs and pistols away. Luckily no one was seriously hurt. Union leaders were then arrested for creating a riot. The presses ground out more flyers—“Are the police our servants or our masters? Shall they be longer permitted to aid the boardinghouse robbers in grinding blood money from the sailor?” Extra police on duty on the water front were withdrawn but the regulars remained. The president of the union was next arrested on a charge of assault with intent to commit murder on a boarding master named John Cobine, and the vice-president was beaten up by a gang of toughs. On May 15 Curtin’s boardinghouse was set on fire, the fire discovered (immediately) and the blaze put out. A union man, P. Garrity, arrested as the arsonist, was released when he proved his innocence. When Captain Dillon of the Laura May fired a pistol at the union men, the ball passing through the clothes of one of the union patrolmen, the warrant for his arrest was skillfully delayed until he had put to sea. All this pressure was almost too much for the sailors but they managed to hang on and, under Furuseth, eventually won their civil rights. But in 1885 things looked so black that President Murray resigned his post to go to sea. He was so poor he did not even have a complete outfit of clothes. But the crimps set up a cry that he had skipped with the union funds.
And, all the while, the shanghaiing continued. When Captain William E. Douglass’s beautiful St. Stephen was ready to sail for Hong Kong in 1886, sailors were so scarce in San Francisco that three cowboys were shanghaied. They were men who had never seen the Pacific Ocean—or any other body of water larger than a buffalo wallow—until they had arrived in town a week before. Their shipmates were better—men who had “jumped” the Drumlanrig, just in after a long and hard passage from Cardiff. Within twenty-four hours of hitting the Barbary Coast, they were drunk or drugged, or both, and dumped aboard the St. Stephen, outward bound.
In the 1890s, Frank H. Shaw, then a lad on the Dovenby, used to listen in as the mate, Horace Perkins, regaled everyone at the bull sessions they called “Portuguese Parliaments” with tales of Frisco crimps. A cockney seaman claimed he had been shanghaied aboard a Yank blood ship where the sadistic skipper liked to pick seamen off the yards with his six-shooter. This would appear to be variation 226a of the Bully Waterman theme of 1851, probably picked up thirteenth hand in the Bells of Shandon or some other Frisco saloon.
The cockney, Hurley, told Shaw he had gone into San Francisco once vowing not to touch a drop. He had fifteen months’ pay in his belt. He had gone into a greasy spoon for a cup of coffee. After drinking the java he did not remember a thing until he awoke in the foc’s’le of the Andrew Jackson—“a son of a bitch of a ship.” He had no kit, no pay, no money belt. All he had was a “God-damn-you mate” poking him in the guts with a belaying pin, and a mouth tasting like a cess pool. These were his souvenirs of a teetotaling visit to Frisco.
No wonder the wide-eyed Shaw was eager to see the sin town of San Francisco. And see it he did. A wily fellow tried to “hocus” him into taking some whiskey dosed with knockout drops. He stalled him off, then he and his pal, Skilly, went into a Barbary Coast cabaret to see the show. At the end of the performance, the leering m.c. promised the sailor boys “saucy diversions” in the back room if they’d like to attend. They jumped at the chance and found only a rigged gambling den, much to their disgust. Gamblers and shills worked on the seafarers, and when Shaw called a particularly clumsy bit of double-dealing, the bouncers moved in, reaching for their knuckle-dusters and blackjacks. They were outnumbered and outgunned by the roomful of merchant seamen who backed Shaw, however. And, before Shaw and Skilly left, they sent the owner through a window, helped themselves to the bank (fortunes of war) and, in Shaw’s words, “reduced the saloon to its component parts.” The brawl overflowed the first cabaret and spilled into the one adjoining it as chorus girls fled screaming. When the police arrived, Skilly pulled Shaw through a shanghaiing trap door and to safety in an alley full of garbage cans and refuse. They found their way to the Seamen’s Friend Society, run by Father Hopkins—himself said to have been the target of shanghaiers—before returning to the ship.
The two young men soaked up more tales of shanghaiing, almost certainly apocryphal—such as the one about the ex-mayor of San Francisco, found fuddled in the forecastle of a whaler soon to be off for a three-year cruise of South Georgia. Shaw also claimed that the captain of the Dovenby, Paddy Fegan, shanghaied a boarding master aboard whose life was made miserable by all hands. Other “seamen” he secured included a cowboy, still with ten-gallon hat, a Scots shipyard worker and a landscape gardener.
The adventures which befell Shaw, if indeed they happened at all, would fill a three-volume set. He was (so he said) shanghaied from an apparently respectable dining room and ended up, nauseated and half-paralyzed, on the whaler Whalen P. Wardrupp until Paddy Fegan rescued him. His tale is like that of Hiram Bailey, just a little too colorful. He claimed, for example, that a captain, sent around to the tradesmen’s entrance of the shipowner’s home, retaliated by shanghaiing the captain of industry aboard his own ship as an apprentice seaman!
There is no need to fictionalize or dramatize the 1890s in Frisco. They are enough, unretouched. At midnight of September 24, 1893, six sailors, in their cups, were returning to Blind John Curtin’s boardinghouse on Main Street. One of the six was John’s son. Curtin controlled all of the jobs on the coastal coaling vessels between S. F. and British Columbia. Young Curtin spotted a black valise in the entrance to the boardinghouse. He picked it up, then dropped it and ran across the street shouting, “It’s dynamite!” The other sailors, befuddled, stooped over the bag to examine it, instead of running. A tremendous blast shook the area. Four of the men were killed and the other was badly mutilated.
The bombing was either a colossal case of stupidity on the part of union sailors or a skillful plant by the enemies of the union. It killed the union for the time being. Though no evidence ever tied its men to the bomb, the Coast Seamen’s Union stood convicted in the eyes of the people.
The Gay Nineties were not all gaiety. There were the bombings, the sluggings, and the shanghaiings. Poor Mr. Hecht, a mild-mannered family man, a teamster, was shanghaied out of San Francisco never to return. His wife, unable to take care of their six children, went out of her mind and the children had to be placed in the Jewish Orphanage. D. P. Browne, of the Warner Valley Stock Company, Ore
gon, had some of his best cowhands shanghaied in 1898 on whalers. Cattlemen, handy with ropes, were in demand by crimps.
Eric O. Lindbloom was a thousand times luckier than most victims of Frisco shanghaiers. He was a tailor, settled in San Francisco. One day in 1898 he was accosted by two men who sized him up and asked if he were a sailor. “Yah, sure.” said Lindbloom, thinking all the while the men had said “tailor.”
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 26