“Then, come along with us,” the men said. “We have a job for you.” They led him to a water-front saloon and invited him to be their guest. When he came to, he was at sea, shanghaied aboard an American whaler for the Arctic Ocean. When the ship put into Port Clarence, Alaska, weeks later, for fresh water, Lindbloom jumped ship. A local minister lent him two pack reindeer and he headed for the hills. He circled inland, met John Brynteson and Jafet Lindberg, and “The Three Lucky Swedes,” as they came to be called (much to the chagrin of Lindberg, who was a Norwegian), went prospecting together. They made the first discovery of gold at Nome and their company eventually produced $23,000,000 of the metal. Surely no other “shanghaiee” owed so much to the old San Francisco custom as did Eric “Lucky Swede” Lindbloom.
The Liverpool Journal of Commerce was, of course, unaware in 1893 that shanghaied seamen were likely to become millionaires like “the Lucky Swede.” It was disturbed by conditions in the California city which affected, and afflicted, Britain’s young men in the merchant service. Of course, this commercial paper was even more interested in the shipowners’ fight with crimps. It was a dollars-and-cents—or, better, a pounds-and-shillings—proposition in the main. But, in any case, by the 1890s the problem of shanghaiing in San Francisco and other American ports had become an international matter.
The Journal of Commerce felt that the shipowners had a Herculean task on their hands in cleaning out the crimps of Frisco: “San Francisco has for many years been a potent object lesson to the wide world of the lawlessness which is sure to prevail in a growing city where the authorities are either unable or unwilling to contend against the cosmopolitan crowd which infests the waterfront... the terrible abuses which flourish in that part of San Francisco where sailors’ boarding masters have their unclean abodes...
“The boarding master of the Pacific Coast has a reputation which too frequently would be quite sufficient to hang him in an old-fashioned country where law and order were something more than mere names to juggle when occasion arises. Every sailor entering the Golden Gate in a British ship is considered specially provided for them to fatten upon without compunction. Directly the anchor is down, if not before, an incoming British ship is surrounded by boats of boarding masters whose occupants, with lies on their lips and deadly deceit in their hearts, are ever eager to woo the seamen from allegiance to the red ensign, even though by desertion each man may forfeit the hard-earned wages of three or four months.”
The Journal was persuaded to let go this editorial broadside by the news from the Britisher Howth. This four-master had arrived in Frisco from Liverpool and was boarded by crimps. The very evening of her arrival eight men deserted after being plied with drink “of the vilest kind.” That same night, the eight were placed on another ship which was ready to sail, and two months of their wages claimed as an advance by the crimps in addition to the blood money their new captain had to pay. “Not even one night was spent on shore before they were shanghaied for another passage—around Cape Horn, probably. Is it any wonder that men like these, with nothing to lose, occasionally become almost insufferably insolent to their officers and brutally tyrannical to better-disposed members of the crew? It is simply a disgrace to the vaunted civilization of the nineteenth century that such a state of lawlessness should be permitted within the boundaries of one of the prettiest harbors in the world.”
The gathering, world-wide outcry against shanghaiing made no real impression on the practitioners of the art. Witness the case of the Ravenscourt. This barque arrived from England after 149 days. While anchored off Mission Rock, she was boarded by Shanghai Brown’s runners. They began liquoring up the crew in the forecastle. The mate, John C. Campbell, hoisted the police flag but the bad liquor took quick effect and, while some of the men clumsily packed their gear, one of the apprentices was sitting on the main hatch painting the bosun’s eyebrows and mustache with a toothbrush and ink. The sweat ran down the drunken boatswain’s face, making him look like a zebra. To try to hold his crew, Campbell used one of the crimps’ own tricks. He got the steward to dose the ship’s rum with laudanum and then had the men have a drink before leaving. Most were soon asleep but the shanghaiers got the inky bosun, a real prize since he was the best sailor of the lot. Campbell saw him sitting in the stern of the boat as it drew away. He was looking at the $5 gold piece Brown had sent him so that he could treat the girls on shore. But he did not see the shore, treat the girls, or keep the gold piece. In two hours he was on the four-poster, Primrose Hill, being towed to sea. It was common for crimps to bring, besides booze and chewing tobacco, a few gold pieces. One of these in the paw of the foc’s’le “kingpin” (the natural leader of the crew) would turn him into a bellwether and the other men would follow him ashore like sheep.
On the Balclutha, anchored nearby, the bluenose skipper, Alfred H. Durkee, kept his crew by locking them in the forecastle. But some of the Ravenscourt’s crew got ashore and the sailmaker, treated to a beer by one of Shanghai Brown’s runners, passed out and awoke a prisoner in Brown’s house. Meanwhile, two decent-looking chaps in clerical garb boarded the Ravenscourt and asked Mate Campbell for permission to hold divine services on the ship, it being the Sabbath. Campbell assented and they started singing the hymn “Pull For the Shore, Sailor.” Campbell and Third went back to their hammocks to loaf.
By five o’clock, the preachers were on the main hatch telling the crew that the captain of Adolph Spreckels’ yacht needed a quartermaster or two, at $60 per month. This would be the chance of a lifetime for a sailor accustomed to getting two pounds, ten shillings a month. The two sky pilots suggested that all hands go with them in their boats to Spreckels’ yacht and try for the positions. The crew readily agreed and were just pulling on their jackets when the sailmaker, who had given the crimps ashore the slip, appeared on the nearby dock. “Sails” shouted to his shipmates, “Men, those two sons of bitches are runners from Brown’s boardinghouse!” He thereupon started heaving bricks from a pile on the dock. Spectators soon joined him and the two “preachers” jumped up on the topgallant bulwark, dived overboard, and swam under the dock to safety.
To avoid the harbor police, who would board ships off Meiggs Wharf automatically in order to keep crimps off, some of the shanghaiers used to go into the choppy waters of the Golden Gate in Whitehall boats to board vessels there. When the Nova Scotia bark, Nelly Troop, came into the Bay in 1888 she was boarded by these pirates off Marin County’s Point Bonita. By the time she reached the Embarcadero the runners had talked the crew into jumping ship. Within a few days they were outward bound on the New Bedford steam whaler, Narwhal, Captain Norwood. Boatmen like Arthur Beyer used to get a dollar per sailor they rowed ashore. When William Griffith, Captain of the Carnead Llewellyn, brought her into the bay, he was boarded in the style of the Nelly Troop affair. He ordered the crimps off but they laughed in his face and made off with eleven of his men though he ordered his crew to have nothing to do with them.
To checkmate the crimps’ new tricks, some masters pulled some fancy tricks themselves. Captain John Cook, of the steam whaler Bowhead, for instance, knew that sailors were scarce in 1903 (the Klondike rush was still on) and shanghaiing prevalent. So he brought his vessel in at the Customs House as needing repairs. He then cleared to “continue” his voyage with the same crew. The shore boats hovered around the Bowhead like circling sharks but Cook’s guard of two officers and a boat steerer, armed with 45/70 repeating rifles, kept them at bay. They had orders to shoot full of holes the first boat to lie alongside. Cook got away with all his men except two who jumped overboard in the bay in life jackets.
When Captain Thomas Dunning brought the Liverpool bark Wanderer into the bay in 1901 to land his injured mate, Mr. Christian, he took similar precautions. Two armed senior apprentices were stationed at each side of the midship house with orders to shoot the first crimp who came aboard. Taking his mate to St. Mary’s hospital, according to John Masefie
ld of the Wanderer, Dunning did not get back till dark. He found his guard had kept the boats away although two of the most notorious crimps in town personally tried to board. But, after dark, one of them brought a boat under the bows and eight men and the second mate slid down the cable into her and were pulled away. Twelve hours later one of them was thrown, unconscious, into a launch at Vallejo Street Wharf and taken to a homeward-bound four-master. Masefield remembers reading Frisco papers which commented that “the trade in deep-water sailors is thriving these days.” Well it might. Crimps during the doldrums of 1894 were lucky to get $7.50 a head blood money. In 1901 they could get $40 easily.
The case of the Wanderer demonstrates that not all crimps depended on doped liquor. A glib tongue was often enough. Captain P. A. MacDonald remembers Jack O’Brien, the Battery Street boarding master of 1900. He came aboard Mac’s vessel, lying in the stream, and “by sheer size, Irish blarney and personality, captured nearly the whole crew for his house, leaving the other crimps with what was left.” The huge O’Brien retired shortly but came out of retirement after the earthquake and fire of 1906. There was a scarcity of seamen again and he simply could not resist the blood money. On the day he met MacDonald he had just put twenty-two men on a British ship at $125 a head blood money!
The swan song of shanghaiing came in the 1890s but the Gay Nineties were the heyday of crimping, too. The business really went out with a bang in Blind John Curtin’s case. One-eyed Curtin (he had lost his eye at sea as a ship’s carpenter) presided over his Fulton House in rolled-up sleeves and black eye patch. The Fulton House dominated Steuart Street, called Finn Alley for the hordes of Finlanders and Swedes who congregated there until it was burned out. (This was a common fate for such houses. Callaghan’s was destroyed by fire in October 1863 and a house at Fourth and Howard was fired twice in August 1864.) Then he set up on Main near Harrison, almost opposite the Sailors’ Home. On September 24, 1893, Curtin’s boardinghouse was blown to hell when a bomb killed five (scab) sailors and disabled another for life. John Curtin knew the right people uptown. He was occasionally “spanked” for shanghaiing during his career but usually it did not amount to much, like the $10 fine he drew in March 1893 for crimping.
One of Curtin’s rivals, Shanghai Nelson, used to defend his crimping of parsons and drunks as seamen. He said he was in the business of bodies. “Them fellows has the weight, and it’s weight that counts, haulin’ on a rope.” It is a wonder that shanghaied seamen were not dispensed at so much a pound by Nelson.
Among the shipping masters of the last wild days of shanghaiing in Frisco were the Norwegian, Harry (Shanghai) Brown, of course; Shanghai Nelson; Scab Johnny (John R. Savory), indicted but acquitted of illegal blood-money charges in 1893; Johnny Fearem; Jim Turk; Tommy Chandler, the ex-pug; and Coffee Jack.
Favorite saloons of the men frequently shanghaied were such places as Jack Gordon’s Crab Ranch and Paddy Ryan’s place, both on the Embarcadero, or Harry Maynard’s bar. Harry claimed to be a former lightweight boxing champion of England and liked to take on sailors for bets. He also bragged of being the champion concertina performer in the world and liked to play a tin whistle with his nose. Other popular, if not exactly attractive, spots around the end of the century and the end of the shanghaiing business, were The Blue Shades saloon on Stevenson Street; also called the Bucket of Blood, and Horseshoe Brown’s place.
Runners for the crimps bore such colorful monikers as Smoothie Gus, Black Curley Morris (for “Nigger” Calender’s house), Sheeney Sam and Blinker Tom. Saloonkeepers, bar hangers-on and others who hovered over the sailors ran to such colorful folk—and womenfolk—as Chicken Jim, Widow O’Brien, Big Bertha, Steam Schooner Annie, the German known only as “Cocoon.” Frank (Kato) Johnson, Black Joe Berendes, Cowboy Mag (“strictly on the level,” the pilot boatmen always said), and Whale Whiskers Kelly of the Chief Saloon.
Frenchie Franklin must have had a tough time keeping from being laughed at because of his part-time city job, when he was not too busy hustling seamen for his house. He was Chief Pound Master of San Francisco. What most people did not know was that the job was a political plum, one of the best-paying jobs handed out by Chris (Blind Boss) Buckley.
Probably the most colorful of all San Francisco’s crimps was Johnny Devine, the Shanghai Chicken. The Chicken was described by the San Francisco Call as “one of the most dangerous habitués of the Barbary Coast.” He was born in Waterford, Ireland, in 1841. Not a big man for a bucko, he was only a little over medium height and lucky to top 130 pounds dripping wet. A newsman once described him thus: “While his general appearance is not repulsive, there is something about his countenance which proclaims that he is not the companion good men would desire.” Devine had high cheekbones, sharp features, a low forehead and straight black hair which he parted on the left. Most remarkable were his dark blue, piercing eyes. He had a stony stare which penetrated to a man or woman’s soul—if he or she happened to have one. He was a man who could look you in the eye—and cut out your heart while he was doing it. He could stare down a Bengal tiger, though he was never so matched.
Some say Chicken Devine was shanghaied out of New York in 1859. In any case, he turned up in San Francisco in 1861 as a sailor on the Young America. He had spent most of his time in irons on the passage, for Devine was a natural-born brawler. He was always picking a fight and usually coming out pretty well in the scuffle. He was a bully to the crew. Even after going ashore, he had one last fight (perhaps for old time’s sake) with McIntyre, one of his shipmates. His first weeks ashore in Frisco were spent in carousing, squandering his wages on booze, and trying to put the touch on Jim McCann, his boarding master. McCann, instead, got him a berth on a deepwater vessel and John Devine departed San Francisco. The Embarcadero must have sighed in relief. In early 1863 he returned, however, on the Henry Brigham. At this time he vowed never to go to sea again. To fill the vacancy he left (a hundred times over), he went into the shanghaiing business. He became a runner for Johnny Walker.
He was just Johnny Devine until this time. He got his nickname in Hanson’s Saloon when a bunch of the boys were swapping ring talk as the Johnny Walker versus Billy Dwyer battle approached. Someone said that Paddy West could whip anyone of his weight. Johnny Walker himself retorted, “You may talk as much as you want to, but I’ve got a little Shanghai chicken that none of you fellers know of who can clean Paddy out in no time.” Pointing to Devine, he finished, “There’s my little chicken.” A fight between Devine and West was arranged immediately, for a $100 stake.
This was the first time Devine had fought for a kitty. The battle took place in Minturn’s Corral on Vallejo Street, emptied of cattle for the occasion. The Chicken won. He soon engaged in another boxing match, this time with Slombo Brock, near Black Point. This slugfest ended in a tie.
When the Shanghai Chicken took on Patsy Marley at Point Isabel, the result was a split decision. This 1864 bout lasted three and a half hours and was called when darkness set in. The umpire said that the Chicken had won. But the referee said Patsy was the better and since he was stakeholder, the stakes went to Marley. Devine’s third big fight was with Tom (Soap) McAlpine, later a New Orleans gendarme. They slugged it out at San Mateo County’s Twelve Mile House on June 20, 1865. After one hundred and sixteen rounds and one hour and fifty minutes of fighting, Soap won. Devine thereupon retired from the ring. He went into a new profession, crime, with shanghaiing for an avocation. As the Call said, “His career of crime, it is safe to say, cannot be equaled by that of any other ‘Barbary Coast Ranger’” According to the papers, from 1865 until 1871 he committed more crimes than any other man and yet usually managed to avoid prison, miraculously. Many of the corpses found floating in the bay were attributed to the ex-pug.
In 1865 a series of robberies and sluggings with brass knuckles and slung shots occurred. The police were unable to make any arrests until they placed in their area an officer in mufti u
nknown to the Barbary Coast Rangers. He stood one day in a Jackson Street doorway, observing the passers-by. On the opposite sidewalk he saw a man walking leisurely down the hill. Suddenly, from a dark doorway came a figure which knocked the first man down. While the attacker was stooping over the stroller in the act of extracting his wallet from his pocket, the plain-clothes man ran up. The robber straightened and fled, but the policeman caught him. It was John Devine, the Shanghai Chicken. He had a pair of brass knuckles in his pocket but at the trial it was impossible to prove that he had used them on his victim. He was found guilty of simple assault and battery, for which he paid a $30 fine, and was also assessed $20 for carrying a concealed weapon. Devine got off very easily but, at least, the sluggings ceased.
The Shanghai Chicken went to work for Shanghai Kelly or, as he was sometimes called in those days, Constitution Kelly, at his boardinghouse on Pacific near Drumm Street. One day a rival crimp, Tommy Chandler, was invited over to Kelly’s. While there, Devine—hiding behind a door—sprang at him, swinging an iron bar which would have bashed Tommy’s head in had it landed. But Chandler, an ex-boxer himself, nimbly dodged and made his escape. Devine carried his grudge against Chandler however. Some say it was for Chandler’s laying him out when he had tried to hijack one of Tommy’s shanghaied seamen. Whatever the reason, when he ran into Chandler again, on Vallejo Street Wharf, he exchanged words with him and Tommy slapped his face. The Shanghai Chicken drew an Allen pepperbox pistol and fired two shots, point-blank, at the other crimp. One ball hit Chandler in the arm, the other in the left breast. But the pistol was not a powerful one and did not wound Chandler seriously. Devine was arrested, of course, for assault with intent to commit murder. The jury failed to arrive at a verdict, however, and he was allowed to plead guilty of assault and battery and got off with a light sentence of only six months in the county jail rather than a long term in San Quentin.
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 27