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

  The Annual Report of the U.S. Commissioner of Navigation, almost thirty-five years later (1885), reported that conditions, instead of improving, were even more foul than before. Earlier, a ship needing a crew had only to hoist a signal at the masthead. The sailors came on board and, mustering around the capstan, signed the articles. The sailors of those days selected their own ships in many cases, made their own bargains, and carried their chests full of clothing on board in proof of their intention to go with the ship. When the vessel was ready to sail, most went on board sober and fit to perform their duties as soon as they were ordered to do so. But, said the Commissioner in 1885, “It is doubtful if the standard now is equal to what it used to be in ‘the good old times.”

  On the Atlantic Coast, the major critic of the crimps was the mulatto seaman, James H. Williams. He wrote many articles for the Independent, including one in which he said of East Coast shanghaiers: “In time they organized into powerful groups or gangs and in order to make their power over the seaman more sure and complete, proceeded to corrupt and coerce shipowners and masters as well as their crews... On the other hand, the master or owner who complaisantly accepted a rebate out of the sailor’s advance notes would never experience difficulty in obtaining seamen. This pernicious custom at length became part of an inexorable system; so much so, in fact, that shipowners as a whole came to regard it as a necessary and legitimate business and absolutely refused to engage crews on any terms except those prescribed by the crimps.”

  Williams would have agreed that Joseph Kelly’s description of water-front San Francisco could have fitted any of a half dozen of our shanghai ports of the “good old days” of the nineteenth century— “... a scene of dissipation, brutality and degradation. It was even said that one well-known boarding master had a standing contract with a drug store close by so that when one of his sailors had an eye gouged out, or a nose broken or an ear chawed off, he could be repaired and put in condition to go on board ship, perhaps to receive similar treatment at the hands of brutal officers and when he returned from sea he was again made the easy prey of every species of land shark. After years of such usage he was then a fit subject for the Ladies’ Seamen’s Friend Society to merely practice upon as a fearful example of human depravity….”

  And all the while the public was bemused by romanticized nonsense about Jolly Jack Tar. Bad poetry, like the following quatrains from the popular Hutching’s California Magazine of the 1860s, was typical:

  “O wilt thou be a seaman’s bride,

  And cross the briny deep?

  The ocean then in peace will ride

  And rock our woes to sleep.”

  “The dark blue jacket that enfolds

  The sailor’s manly breast

  Bears more of real honor than

  The star and ermine vest.”

  Meanwhile, back at the beach, bloody-nosed sailors were being bought and sold like cattle.

  Some ports were relatively free of shanghaiing. The nasty business never really caught on in the Gulf ports, for example, the “soft underbelly” of shanghaiing. In Galveston, Texas, Her Majesty’s Consul reported the influence of crimps to be steadily declining as the nineteenth century wore on. This was documented by the statistics of Britishers who had paid themselves off with the jib downhauled (deserted). In 1894 some 5 per cent of arriving British tars deserted. By 1898, this had dropped to 21/2 per cent—a mere 240 men in all for the entire year.

  In New Orleans, conditions ashore were already so good that the effect of the legislation of 1884 prohibiting advance wages was hardly noticeable. Most of the boardinghouses had actually gone out of business by 1885, leaving only a few small ones which demanded a kickback for shipping a man but which exerted little control over the waterfront labor supply. U.S. Shipping Commissioner Wright in his report to Washington that year made no mention of shanghaiing at all, reserving his criticism for buckoism, its evil twin—“I take pleasure in stating that masters in general are kind and humane in their treatment of sailors. I would be highly gratified to be able to say the same of mates, but candor and truth compel me to say that quite a number of these are coarse and sometimes brutal in their treatment of sailors.”

  There were a few New Orleans crimps of the ilk of their Frisco and New York rivals, of course. If we can believe Herbert Hamblen, one boarding master broke into an undertaker’s, selected a corpse, dressed it up in pea jacket and canvas pants, and carried it aboard ship. He assured the captain that he had a real sailor though he was something of a tippler ashore. The second mate could get no answer from him when he roared at the new man so he picked him up and lugged him to the topgallant forecastle where he leaned him against the capstan, ordering him to keep a sharp lookout. When the corpse did not sing out to report a nearby vessel’s lights, Second beat the devil out of him.

  Like New Orleans and Galveston, Mobile had a rather good reputation among our ports although crimps there did manage to evade the no-advance law by various subterfuges.

  On the Atlantic Coast, however, things were not so rosy. Captain Nathaniel Brown’s experiences in Savannah in 1850 with the bark Europa were typical. He came upon some of his men packing to run, so he put two of them in jail for safekeeping and, as he later reported, “I told them all if they did run, I would have every policeman in the city search for them until they were found, and then I would put them in jail until the vessel was ready for sea.” Nevertheless, five deserted and five more refused to work. He threw them in jail, lamenting “Of all places upon the face of the earth, Savannah is the worst for sailors. You can form no idea of the trouble and vexation they cause their captains here. We have nobody on board but the two mates, Charles [his son] and myself.”

  Brown sent to Charleston for a crew. Webb and Rice, shipping masters there, came through with nine good seamen and a carpenter but asked for $12 blood money per A.B. and $15 for Chips, plus one month’s advance wages for each. Captain Brown got them to lower the price to $10 per month and two months’ advance. (Thus he was less out of pocket while the hapless sailors would be working off a dead horse for twice as long.) When the men were mustered aboard and ordered to up anchor for Sumatra they refused duty. The crimps had told them they were going to Calcutta on the Europa. The captain offered them $2 more per month; then $4. “No,” answered one of them, “not for $25 would we go. We shipped to go to Calcutta.” Brown brought the shipping masters and two constables aboard to intimidate the crew but they were adamant. He could not sail with an entire crew in irons, so he left them in jail for trial by the local district attorney and shipped a whole new crew. In a letter to the owners he described the kind of men offered him by the crimps—“lawless, drunken vagabonds. I had no idea these Southern ports were so bad.”

  Brown was afraid to release the five of his original crew whom he had jailed, thinking they would run off. (He was right. When they were finally released they all cut and left the Europa.) His mates were out on their feet, exhausted from lack of sleep and the vigilance necessary to keep away from the ship’s sides the fleets of small craft which were trying to steal away the men. Shots were fired into the small boats and gunfire was returned from them. To make matters worse, the Europa ran aground. The distraught shipmaster wrote the owners, “You cannot conceive, gentlemen, of the system of sailor stealing that is carried on in this cursed hole. There are runners from every sailor boardinghouse in the place who do nothing but decoy and steal sailors from their respective ships.”

  In 1885 the Shipping Commissioner in Savannah reported no improvement in crimping conditions there despite the enactment of the Dingley (no-advance) Act. Nor was any improvement apparent in Charleston, South Carolina. Many sailors were being run off their ships there by crimps. The latter were paid from $50 to $100 for each man they could persuade to desert. The captains could well afford to pay these rather steep reverse-shanghaiing fees. The hands forfeited their wages after
desertion, whether the desertion was voluntary or forced. G. B. Stoddard, Charleston’s U.S. Shipping Commissioner, in commenting on this practice to his superiors stated, “There seems to be a great deal of crooked and unjust treatment of seamen on board British vessels at this port.”

  In Norfolk, Virginia, although the Shipping Commissioner there in the 1880s reported conditions were somewhat improved as to sailors’ boardinghouses and shipping masters, sailors were still being sold, as in the case of the S.S. Orwell, for $12 bonus (blood money), plus a $2 shipping fee per man. An interesting commentary on the state of affairs in Norfolk is provided by the case history of John H. Mykins, too.

  Mykins, an illiterate quarter gunner on the U.S.S. Franklin, a man of fifty years of age and the father of four children, went ashore in Norfolk on January 12, 1885. He was almost immediately drugged, taken on a steam tug and, that very evening, loaded aboard a Dutch brigantine commanded by Captain A. Houwen, at Hampton Roads. Mykins was still wearing his man-o’-warsman’s uniform when he awoke aboard the Dutchman the next morning. He asked the captain to be allowed to go ashore. The Hollander refused and together with Mykins’ shanghaier, a Main Street crimp named Bullock, forced him to sign the ship’s papers.

  The brigantine sailed for Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, but had to lie off the bar unable to enter. Mykins described his plight to the U.S. consular agent at Desterro, Santa Catarina Island, where the brigantine finally made port. In his own words, the Navy gunner reported, “From the cruel treatment I received I was almost unable to do duty. Upon arrival, the Captain desired me to desert. Then, from more abuse, I was glad to accept my discharge even at the loss of wages. From the threats of imprisonment from some trumped-up charges, I came ashore with $6. 25.”

  The unlettered Mykins also had someone write a note for him to the U.S. consular agent at Desterro, a note which he signed with his mark. “Am suffering as being without doubt registered as a [Navy] deserter by which I never had any intention or desire and no party to. I would gladly return to my duty could I do so.”

  As late as 1903, James H. Williams and his pal, Spike Riley, were shanghaied out of Norfolk by crimps working for a shipping master named Cassidy.

  As for Baltimore, the no-advance law made no real change in the prevailing situation. But John J. Rodgers, U.S. Shipping Commissioner in that city, pointed out that the port differed from others of the Atlantic littoral—“The sailor boardinghouse keepers of this port, as a class engaged in such calling, are persons generally of very creditable characters and seem disposed to do what is right for their boarders.” This was one man’s opinion. The British Consul certainly did not agree with Rodgers. And the S.S. Broadgate in 1899-1900 incurred in shipping fees and bonuses an expense of $832.50 in engaging seamen there and in Philadelphia. The steamer Columbia in August of 1899 was nicked by Baltimore crimps for $546. (Ten seamen at $25 a head; five trimmers at $25 each; four firemen at $30 each; $6 for tug hire; and $40 service charge.) Moreover, the British Consul, Fraser, reported home to the Foreign Office that Baltimore runners were using every means in their power to prevail upon seamen to quit their ships. He urged that the American shipping master system be gotten rid of completely. The answer was a firm No. The Chamber of Shipping of the United Kingdom explained, “As matters stand at present, it is absolutely impossible for shipmasters to obtain seamen to man their vessels except through crimps and by paying crimps. This recommendation, therefore, should not be enacted until, by the enforcement of the laws, crimps are no longer the only means of obtaining seamen.”

  By 1899, legislation against crimping was being enforced in Baltimore. One of the first cases was that in which the District Court convicted a firm of shipping masters of getting payments for securing berths for seamen on the British steamer Ethelred. James H. Williams, with nineteen cents in his pocket, arrived in Baltimore in 1899 and organized a sailors’ union. He got three men of the Ethelred to deliberately ship through the crimps for “nominal” wages and to act as witnesses against them later. The trio signed on the ship at the British Consulate for one shilling a day for the first twelve days and full pay thereafter. When they got back from a sixteen-day voyage, they had exactly $3.17 coming. The shipping masters, Goodhues, Garland, and Nicholson, were arrested and tried on November 23, 1899. Convicted of taking blood money, they were given the maximum fine, $300. The Ethelred case was important in that the Foreign Office issued a circular as a result, urging consuls to oppose crimps and forbidding any further shipping of men for token wages.

  Philadelphia could not compare with San Francisco, Portland or New York as a shanghaiing port, although James Williams once related how he was beaten, abused and dragged through its streets by two police officers for asking to be released from his contract in order to attend his mother’s funeral. And George Fred Tilton’s description of the City of Brotherly Love’s boardinghouses still held—they were indeed “not run by the finest class of people.” Their chow was still worse than galley fare at sea; boarding masters yet seized sea bags and chests to control sailors; they still sent runners aboard ships to entice the men to desert; and they still managed to milk the simple seamen of from one to three months’ advance pay for their so-called debts. The Acting British Consul in Philadelphia, Clipperton, complained to the Foreign Office that there were no local laws to prevent boardinghouse keepers and runners from having free access to the crews aboard ships in the harbor. Although there was a Federal law in force in all states prohibiting a crimp from demanding remuneration for providing employment for a seaman or for harboring or secreting deserters, it was ineffective.

  James A. O’Brien, the U.S. Shipping Commissioner in Philadelphia in 1884 and 1885 was optimistic. The new no-advance-pay law, he felt, would virtually render the seamen beyond the control of the boardinghouse keepers. But as late as November 1900, the steamship Miramar had to pay $5 out of a sailor’s advanced pay, plus $15 bonus and $2 shipping masters’ fee to get a man. And in January 1901, the captain of the same Miramar had to pungle up $22 for a carpenter.

  James H. Williams was shanghaied, rushed through the streets by a convoy of crimps and thrown aboard the London three-master, Maine, in January 1889. In the ‘90s he ran into a sick Norwegian who also was shanghaied aboard his ship at Philadelphia. The man, who should have been in a hospital, died four days out.

  Boston had a very long history of crimping, but it was never as vicious as that which was common on the West Coast. In 1834 the Boston Daily Advertiser condemned the advance system as “traffic in the flesh of human beings, whom it first brutalizes in order to render them fit subjects for such traffic.” According to the California historian, W. W. Robinson, the first American in Los Angeles, Joseph (Blond Joe) Chapman, was shanghaied out of Boston to Alta California, much as Hawaii’s first Spaniard, Don Francisco de Paula Marin was shanghaied to the Sandwich Islands, according to Adalbert Von Chamisso. And Boston’s Father Taylor—Edward Thompson Taylor, not to be confused with Frisco’s Father William Taylor —had a long hard fight with Boston’s shanghaiing fraternity. Rev. Taylor, an orphan, was sent to sea as a cabin boy when only seven years old. He got religion at a conversion meeting in Boston’s Methodist Chapel and when he was taken off the privateer Black Hawk as a prisoner by the British in 1812, he became a sort of self-made prisoners’ chaplain. He read and he preached to his fellow cellmates in Halifax Prison. When he was released, he started to work for an Ann Street junkman but parishioners of the Bromfield Street Methodist Church helped to educate him and soon he started the Seamen’s Bethel. He ran it for forty years, splicing his sermons with the salty language he had picked up as a sailor himself. He made forays into dens of iniquity and he haunted sailor boardinghouses. Taylor was frequently ordered out of grogshops for spoiling their trade and one boarding master even threatened to break his head. Why this hatred by the land sharks toward Father Taylor? Because he was amazingly effective for a sky pilot. In ten months of 1869-1870 alone, he
converted in his Seamen’s Mission and Reading Room sixty-five Swedes, eighteen Danes, eighteen Finns, fifteen Norwegians, one Russian, twenty Germans, thirty-two Americans, eight Englishmen, four Welshmen, two Irishers, five Hollanders, three Frenchmen, one New Zealander, one St. Helenan, and one Hindu.

  A shipmaster who used the go-by of Captain Ringbolt in his writings was once ready to sail from Boston in the 1840s on a Saturday morning. On Friday night the long-missing Negro cook showed up, drunk as a skunk, in the custody of a sailor landlord. The shark then presented the captain with the following paper:

  Captain and owner ship ______ Please pay to the order of ________all the wages that may be due me on the arrival of the _________ at port of discharge in the United States_______ value received.

  his

  Signed, Henry X Jenkins

  mark

  The scoundrelly crimp had taken all of the Negro’s wages for his last voyage—$14 a month for eighteen months—and in return had given him three weeks’ lodging. He kept him in a drunken stupor the whole time so that he was not even aware that he was in Boston. In his alcoholic coma he did not realize, of course, what he was signing when he made his “X” on the document which gave away all his pay for his next voyage. The captain tore up the paper and threw it in the face of the shanghaier and ordered him off the ship. He did not allow the land shark to make off with Jenkins’ sea chest. When the captain looked inside the chest he found that the crimp had left the cook just two shirts and a single pair of duck trousers as his fit-up.