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 1884 no-advance law improved the treatment of seamen in Boston and gave sailors more independence there from landlords. Arrests were actually made of crimps who broke the law. James E. Kane was apprehended in March 1895, for example, for demanding blood money for a crew for the bark Eva Reed. He was held for trial on $300 bail on each of several counts. However, incredible as it may seem, according to a Coast Seamen’s Journal headline, Boston in 1918 had “Crimps Still in Business.” A man named S. Alexanderson that year wrote to the editor to complain that during the war years of 1914-1918 he noticed that American crimps were again able to draw a supply of men and to sell them to ships at so much per head, just as in the old days. When protests were made to union officials he said that they answered, “It isn’t our affair; we don’t pay.” To this Alexanderson answered in the Journal, “True-enough. But we certainly help to maintain a set of men that are only waiting for an opportunity to do us dirt.”

  James H. Williams was acquainted with Boston crimps. He sailed about 1885 with a young Gloucester fisherman who had been shanghaied out of Boston that year, and in the winter of 1893-1894 Williams had to sabotage a crimp’s wagon, causing it to founder on an icy patch in a Boston street, spilling its load of crimps and scabs. Williams was then engaged in a running battle with the shipping masters. They had combined with owners to drop wages to $16 while upping the shipping fee to $3 and the bonus or blood money to $40. (Thus, only the sailors suffered, as usual.)

  In Providence, Rhode Island, crimping was carried on in the 1860s by the master of a bugaboo which plied Long Island Sound. He was called The Portuguese Consul because he preferred to ship Portuguese and Azoreans rather than Americans. During the ‘90s, crimps were shipping scabs there and James H. Williams was forced to board vessels like a pirate in the night to run the nonunion men off.

  At New Bedford, crimping was bad enough to cause the Mercury to demand that the “predatory warfare” and defrauding of seamen be suppressed. The Friend of Honolulu picked up a sharking story in 1850 from the Mercury and commented, “a more despicable mode of robbery could hardly be devised.” Tom Codd and his partner, Big Joe Beef, top New Bedford crimps of the ‘80s, according to Williams, got up to $100 for the peddlers, soldiers and farmers they shanghaied.

  Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said, “Nor must Uncle Sam’s webfeet be forgotten.” But America’s merchant sailors were forgotten even though Journals like the Honolulu Friend cried out in their behalf: “Come down, I say, to the deck and hear the brutal curse with which his exertions are rewarded and witness the dastardly blows from the contemptible, cowardly thing that walks the quarter-deck in the place of a skillful and manly officer... Descend with him into that dark, damp and cheerless forecastle where no fire gives out its reviving warmth, and where bed and chest with their contents are alike saturated and as wet and comfortless as the clothes he has on….

  “His boardinghouse is in many instances as destitute of comfort as the forecastle he left. And here he becomes too often the victim of the harpies who seek his destruction. He is drugged or poisoned with bad liquor, then Shanghaied [sic] or taken insensible on board another vessel where some merciless tyrant may force him through the same round of abuse….”

  Whatever improvement in sailors’ rights resulted at long last from the Dingley Bill of 1884 was speedily nullified by its amendments, made two years later, which permitted allotments to “original creditors.” These, of course, were boardinghouse keepers and crimps. Once again, if it made any difference to them, they could operate within the law.

  All over the globe, little groups of dedicated people were trying to help the sailor out of the social and economic morass into which he was sinking ever deeper. These people founded Seamen’s Bethels, Snug Harbors, Seamen’s Savings Banks, Seamen’s Hospitals, Seamen’s Friend Societies, Sea Missions, Mariners’ Churches, Marine Bible Societies, Ships’ Libraries, Mariners’ Houses and the ubiquitous Sailors’ Homes. By the end of the century, these Sailors’ Homes came to be found in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, New Bedford, Portsmouth, Wilmington (North Carolina), Galveston, Boston, Portland (Oregon), Portland (Maine), Charleston, Mobile, Chicago, Sydney, Victoria (B. C.), Hong Kong, Calcutta, St. Johns (New Brunswick), St. Johns (Newfoundland), Madras, Melbourne, Haifa, Bombay, Belfast, Cork, Dublin, Queenstown, Glasgow, Greenwich, Leith, Stornoway, Marseilles, Honolulu, Amsterdam, Callao, Hamburg, Le Havre, Rotterdam, Yokohama, Hull, Milford, Swansea, Gravesend, Sunderland, Southampton, Cardiff, Lowestoft, Gloucester, Bristol, Dover, Davenport, Falmouth, Plymouth, Great Yarmouth, Holyhead, North Shields, Liverpool and Ramsgate. There were two Homes in London, one on Wall Street and one on Dock Street. And, ironically, there was a Sailors’ Home in Shanghai, presumably to protect seamen from shanghaiing.

  New York in the nineteenth century was a mecca to pleasure-loving sailors. They liked the coffee houses of Courtland Street where they rubbed shoulders with newsboys, bums and the slumming upper class. Dance halls on Water Street were cesspools of iniquity to proper New Yorkers, but were just the thing for the dry, women-starved “jolly marines” off Gotham’s clippers and blood packets. They liked to gawk at the rat and dog pits which Kit Burns featured at his Sportsman’s Hall or at the fighters mixing it up in Owney Geoghagan’s fistic arena on the Bowery. If they wanted to trip the light fantastic, they could head for the dance hall so patriotically called The Flag of Our Union, on James Street. And if they had a dollar in their dungarees, there were always the maisons de pie, like 3371/2 Water Street, with their painted girls in tights and silk stockings. By 1831 little old New York had 10,000 prostitutes and of this army a battalion or two catered to seamen.

  Foc’s’le hands were not picky about their entertainment. The Sultan’s Divan, a beer garden on Chatham Square, was pretty tony for them. The girls there were both high class and low bodiced and they affected coyness when the rough mariners paid them crude attentions. Toward the other end of the scale was the foul den in Five Points kept by Theodore Allen, called “the wickedest man in New York,” or the dive so popular in the ‘80s, near the corner of Bleecker Street and South Fifth Avenue. This was the Black and Tan Concert Hall, where both white and colored customers were welcome. It was known familiarly as The Chemise and Drawers. If a sailor became so drunk in these purlieus that he could not pronounce—or perhaps even remember—his own name, the accommodating crimps gave him a new one. Usually it would be that of his new seagoing home. Thus, Jake Sheffield of New York was so baptized, arbitrarily, by a Bowery crimp who shanghaied him aboard the packet Sheffield.

  William Jay of New York wrote in 1823: “Of all classes, that of seamen appear to be the most helplessly destitute of all that can bless the life that now is, or shed a cheering radiance on that which is to come.” From about 1816, New York churchmen and others labored to save the sailor. Men like Eastburn, “the Sailor’s Friend,” and Anson G. Phelps did their best. Captain Benjamin Hallett organized bethels in both New York and Boston, and Captain Charles H. Marshall of the Black Ball Line tried to improve the sailor’s lot. About 1843 a Floating Chapel of Our Saviour was launched in New York harbor to rescue seamen’s souls, and Mrs. Rebecca H. Lambert, wife of a master mariner, founded Sailors’ Homes in both New York and San Francisco. A remarkable woman, she was also the “father” of the U.S. Shipping Commissioners Act of 1872, and it is claimed that she raised in New York, on one single day, $10,000 for the Sailors’ Home there.

  But altogether too much of the attention of these people was paid to handing out Bibles and tracts, and not enough consideration given to protecting sailors from the schools of land sharks of Water Street and environs. By the year 1838 some one hundred and fifty-nine ships were fitted out with libraries of sixty to eighty volumes each. By 1884 there were 12, 678 ships’ libraries on both U.S. naval and merchant vessels. But these libraries were heavily larded with religious books, unread. Also, when the New York Sailors’ Home was set up
by well-meaning folk, it accommodated seventy boarders but was lucky to average from twenty-five to fifty sailors in residence because they were forced to sign a pledge of total abstinence before they were allowed to register.

  In any case, these gestures were at best too late and too few to diminish the control of Eastern ports, particularly New York, by crimps. They might have succeeded in 1747 when the port of New York supported a mere 755 seamen, or in 1762 when 3,552 sailors called it home. But not in the 1840s when many of America’s 100,000 seamen were calling at New York at one time or another in vessels flying all the flags of the world.

  Herbert Elliott Hamblen in 1899 wrote a book, The Yarn of a Bucko Mate, which, like Hiram Bailey’s, Shanghaied Out of Frisco in the Nineties, has long puzzled librarians. It appears to be a work of nonfiction at first blush, but the reader comes away with a suspicion that the story has been fictionalized, if not made up out of whole cloth. The account purports to be the story of Peter J. Stetson, a young runaway from upstate New York. He was dragged into a Water Street saloon by a beautiful young thing and, after a drop of something, he waded into a fight. Rescued from raiding police by a runner called “Handsome Harry,” he was taken by him to a seamen’s hotel bar presided over by a filthy and villainous-looking man. Shortly, the lights of the barroom began to dance and Stetson was kicked awake to find himself in the harbor, on the deck of a Black Bailer.

  According to Hamblen’s yarn, Stetson found Handsome Harry in the forecastle, where Harry admitted helping shanghai him for $5 of tick at the bar. From the Black Ball ship the apocryphal Stetson went on to a succession of vessels and many adventures. True or not, the way Stetson went to sea is the way so many raynecks and joskins, seeing the Knickerbocker sights, were suddenly transformed into sailormen. James Williams met a Norwegian shipmaster shanghaied out of Hell’s Half Acre as a common sailor, and also a minister who had been enticed out to a ship in a small boat (under the pretext that a dying man aboard her needed a holy man’s services) and then shanghaied.

  The old salt who wrote under the name Captain Ringbolt called the Atlantic coast crimps “pests of society.” Ringbolt in explaining why owners did so little to protect their men from sailor landlords and other lampreys, stated that the shipowners regarded a seaman “as more like a horse than like a man, and if they have the humanity to give him a lodging, it would be in the barn.” Ringbolt arrived in New York once from Singapore in the 1840s, to find the deck of his ship aswarm with runners. When payday came, a crimp had the nerve to march up to the captain and demand the pay of Isaac Brown, a lunatic who had been shanghaied out of New York in the first place. He had dropped out of sight upon his return to Gotham. The sailor landlord, claiming to be Brown’s brother-in-law, produced an order for wages of more than $100, signed by Isaac Brown’s “X” mark. Now, Brown had not earned a dime. He could not work; he could not write; he had not signed articles. And he had certainly not composed the order in hand. The captain refused to pay, telling the crimp that Brown owed him—for advanced wages, his passage to Singapore and return, and for the wages of the men who had had to attend him constantly.

  But the captain did not realize the power of New York’s crimps. The landlord-in-law took the case to attorneys Burr, Benedict and Beebe and got seven of the crew to perjure themselves by swearing solemnly that “Isaac Brown was a good seaman; was neither drunk nor deranged during the whole voyage and always performed his duty like any other man, excepting for a few weeks when the captain cruelly confined him in irons.”

  The two mates and the carpenter told the true story but they were only three witnesses against seven. The captain, as a part owner of the vessel, was not allowed to testify that two of the very perjurers on the stand had come to him, begging that he iron the crazy man after he had attacked them, or that two of the others had helped him rescue Brown when the loony had jumped overboard. Judge Berts allowed the landlord to libel the ship for Brown’s wages, and the crimp eventually bled the captain of $300.

  Later, Brown came down to the dock to ask the captain to allow him to sail with him again. He was improved mentally but from his ragamuffin clothes it was obvious he was down and out. The captain asked him what had happened to the money his brother-in-law had been awarded. Brown answered that he had seen no money in New York and that he had no brother-in-law. He said, “My landlord took my clothes and put me aboard of a coaster and I don’t know where I have been since.”

  After the California gold discovery of January 1848, New York became the great supply point for seamen at a time when the supply was growing scarcer and scarcer. A New York paper of the 1850s said, “It is calculated that the Pacific Ocean service absorbs 4,000 seamen every year. That is to say, that number go out from the Atlantic and do not return, some going to California and Australia, others lingering in the Islands or perishing. There is no adequate supply for such an absorption and hence the scarcity of seamen.” And, the paper should have added, hence the proliferation of crimps in water-front New York.

  A whaler, writing in the April 1857 Hutching’s California Magazine, recalled how the slop shop men of New York were in league with the boarding masters in fleecing seamen. The sailor would select his gear—sturdy flannel shirts, blue drill trousers, tarpaulin hat, and so forth—and it would be locked in a standard sea chest. The haberdasher would keep the key in his pocket until the pilot was discharged from the man’s outbound ship. This was to prevent the sailor from jumping ship with his fit-out. Of course, when the man opened his trunk he was likely to find that he had been swindled by a sea-chest version of the old shell game. His chest would contain not the fine new gear which he had painstakingly chosen but moth-eaten third-hand or fourth-hand duds stripped from a drunk or a corpse. At least one sailor was so incensed over this trick that he nursed his grudge for the three full years of a whaling cruise. When he got back to New York he pounded the haberdashing scoundrel within an inch of his worthless life.

  Sailors themselves who got religion, like Father Taylor, tried to help their old buddies in Atlantic Coast ports. One such man was a Swede named John Esping who left home in Chicago in 1852 to go to New Orleans to follow the sea. There, after a few days of profligate carousal, he fell into the hands of the jackals and was doped and shanghaied aboard a Yankee ship bound for Le Havre. Esping did not know a thing about seamanship so he was kicked and cuffed unmercifully, winding up in the hospital at Le Havre for three weeks. He returned to the States and in New York, despite his good resolutions, he succumbed to the enticements of his shipmate, George C-----, who knew all the vices and dissipations of New York. Soon Esping was a victim of the D.T’s, an inhabitant of the Seamen’s Hospital on Staten Island and a drunk again. He was shanghaied out of Savannah after being kept “on ice” in jail there by a crimp for three weeks (nearly starving on a diet of hominy and water). Much later he found an honest boardinghouse keeper in New York, Captain Peterson, but again fell off the wagon and even became a sailors’ boarding master himself till he drank up all the profits. After bumming around the watery portions of the globe some more, he took the pledge, became a missionary to seamen in Boston and labored in their behalf for the rest of his life.

  Captain Charles C. Duncan was appointed New York’s first U.S. Shipping Commissioner in 1872, to look after sailors and to guard them from abuses. The Friend of Honolulu said an amen to the editorial in the New York Observer: “Every sailor will have to be shipped before him, and will not be forced to take a distasteful voyage at the command of his landlord, nor will he have to pay ten of fifteen dollars to secure such a voyage as he prefers….”

  On October 1, 1873, The Friend reported that the New York Association of Sailor Boardinghouse Keepers had decided to give up its opposition to the new U.S. Shipping Commissioners law. The Friend wisely felt it was merely a truce until they could make new and stronger efforts to resist the law. In any case, for a year or so (before it was hobbled with amendments) the 1872 law w
orked. Duncan shipped 26, 636 men in New York, of whom 15, 206 shipped without paying an advance. He saw $1, 653, 186. 08 paid into the hands of sober sailors. (No wonder the crimps were determined to fight for a gold mine like that!) Duncan was rightly proud of his success and in the report he filed in 1874 for the preceding year he stated, “There has been no case of ‘Shanghaiing,’ mutiny, riot or bloodshed on shipboard.”

  Apparently there were no cases of shanghaiing reported to Commissioner Duncan. But there certainly were cases in New York in 1873. The San Francisco Alta California on October 10, 1873, reported how the Baltic had just arrived with a crew of lubbers shanghaied in New York. Among her “tars” were tinkers, carpenters, tailors, barbers, brewers, bakers, brogue makers, clerks and greengrocers. Almost everything but an Indian chief—or a real sailor. The Alta next day denounced the “Shanghaiing of Freemen” in New York and the Baltic’s crew being “taken like the Negroes of Africa by fraud and violence... (We are as Americans overfond of boasting of our country being the land of the free, where all stand equal before the law. The boast is a lie. There is no such thing as even-handed justice where such atrocities as the shanghaiing of men can be perpetrated.”

  During the midst of the notorious Sunrise case in San Francisco in 1873, U.S. Assistant District Attorney Morrow was visited by an intelligent-looking boy wearing a greasy blackball cap, an old and oversized coat, a worn shirt, too-large pants and flimsy shoes from which his toes peered timidly at the light. His red hands were covered with tar stains.

  “Who do you want to see, my boy?” asked Morrow.