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

  “I want to see the United States District Attorney.”

  “Well, I am the Assistant District Attorney. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, sir,” answered the boy, “I called to see if you could assist me in getting my wages. I came here in the ship Baltic and I was put down in the articles as an able seaman. But now I have heard that they intend to only pay me off with a boy’s wages because I was not an able seaman and had never been to sea before. As I’m charged with a fifty dollars advance, if I’m paid off as a boy, I won’t have a single cent and I don’t know anybody here in San Francisco, and I haven’t even got any clothes.”

  “But why did you ship as an able seaman and take the $50 advance if you had never been to sea before?” asked Morrow.

  “I did not ship, sir. I was forced aboard in New York and brought here against my will. I never saw the $50.”

  “But did you sign the articles?”

  “Yes, sir. I signed the articles but I couldn’t help it. There was a man who stood on each side of me. When I refused to sign, one hauled off and hit me in the face. They told me they would knock my head off if I did not sign.”

  Morrow began to pump the boy and got a detailed story of how New York’s Water Street shanghaiers operated. The boy, Frederick Staple, was a carpenter who was looking for work on Water Street in May 1873 when a well-dressed stranger tapped him on the shoulder and asked, “Wouldn’t you like something to do?”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Staple. “That’s just what I’ve been looking for.”

  “Well, I think you’ll suit me. I’ve been looking for someone to put in the way of a good job. How would you like to go to San Francisco? I have just made a big contract for a patent medicine out there and I want to get a smart young fellow to go with me.”

  “I should like to go, sir,” eagerly responded Staple, “if the wages are good. Work seems pretty hard to get here in New York this spring. What would you pay me, sir?”

  “I’ll give you twenty-five per month and pay all of your expenses so that you can save all your wages. The pay will be in gold, too, and you can have a nice little sum when we get through. And perhaps you’ll strike something even better out there, for there is plenty of money to be made there by a smart man. Will you go?”

  “Yes, sir. When do you wish me to start?”

  “We shall have to get off by Monday. You’d better come and get supper with me. It’s pretty near supper time and we can talk it over.”

  The man led Staple into Cherry Street and to Charles Gleason’s sailors’ boardinghouse across the street from the Sailors’ Home. He then showed Staple the washroom. When the young carpenter was done with his washing up, he looked in vain for his hat, coat and vest. His new friend, who turned out to be Gleason, explained he had sent them to the baggage room to be brushed up a bit. “Put this on till after we get supper,” he suggested, handing Staple an old sailor’s monkey jacket.

  The boy was bewildered when Gleason broke off his friendly chatter at the table and suddenly said, “Now, I guess we’d better go down and see the captain. You must tell him that you’re a sailor and that you’ve been going to sea for four years. Then you’ll get a $50 advance.”

  “But I can’t tell him that, for I ain’t a sailor. I’ve never been to sea in my life.”

  “Damn your soul!” Gleason clenched his fists in front of Staple’s face. “You son of a bitch, you come down to my house and eat my supper and then tell me you’ve never been to sea!”

  “But, it’s true, sir. I’ve never been to sea.”

  “Hear me!” roared Gleason. “You’ve been to sea for four years!”

  “But I can’t...”

  “Do you hear me?” Gleason hit the boy a solid blow on the side of the head with his right hand. “You’ve been to sea four years, when the captain asks.” He followed this with another heavy blow to the lad’s head with his left hand. “Now, you remember, when the captain asks you, you’ve been to sea for four years or I’ll knock the damned head off you! Do you hear?”

  “Yes, sir,” gulped the frightened boy.

  Gleason stuck a sailor’s cap on Staple’s head, got one of his runners to take one of the boy’s arms and he took the other. They marched down the street. In the open air the boy’s courage returned. He told them to let go or he would call for a policeman.

  “You say a word to anybody and I’ll knock the teeth down your throat,” said Gleason. The menacing runner on the other side added, “And I’ll kick you to pieces if you so much as open your head!”

  “And hear ye,” warned Gleason, “the best thing that you can do is to keep as quiet as you can. All the policemen down here are friends of mine. If you call to one, I’ll give him a couple of dollars to club the hell out of you.”

  In the dark they made their way and just as the boy was about to call to a passing police officer, Gleason and the officer nodded pleasantly to each other. Staple swallowed and decided to protest to the ship’s captain instead.

  At an “outside,” or private, shipping office, the captain told the crimp the boy would not do. He was not heavy enough. Marched back to the boardinghouse, he heard the runner suggest he be shipped to Liverpool, and Gleason’s answer, “No, I’m going to send him on a voyage where he won’t come back soon. Monday I’ll ship him to China.”

  Staple tried to escape from his locked, windowless room. He searched for a trap door in vain, but at 5 a.m. succeeded in picking the lock on the door. When he opened it he found an enormous watchdog outside which growled savagely and prepared to spring. The boy slammed the door shut, terrified. He had been torn badly by a dog when he was a child, and was scared to death of them.

  The next day the captain of the Baltic changed his mind and accepted Staple. Gleason gave him his sea outfit, consisting of a quilt, two flimsy shirts, three clay pipes, a pound of plug tobacco, a belt, a sheath knife and a rusty old swallow-tailed coat stolen from a shanghaied bummer. This in lieu of a pea jacket. Such was Staple’s Cape Horn winter gear! The two men marched him back to the shipping office where the clerk pointed to a piece of paper.

  “Sign, you son of a bitch!” hissed the runner, still holding his left arm. “Sign or I’ll kill you,” said the landlord, hitting him heavily under the jaw.

  The boy scribbled his name and was rushed outside. When he asked for the $50 advance, Gleason promised, “You’ll get that on board,” as he hailed a boatman.

  Aboard the Baltic a man shouted at Staple, “Take your dunnage into the starboard forecastle.” Staple started aft toward the cabin. “Where the hell are you going?” shouted the half-drunk bosun. “I was just going back there, sir,” answered the poor carpenter. “Are you the captain?”

  “Going back there, you damned fool!” He let fly with his fist and knocked the boy down. “You’re a pretty specimen to come aboard ship. Go forward there or I’ll kick you forward.”

  When Staple escaped from the bosun to the forecastle, he found other shanghaied landsmen there. When he asked about his advance, his shipmates suggested he take a cow-hitch on the extremities of his swallowtail. Luckily, the Baltic was no hellship. Captain Taylor treated his crew well. Staple’s foc’s’le buddies cut off the ludicrous swallowtails from his coat but were a friendly bunch.

  With Morrow’s help Staple got $13 in A.B.’s wages, all that was due him after the $50 advance pocketed by Gleason in New York. He never wanted to see New York again and was delighted when he found a carpenter’s job in San Francisco.

  Frisco learned more about New York shanghaiing tricks when one of Staple’s mates, Thomas Cranna (alias Tim Finnegan), was interviewed by the press at Tom Boyne’s Union Sailors’ Home on Vallejo Street. A magnificent specimen, six feet, two inches in height, and a veteran of eleven years in the British Army, Cranna was standing near the foot of New Canal Street, looking for something to
turn up when a fellow with the cut of a sea captain asked him if he would like a job with good pay.

  “Yes, sir!” answered Cranna with enthusiasm.

  “Well, there’s a ship lying in the stream there,” the stranger said, pointing offshore, “and I’ve got the job of whitewashing her. I want a big strapping fellow like you to help me. I’ll give you forty cents an hour to help me.”

  On the way to his “store” the man told the Irishman that he would have to sign a contract and that he would not be likely to get the painting job unless he fibbed a little and said that he was an A.B.

  “All right,” agreed the gullible Cranna. “I’m the best able bodied seamen for forty cents an hour at whitewashing in the country.”

  At the “store” (shipping office) Cranna said he was an A.B. and signed articles. He was hustled aboard the Baltic where he looked in vain for brush and bucket. He had many an hour of scraping masts and scouring brasswork en route to San Francisco in which to meditate on how he had been duped by the New York crimp.

  About the same time that Cranna-Finnegan was being whitewashed aboard the Baltic, Alfred Dean, a twenty-five-year-old pharmacist was hanging around New York’s castle Garden and the Battery. A stranger asked him if he wanted work. “Yes!” was the druggist’s answer. He soon found himself inside Brown’s sailor boardinghouse on Monroe Street. He was sent aboard the Herald of the Morning. He signed no articles. He found he had been shipped by the crimp as an A.B. and not as a steward’s assistant, as promised. The ship’s destination was San Francisco, not Liverpool as he had been told. He did not get a cent for his services. True, his services to the Herald were not much. He had no idea of, or talent for, seamanship so he was kicked in the stomach, knocked up against the belaying pin rack, and given a rupture in addition to numerous bruises. Dean survived the trip and had Second Mate Richard Deverell arrested in Frisco for brutality, but he never got even with the real culprits, the New York crimps.

  The 1884 no-advance law improved the seaman’s lot in New York somewhat. Shipping Commissioner James C. Reed in 1885 said of the typical sailor ashore in Gotham, “With more money in his pockets when he comes ashore, he enjoys greater independence in choosing his boardinghouse.” But the New York Sailor Boardinghouse Keepers’ Association was a strong organization. It was chartered under the laws of the state. Its members had a legal lien on their boarders’ clothes. They soon got a $40-bonus system set up to replace the abolished advance. (The money came as a rake-off taken from the monthly wage of each sailor.)

  The crimps had also seized control of the Sailors’ Home on Cherry Street, and a San Francisco Call story in 1909 described the New York Seamen’s Institute as a crimping organization.

  In the 1890s when Matthias Hank, a seaman on the Minnie Swan, joined the union in New York, Captain Higgins got a gang of crimps to jump him. Luckily for Hank, he had some friends with him and the crimps got the worst of the fight.

  There were many such examples of collusion between crimps and captains in New York. In April 1900, the shipping master, Brennan, signed men on the Westgate for one month’s allotment ($16) but, when he had them on board, tried to force them to sign an additional, illegal allotment of $32. The crew asked the captain to let them see the British Consul. He went ashore but brought back not the Consul but Brennan, eight runners, and a party of boxers. After three crewmen were assaulted by the pugs, the rest gave in and signed their $32 away. (Yet it was said that Brennan used to brag that he never took money away from sailors, only from owners.)

  When a British master got four men without the services of shipping masters Brennan and Haveron and sent them to the British Consulate to sign articles, they were driven away by crimps. The British Consul General, Sir Percy Sanderson, urged that unauthorized persons be refused admission to the shipping office maintained by the Consulate General and that a policeman or constable be hired to keep order in the shipping office.

  In Parliament, J. Havelock Wilson raised the question of maintaining proper order in the vicinity of U.S. Shipping offices, too. The Board of Trade reported that in August 1898, men for the S.S. Port Chalmers were harassed by crimps in New York at the Consular Shipping Office after their discharge…. “There appears to be prima facie ground for believing that a brutal assault was actually committed.”

  J. Havelock Wilson described the Consulate’s shipping office in New York graphically to his fellow Members of Parliment:

  “The office comprises two large rooms knocked into one, with a counter in the centre, a most dilapidated entrance, and the place itself looking as if it had never been painted or cleaned for a considerable time. Whenever a crew is to be engaged or discharged, the part of the room allocated to seamen is crowded with crimps, boardinghouse keepers of the lowest kind, runners for tailors and shoemakers, women boardinghouse keepers, touts, and, in fact, every class that is usually found in a port like New York who prey upon seamen.

  “These people are all crowding around the counter and as soon as the seaman receives his money into his hands, if he has any dealings with the boardinghouse keepers, crimps or runners, they frequently take the money out of the seaman’s hands, put it into their pockets and invite the seaman to go with them elsewhere to setde up their account.

  “I was eye witness to a most brutal assault upon a seaman in the passage of the shipping office, because he had refused to hand over his money to one of the crimps.”

  When crimps ordered sailors who had shipped on the Johanna in 1900 to sign a paper reading “Received from Captain A. Ferguson the sum of $32 in cash and goods.” they did so like sheep, and never saw a penny of it. Captain Cook of the Cambuskenneth was threatened with a brutal assault by New York crimps if he persisted in his attempts to ship men without going through them.

  James H. Williams’ articles helped shock Congress into favorable action on Furuseth’s legislative program and crimping abuses were eventually corrected. Much of the pressure exerted on Congressmen by the Social Reform Club was the result of the writings of Williams, the Massachusetts-born, red-headed mulatto. (His devotion to unionization was remarkable because he and other Negroes and mulattoes were excluded from regular membership in the Atlantic Coast Seamen’s Union, organized in 1888, except in the cooks’ and stewards’ his calling—“I was indentured to the sea service in February 1876.” he once said. And another time, referring to the sailor’s life, he said, “I began my career in a voluntary—or is it involuntary?—slavery….”

  Even with the help of Williams, the Social Reform Club and the Central Labor Union, Furuseth and the National Seamen’s Union had a devilish fight on their hands in ridding the water fronts of New York and other Atlantic ports of control by crimps. As late as 1900 Furuseth admitted publicly that crimps remained in full control of the Atlantic Coast situation. But conditions were constantly improving over those of the heyday of sail. Desertions dropped in New York. Complaints to the British Consul from New York were only nine of a total of seventy-nine in 1899. And the U.S. Treasury Department blamed New York desertions on other factors than crimping, mainly the “drunkenness and allied vices” of Gotham.

  By 1903, the crimps’ adversaries in New York were on to most of their tricks. The Episcopalian Seamen’s Chaplain there, Archibald R. Mansfield, really stole a leaf from their book in order to thwart them. While they were sending rowboats out to meet incoming ships, to decoy their crews ashore as deserters, Chaplain Mansfield would speed past them in his steam launch, the Sentinel, given to him and the Seamen’s Chapel by Miss Augusta de Peyster.

  Old laws, long on the books, had life breathed back into them. These included an 1886 edict which provided that all boardinghouse keepers had to be licensed by the Board of Commissioners and that no one could board a vessel without the explicit permission of the master. Other resuscitated laws provided that all shipping masters had to be licensed and that no boardinghouse keepers were allowed to e
ngage in the shipping of seamen. The Federal no-advance law was taken seriously too, and crimps like William Simmons, who took advances in spite of the law, had to refund the advance and pay a $25 fine in addition.

  In 1902 a private report to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Navigation all but chortled over the changed conditions in New York harbor—“Three years ago the crimps in New York were numerous and their association was equipped with a comparatively large treasury and among the members of the association were some wealthy men... Ever since we broke the treasury of their association through criminal prosecutions, they have been in a weak condition and they have had quarrels among themselves….”

  Aside from San Francisco, California ports had only a modicum of shanghaiing. When Captain David Davies of the Glenogil wrote to his employers to criticize the crimps of the Pacific Coast and said, “I do not wish the name of myself or the ship’s name published in any newspaper as it would be unsafe for either the ship or myself to return to Californian ports if the crimps knew that I had made this declaration.” he was referring largely to Frisco.

  In Eureka the crimps were mostly involved in scabbing and union busting rather than out-and-out shanghaiing. Some, like Cat House Johnny, were obviously dabbling in a profession even older than shanghaiing. Coffee Jack Conar (or Connor) ran the water front of the Humboldt County lumber port in 1885 and 1886, while in 1887 the Coast Seamen’s Union was pretty peeved with a crimp there by the name of Baker. He was an ex-deepwater boardinghouse runner who doubled as a deputy marshal. Baker enticed crews to desert and filled Eureka with Japanese scabs. In 1893 the Eureka paper, The Western Watchman, charged that the Board of Supervisors had asked for an unlimited supply of constables or deputy sheriffs “to line our wharves so that when men were shanghaied at San Francisco and other ports there would be no possible escape for them.” In 1897, Fitz, one of the Coast Seamen’s Journal’s regular correspondents, claimed that a former Sacramento professional gambler (turned shipping master) was running the Humboldt Bay port.