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 population of the port on the Strait of Juan de Fuca jumped from three families and fifteen bachelors in May 1852 to some five hundred and ninety-three people in 1870. By 1890, it was a wild, prosperous lumber-boom port. Admiral Robert A. Coontz, in fact, found Port Townsend a little too wild for him when he first visited it as an ensign en route to Alaska. The first night he spent in his hotel a man in the room next to his came down with smallpox and the man on the other side of his room was murdered. Port Townsend proved to be a victim of speculation. It was overbuilt. It soon had facilities for a city of 20,000 people, with fine brick and stone business buildings and three streetcar lines. But the bubble burst, a panic ensued, and Port Townsend has never made the comeback its boosters have long predicted.

  Nowadays, tourists to Port Townsend are shown the old shanghaiing tunnels, if, indeed, that is what they were used for. (“Escape tunnels” for bandit Joaquin Murieta in California’s Mother Lode turned out to be storage areas for barrels of beer, it must be remembered.) These passages through the water-front fill of ballast stone, deposited by vessels picking up cargoes of lumber, supposedly were used to haul knocked-out men to small boats at the docks. Some oldtimers say the tunnels were used in the reverse direction too, in order to smuggle opium from ship to den of iniquity. According to a brochure published by Widell’s Hardware, the tunnels—part of which underlie the hardware store—if they could be traversed in their entirety today, would take you some six blocks, from the City Hall to Taylor Street and from Washington Street to the water front. And it is the proud boast of Jefferson County that only two cities in the world enjoyed the luxury of tunnels for shanghaiing—Frisco and Port Townsend.

  All kinds of men are reputed to have had their hands in the shanghaiing business in Port Townsend—Ed Sims, Max Levy and even the British Vice Consul, himself. He was actually a Norwegian subject, Oscar Klocker, and he was said to be a shipping agent though he vehemently denied it. These Olympic Peninsula crimps shipped beachcombers, soldiers, lumberjacks, and Indians. When the Queen Elizabeth reached Iquique in June 1899, the captain wrote home about his crew, for whom he had paid a $50 bonus and $25 advance each (all but four of whom immediately deserted upon reaching Chile): “Four of the men I shipped in the Sound did not know one end of the ship from the other, yet they were all shipped as A.B.s.”

  When the hellship Willie Rosenfeld in 1896 reached New York en route to a good-riddance foundering off the coast of Brazil, Captain Dunphy had to pay his crew $5 each for shorting them on food during the passage and for illegal deductions. He had given the Port Townsend crimps an illegal $10 shipping fee for each bloke. The poor shanghaied crew had a bad time of it. Mates Gilman, Sullivan and Gilbert all beat the luckless fellows. They had been shanghaied on a Sunday, unusual in itself, after being beaten into submission at Max Levy’s boardinghouse. When they complained to Captain Dunphy that they had been defrauded, he just snorted, “Go to your boarding master!”

  John Gronow reported Levy’s shanghaiing two men on the British four-master, Andina, that year, too. The Alsterdamm was not only held up for the usual blood money but also had to accept a watchman placed aboard by the crimps for $20. One of Levy’s side-kicks was Thomas Newman, who came to Port Townsend from the East via Tacoma. He was involved in the Andina case. Newman was charged with assault with a deadly weapon on Thomas Breen, who had picked up one of the shanghaied men who jumped overboard to escape. The judge dismissed the case, causing Gronow to groan, “Thus, slowly but surely, I am getting convinced that this place is a hell for the sailor and a paradise for the crimp.”

  After 1898, crimping declined in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and even San Francisco, but least of all—if at all—in Pacific Northwest ports. Astoria, a tough outpost of Portland, Oregon, in Alaska-Klondike times, was a particularly bad situation. It boasted a line of cribs along the street on which the post office was located, causing decent folk to use the back door when mailing letters. Sailors found the cribs convenient from their boardinghouses and the saloons they patronized, like Maggie Riley’s, The Louvre, or Dick Marion’s saloon, which featured fighting bulldogs. One high-class establishment aown by the dOCKS Featured a girlie snow for which admission (to those short on cash) was one fresh salmon. A pen at the door was the receptacle for these finny tickets. Astoria was in the same class with Port Townsend, which William H. S. Jones, Second in the lime-juicer British Isles, called “one of the most notorious ports for crimps.”

  According to Mont Hawthorne, Astoria crimps really beat the bushes for men in 1883. They liked to cruise the woods outside of town looking for rubes, and a neighbor of Hawthorne’s warned him that the man in the cabin next to his was kidnaped by night and taken out to a windjammer. So, whenever Hawthorne went out to his job, cutting wood along the Walluski River, he took a loaded shotgun and rifle along with him. One night he heard someone trying to force his cabin door as he lay in bed. He called out to the men, whom he took to be shanghaiers, to go away or he would kill them. When there was no answer, he fired seven shots through the door. Mont heard a great racket in the brush as the crimps ran away. He kept an eye peeled for them but they never returned to bother the woodsman again.

  In Port Townsend, Tom Saunders’ honky-tonk and Limey Dirk’s boardinghouse and Pacific Hotel were places for sailors to avoid if they knew what was good for them, and they frequently did not, although union seamen besieged Dirk’s establishment one time, bombarding it with beach stones in forays launched from the security of whorehouses up the street. In Astoria, Hawthorne carried a revolver even when he took a walk in broad daylight on the board streets of the water front. The town was run by “King George” Hill who had a dance hall, a red-light house (the biggest in Astoria), a saloon, and a variety theater, all in the malodorous district called Swill Town. Pat O’Brien, another crimp, was shot and killed by a friend of Hawthorne’s from Boston named Phil Pierce. There was an unnamed woman boarding master, according to Hawthorne’s reminiscences, who overasserted her female rights by shanghaiing her husband for $100. According to the story, when the man got back to Astoria from Liverpool, he was found dead beside a pile of lumber which was to be used by the city to plank a water-front street. The good woman, properly bereaved, sued Astoria for $75,000 for causing her beloved husband’s death. This led the district attorney to chide her in court for selling him, alive, for only $100 when he was worth $75,000 dead.

  Although men were placed in jail on trumped-up charges and then shanghaied from there, George Grannis’s story takes the cake. He was Astoria’s Methodist minister in the 1880s, and he was almost shanghaied out of his own church! As the preacher descended the staircase from the belfry one day after ringing the bells, a man threw an overcoat over his head and another pinned his arms to his sides. Grannis kicked out and knocked the wind out of one man. Then he butted the other in the head. Soon all three men were rolling down the stairs. The sky pilot, fighting for his life, forgot about turning the other cheek and remembered his training as a boxer. The two crimps quickly had their fill and fled. The minister presented the coat which he had captured to the church’s janitor. The next day he, and the rest of the townspeople, noticed that one of the well-known local runners was missing three front teeth.

  The Clyde Sailing Ship Owners’ Association in Scotland seconded in November 1900 a suggestion of the British Board of Trade that all of Her Majesty’s consulates and vice consulates follow the lead of the New York office in excluding boarding masters from the premises during the engagement or discharge of seamen. The Clyde Association was particularly bothered by Astoria—“We are having a great deal of trouble there with the crimps.”

  When the captain of the French vessel Belen refused to ship men via the Astoria crimps, they got him arrested on a cruelty charge. They then agreed to dismiss it for $75 blood money per man shipped, plus a $100 attorney’s fee. If he did not do as they asked, he knew he would have to post bail and delay t
he ship until evidence was collected. This delay would be very expensive. The owners ordered him to get the ship away by making the best deal he could. All too often, this was the course which weak-kneed shipowners took. This sort of surrender in Astoria and Portland fed the crimps’ growing hunger for power and extortion. Balfour, Guthrie & Company felt there was no way out of the blood-money grafting. They feared reprisals if shipowners tried to end it and they advised them just to try to deal with the crimps as best they could. This attitude led Sullivan & Company, Portland crimps, to engage Gracie, Beazley & Company in England to act as their blood-money agents over there. Some men fought the Columbia River extortionists, like the mate of one vessel, named Burch. He forced the crimps off his ship, but when it arrived at Portland that very night they were back and they took off his whole crew. Spinelessness was the rule. The U.S. Commissioner of Navigation, Eugene T. Chamberlain, was flabbergasted by this “supineness well nigh incredible in a British master.”

  Portland, of course, was worse than Astoria. According to British Consular figures on deserters (and only those formally reported missing), in the 1890s British vessels lost the following numbers of men: 182 (1896), 317 (1897), 691 (1898), 512 (1899) and 411 (1900). Many or most were enticed away or run off their ships. Portland was not so desirable a town, like Frisco and New York, that hundreds of men would throw all their pay away to be on the beach there, broke.

  Captain John Hughes of the Marion Inglis found Portland, Tacoma, and Seattle in these years to be worse dens of crimps than even San Francisco. He tried to keep his ship at a wharf to take on crewmen, and to sail from there, rather than remain lying in the stream at the mercy of the crimps. But Larry Sullivan met him and boldly told him he would not allow him to wait even until the next day to go into the stream. Sullivan made it clear to Hughes that if he did not mind him the captain would not get any men at any price. Captain Hughes capitulated. He did as he was told. Sullivan put a watchman aboard with the crimped crew to see that none of them deserted on the downriver run. The guard left the ship at Astoria.

  Captain Pierre J. Picherie, retired sea captain of San Pedro and former skipper of such three-masted barks as the Denis Cruan, the Florence Cherie, the Jeanne and the Duchesse Olga, always considered Portland’s lower Burnside Street and environs to be the toughest water front in the world—“The Barbary Coast couldn’t hold a candle to Portland.” At the Oregon port not only did the crimps shanghai his crew off his ship but they had the colossal gall to sell the very same men back to him. There was an Oregon statute which forbade the enticing away or the harboring of deserters but it was not effective, although British Consul Laidlaw repeatedly urged its enforcement.

  When the Riversdale was at Portland, boarding masters bribed her men (who were making £6 a month) to desert for $40 each. All the master could do was to offer his men a raise of £1. The crimps threatened to take his whole crew off and to shanghai him but he complained to a deputy marshal, who ran the land sharks off.

  Among Portland’s famous crimps were Peter Grant, Jim Vierck, J. P. Betts, Larry Sullivan, David Evans and Joseph (Bunco) Kelly. Thirty years ago Steward Holbrook was lucky enough to encounter Spider Johnson, an ex-sailor who turned to barkeeping in the old Pastime saloon run by Jack Dempsey, the Nonpareil. According to Spider, Bunco Kelly shanghaied the cigar-store Indian which stood in front of Wildman’s tobacco shop, and got it aboard a British bark in October of 1890. Bunco and some of his drunken recruits also broke into a mortuary at Second and Morrison once, thinking it was the cellar of a saloon. According to Johnson, thirty-nine men died from drinking a keg of formaldehyde, so Kelly hauled them out to a ship which was short an entire crew. He described his recruits as dead drunk rather than dead and got $52 each for them, the extra two dollars being for his excessive bar bill, necessary to render them so completely senseless. (Or so the story goes.) Kelly later opened the Mariners’ Home at Third and Davis Streets. On October 5, 1894, he Was arrested for the murder of George W. Sayres while trying to shanghai him. He was indicted in December and convicted in spite of the fact that he had a good alibi. At the time of the killing he was engaged in a fight with Larry Sullivan at Second and Ash, for which Municipal Judge B. M. Smith fined them each $10. He was sentenced to prison where he wrote a book titled Thirteen Years in the Oregon Penitentiary. He left Portland eventually to go to work for Dick McCarron (an ex-Portland boarding master) in Los Angeles or San Diego. Spider Johnson always believed Bunco was framed or railroaded on the Sayres murder charge. In his time, Kelly set some kind of a record for impressing a crew of fifty men for a four-masted bark in just three hours. He was also said to have shipped two women, dressed as men, and to have collected blood money for them.

  But, according to Spider Johnson, Larry Sullivan, not Bunco Kelly, was the top crimp in Portland. He was born in St. Louis about 1863 and he died in Portland on June 9, 1918. Sullivan was buried in Mount Calvary Cemetery. In the 1880s Larry was just a pug in Astoria but when he came to Portland he dabbled in both battling and crimping. He beat Tom Ward, a real scrapper, in seventy-five rounds on the Washington side of the Columbia River in a bare-knuckles brawl under the London rules. (By these rules a round lasted until one or the other fighter hit the deck.) He next fought Dave Campbell, later Portland’s Fire Chief, in the Mechanics Pavilion of the Rose City.

  Sullivan started his sailors’ boardinghouse in an old warehouse at Second and Glisan Streets. It was a modest affair which did not boast even a piano. Sullivan used to stand guard in a second-floor window of his building with a shotgun, keeping an eye on the polling place below. He is said to have had a keen interest in politics, one time enfranchising the entire crew of a Dutch ship, though none of the men could speak or write English. The handsome, 180-pound pug-crimp-politico married a real knockout in Lucille Ayers. Perhaps because of her influence, he forbade liquor and women in his boardinghouse, forcing his tenants to go around the corner for one or the other.

  Larry was usually able to ship men with the help of hard liquor or cold cash as persuaders, rather than resorting to a billy or brass knuckles. But he was not above using knockout drops, the tried-and-true Mickey Finn. And some of the crews he shipped were freaks —one ship got two A.B.s and all the rest were plowboys; on another he delivered a bullwhacker as a bosun.

  Sullivan went from Portland to Nevada where he is said to have fixed the Joe Gans-Battling Nelson fight. (Nelson always claimed something was fishy in Washoe when the battle was taken away from him for a so-called foul.) Spider Johnson figured that Sullivan probably shanghaied more men out of Portland than his rivals, Bunco Kelly or Jim Turk, and this really took some doing. For Turk was a real bully boy as well as a colorful individual.

  Jim Turk is said to have shanghaied a doctor who came back to Portland, not with pistol in hand but with, figuratively, garlands of roses for Jim. The unexpected six months’ sea voyage had cleared up the medico’s TB! Turk is also said to have shanghaied his own son, Frank. He found Junior playing around with bad whiskey and badder women, so Jim got him drunk and loaded him aboard an outbound windjammer. And he did not forget to collect blood money for Sonny, either.

  In the early nineties Jim Turk ran a house on Couch Street between First and Second. He was a big fellow, almost six feet, weighing about 200 pounds. Turk was always well-dressed and he affected a carved, gold-headed cane. He came to Portland from Pendleton with a pal, Bill Daly, and the latter’s Japanese wife or mistress and their half-caste twins. Turk and Daly had set up the Big Bonanza saloon on East Court Street in Pendleton, where they staged boxing matches starring themselves or the eight-year-old twins. Turk apparently sold whiskey to the Indians of the Umatilla Agency and probably a few drunken cowboys or sheepherders were rolled, too. According to Spider Johnson, Turk set up housekeeping with a squaw called Old Queen. He acted as bodyguard and bouncer for Daly.

  After the latter was arrested for beating up his Japanese woman, he sold out and mov
ed away.

  Jim Turk went to Astoria and Portland and did well. He soon had some of the best property in Astoria. He became a sporting figure, going in with two other men to bring Jack Dempsey to fight Dave Campbell, the former fire chief. Many people liked Turk, and Spider, for one, thought he shot square and never robbed anyone— except maybe a poor sailor. He probably got them drunk and loaded them in the hack run by Tony Arnold, the Fourth and Everett saloonkeeper who specialized in shanghai runs to the water front with his coach.

  Quite possibly, men were shanghaied off Nancy Boggs’ whiskey scow during the 1880s. She was a tough one. When police tried to board her scow she sprayed them with boiling water. Nancy ran a place ashore, too. Bridget Gallagher ran another place from which it is likely men were shanghaied. But Elizabeth Smith, or Liverpool Liz, the homely 200-pounder with the whiskey scow in the Willamette and the Senate saloon ashore on Second Street, was a pretty square shooter who probably protected sailors rather than preying on them. A feature of her saloon was a primitive dumb-waiter. She had a hole cut in the ceiling of her barroom through which drinks were passed to the girls upstairs and their guests. Entertainment was simple; an accordion player upstairs, a professor pounding his 88 on the ground floor. Lon Kendall, a flashy fellow with a string of horses and a diamond on his watch chain as big as a ballast boulder, helped Liz run the place.

  Liverpool Liz was bighearted and often paid grocery bills for down-and-outers, or sent turkeys to them for Christmas or Thanksgiving Day. She often took care of drunken sailors’ valuables. But one night two policemen heard groans coming from a room above her Senate saloon, which was closed for the night. They found Liz lying on the floor, her face beaten to a pulp. A former bartender of hers was eventually arrested. He had become dissatisfied with the rake-off on drinks passed up through the ceiling, and had expressed his disgruntlement with his fists. When Liz died she was buried in Lone Fir Cemetery, not far from Jim Turk’s grave.