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

  Occasionally Oregon’s crimps erred in their shanghaiing. They enticed a young fellow, George Banks, aboard a ship in the Columbia River one day on the promise of delivering to him some dynamite for a railroad blasting project in which he was engaged. When he was aboard he discovered that he had been shanghaied. Banks, whose friends called him “The Dynamite Kid.” reached into a pocket and pulled out some detonation caps. “You ain’t goin’ to shanghai me! I’ll blow you to hell, first,” he advised them. The prudent crimps soon surrendered the ship to him and he took it upriver to his camp, unloaded the dynamite, and paid for it.

  In the Cedarbank case too, the crimps picked a tartar. Captain R. F. Batchelor, afraid that the municipal, police, and justice courts were bought up by the crimps, got the U.S. Marshal to arrest some of his men who had been enticed to desert. The men were rounded up at Sullivan and Grant’s boardinghouse and marched back to their ship. Grant got the sheriff to take them off again after a meeting in a justice of the peace’s office where, according to Batchelor, “the honorable J. P. and the crimp arranged matters in a back room.” For his part, Batchelor had the U.S. Court arrest the sheriff and constable who removed the deserters from the ship. The charge was interference with a U.S. marshal in the execution of an order of the U.S. Court. Batchelor’s motives in harassing Grant and Sullivan were clear. “I made up my mind to spare no pains to retain my crew. I at first hoped to do this in a quiet way but, seeing that all the vessels in port acted thus and were almost completely stripped of their crews, I considered it high time to stop the crimps having everything their own way.”

  When the Germans joined the French and British in battling the crimps, Larry M. Sullivan passed the word around to put the “kibosh” on German Consul O. Lohan. Lohan was backing up the demand of Captain H. Bruhn of the Elbe that Sullivan be arrested for conspiring to get Bruhn’s crew to desert. If they did not drop the case, threatened Sullivan, he would take every last living man off the Elbe; he would come with a boat and clear the damned ship out. Publicly, however, he later claimed, “These men deserted of their own accord. I was on the dock when they came off but I used no improper or illegal influence. The boatswain led the way. He threw out the gangplank. He left because he was not satisfied with the treatment he received on board. He is an American citizen.” Sullivan told the press. “There he is, in the next room.” Peter Grant added his pious two bits by proclaiming, “We respect the property rights of ships. We did not go on the ship. We did not instigate the deserters at all. Can we be blamed for the desire of the men to go ashore?” He began to warm to his subject. “Yes, we expect to get the censure and condemnation of the public in this case. But if the public only knew the actual conditions of this business, it would not be so ready to raise its voice against us. The public labors under misinformation. If it would stop to consider, it would not blame sailors for deserting the hard life on a ship, nor would it censure us in our business.”

  The Portland Oregonian was playing it cozy and doing no crusading. It reported however, “It is not known whether Sullivan’s threat had anything to do with the wholesale desertion or not. All that is positively known is that the delivery took place, that the ship was cleaned out of sailors almost as slick as a whistle, and that Sullivan was on hand with a boat to take them away. He denies, however, that he is responsible for their desertion and declares they went ashore of their own free will.”

  As for Lohan and Bruhn, according to the Oregonian it was Consul Lohan who was ready to grapple with Sullivan (and Sullivan knew it). It was not Bruhn. Of the latter the newspaper commented, “He has had his fingers singed before in troubles with boardinghouse people in different parts of the world, and is chary of any more imbroglios with them.”

  Things slowly improved in Portland, far more slowly than in other havens. The new factors of steam, unionization, legislation, and public opinion finally took effect and the crimps were out. But Spider Johnson told Stewart Holbrook in 1934 that there was still four shanghaiing gangs in the port in 1917. Captain P. A. McDonald recalls today that when he was captain of the four-masted bark Moshulu, loading on the Columbia River for South Australia, he had to engage Shanghai White, “a man of evil repute,” in order to get a crew. This was in 1927 and 1928. But, at least, slugging and drugging were no longer de rigueur among the shipping masters of the Columbia and Willamette.

  The word “crimp” is said to be of German origin, coming from krimmen—to rage or gripe—but it has been associated through history far more with English and American ports than German havens. It must be remembered that not all boarding masters or shipping masters were crimps, of course. Some managed to stay in business without resorting to the gangster tactics of the shanghaiers. Not all crimps were colorful men like Patch-Eye Curtin of Frisco nor were all runners vicious. Such fine men as Tom Crowley of San Francisco were boatmen for crimps in the old days. Crimping was a business fifty years ago and a highly profitable one, at that.

  In England, impressment of naval seamen and crimping of merchant sailors were twin traditional evils, like gin and vice, poverty and crime. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the term “crimp” in current usage in Britain by 1758—“When a master of a ship hath lost any of his hands, he applies to a crimp who makes it his business to seduce the men belonging to some other ship.”

  There are at least two synonyms for crimping—trepanning and shanghaiing. The first term, which actually signifies perforating the skull in surgery, was in use in 1796 when John G. Stedman in his Expedition to Surinam reported on men “trepanned into the West India Company’s service by the crimps.” When Captain Marryat wrote his famous Midshipman Easy in 1836 (“offering three guineas a head to the crimps for every good able seaman”) the term “trepanning” was disappearing, “crimping” was holding its own, and “shanghaiing” was still awaiting the California Gold Rush in order to be coined.

  In 1844, James Murray of the British Foreign Office proposed the establishment of a Board of Commercial Marine. Early in that year this proposal was put to the Board of Trade. It was not then adopted but there was some legislation over crimping as a result, and crimps were licensed by an act of 1845. By British laws of 1835, 1845, and 1850, no seaman was allowed to go to sea without signing articles. But many made last-minute pierhead jumps and many others were shanghaied despite the law.

  Washington Irving, Carlyle, Macaulay, Southey and many other writers used the terms “crimp” and “crimping,” and, of course, the newspapers often carried stories on the subject. The practice was such a long-lived one that acceptance of the term into the language was virtually guaranteed. (Surely one of the most premature, or optimistic, papers on record was the Hull Advertiser which lamented on September 26, 1795, “We are sorry to find that the infamous practice of crimping is not yet put a stop to.” Even with all the work of the Missions to Seamen, the Apostleship of the Sea, the British Sailors’ Society, the Shipwrecked Mariners’ Society and the Sailors’ Homes—Prince Albert himself personally opened the Home in Liverpool—it would take more than a century to rid Britain and the world of crimps.)

  The Weekly Political Review singled out the prime requisite for success in shanghaiing when it referred to the “men who do not possess the necessary rascality for crimping.” The infinitive “to shanghai” was born late in the long, if not honorable, profession of crimping. It was created in San Francisco about 1850, and Father Taylor, the street preacher, was one of the first to put it into print. Within twenty years it was solidly imbedded in the English language, indicated by a news story in the New York Tribune of March 1, 1871, which ended—“and before that time they would have been drugged, shanghaied, and taken away from all means of making complaint.”

  Crimps were everywhere in Britain; everywhere there were ships laden with cargo or simply ballast and fleas, everywhere that salt water licked at pilings. In Holborn in 1858 a mob assembled for the happy purpose of pulling down a crimping hous
e, for example.

  In Liverpool, Barney Houlihan was a boarding master of Denison Street. According to C. R. Benstead, the Barbary Coast’s Mike Connor was imitated by another Liverpool crimp who forced his recruits to walk around a bullock’s horn so he could “truthfully’’ tell captains that his men had, indeed, been around the Horn. An American crimp of Liverpool, in spite of his name, was John da Costa. (Or perhaps the Portuguese just catered to gringos.) Bill Coffman, shanghaied out of Frisco himself, remembers still the sailor boardinghouses which lined both shores of Paradise Street, Duke Street and Park Lane when he was in Liverpool long ago.

  William Brown Churchward, who wrote Blackbirding in the South Seas, had a Negro servant, John King Bruce, who was the first “white” man on the beach in Samoa. He had been shanghaied originally in Liverpool, put on board the Yankee bark Eneas B. Slowman, then shanghaied from her and onto a rotten old “junk” supposedly bound for Montevideo, Uruguay. Instead, she ran alongside the U.S.S. Rappahannock (or so claimed Churchward) and the Negro was shanghaied into the U.S. Navy for a tour of duty in South Pacific waters.

  The hard-working United States Consul in Liverpool during the Civil War was Thomas H. Dudley. On December 24, 1861, the State Department sent him a dispatch asking how expenditures for destitute seamen might be reduced in that port. Dudley gave the query a lot of thought and replied on March 6, 1862. He had no quick cures for the problem, but he did recommend strongly the arrest of seamen-deserters and of officers guilty of assault. He wanted sailors’ contracts to be legally and voluntarily made and to be rigidly enforced. He wished to see shipping masters licensed and forced to post bond. Among his observations were the following:

  “One chief cause of existing evils is undoubtedly the scarcity of seamen, which is itself partly the result of the next chief cause, the system of shipping seamen and paying advances…. A great part of the trouble and discomfort on board ships, and the consequent desertion and destitution of seamen, is attributable to the inferior quality of the crew and officers. The officers are rarely much, if at all, superior to the men they are placed over either in character or ability; consequently they exercise but a feeble moral control and are obliged to substitute for it a physical coercion, often amounting to a reign of terror, as might be expected under such circumstances.

  “Under the present system, seamen are shipped by unauthorized persons of low character whose sole aim is to make the largest immediate profit out of the transaction. With that object, the advances to seamen are kept up and but a small part falls to the seaman, the shipping master and the boardinghouse keeper generally managing to appropriate the greater part. The details of this system of kidnaping, cheating, drugging and selling men, as previously practiced in New Orleans under the term of ‘shipping’ and at the present time in a modified form in New York and other ports of the Union, are perfectly revolting and leave room for little or no surprise that decent men shun the service.

  “It is well known that in two cases out of three, if not in nine cases out of ten, the names on the duplicate articles presented for clearance are altogether fictitious, and the crew not shipped until afterwards. The whole thing is managed by the shipping master, the master of the vessel rarely seeing the men until he goes on board to get the ship under way and then finds most of them helpless or stupid with drink or drugging.

  “When sail has to be made the men are roused to duty, which frequently requires some strong persuasion. Most of the men shipped as able seamen are incapable of doing seamen’s duty; those who have are drunk and have been cheated of their advance and are, consequently, sullen and discontented…. Some are shipped voluntarily, tempted by the large advance, but by far the greater number have been what is called ‘Shanghaied,’ that is, deceived by pretenses of shipping as deck hands, assistant to the cook or steward, passenger cooks, and the like, or made drunk or drugged.

  “In these cases, of course, the advance, sometimes amounting to two months’ wages, is appropriated by the shipping master or boardinghouse keeper, and it is easy to perceive that it thus becomes their interest to ship such persons because good steady seamen cannot be so easily cheated.

  “Among them are some who are called Blackballers, men of the most depraved character, capable of any sort of thieving and violence. These consider the incapable fair game, and plunder and abuse them accordingly.

  “It is not at all uncommon for men to arrive here [Liverpool] shoeless and half-clad, offensive beyond expression from accumulated filth. They are largely in arrears to the vessel for the advance paid to the shipping master so that they can obtain no further advance to buy clothes and, glad to escape a state of experienced and intolerable misery, they desert, and what wonder is it?”

  Johnny Karlson was another man who knew the crimps of Paradise Street. Karlson, later caretaker of Pier 20 in San Francisco, was shanghaied in Liverpool in 1876 aboard the ill-fated Britisher Ocean King. She caught fire in mid-ocean and was abandoned. Karlson and his mates took to the boats and made it safely to the Marquesas.

  Other men who commented on the shanghaiers of Liverpool were Herman Melville and U.S. Consul Ogden of that port who, in 1836, noted the rapid turnover of American crews there, yet the lack of new faces. The ships always got the same men. They were enticed off vessels even when they were leaving the dock or were out in the Mersey itself. Melville, in his novel Redburn, offered a picture of Liverpool during the booming days of the New York packet ships. “Of all seaports in the world, Liverpool perhaps most abounds in all the variety of land-sharks, land-rats and other vermin which make the helpless mariners their prey. In the shape of landlords, barkeepers, clothiers, crimps and boarding house loungers, the land-sharks devour him, limb by limb, while the land-rats and mice constantly nibble at his purse.

  “Other perils he runs also, far worse, from the denizens of notorious Corinthian haunts in the vicinity of the docks, which, in depravity are not to be matched by anything this side of the pit which is bottomless.

  “And yet, sailors love this Liverpool….”

  In Newcastle, the Black Diamond boardinghouse, according to P. A. Eaddy, was a shanghaiing resort. Here a pal and shipmate of Eaddy’s, named Billy, had his drinks doped. When he woke up, he was in the bottom of a small boat near the Dyke Ferry Landing on his way out to a full-rigged German ship.

  Crimps in Hull included one who, like Liverpool’s Johnny da Costa, specialized in handling Yanks. He was called One-Eyed Melvin or Prussian Jack Melvin. U.S. Consular Reports from Hull in the nineteenth century abound with such statements as the following, on sailors: “Upon arrival here they are in debt to the ships and, aided by the crimps and not opposed by the officers, they desert.” Many shanghaied American seamen were dumped in Hull to fall prey, all over again, to the land sharks. The American Consul there in 1884 reported to Washington on the sorry crews being paid off, lured ashore, or run off in Hull. “The wheat ships arriving at this and other ports from San Francisco are manned by the most worthless set of men.” He mentioned in particular the Reaper, Solitaire, Tarn O’Shanter, and Amy Turner. On each of these vessels, only two or three men could be trusted at the wheel, though good blood money ($15 to $20) had been paid for each. Most of the deserters at Hull were green landsmen who were innocent victims of the system of advances and allotments which the Consul termed “a complete swindle.” After the San Francisco crimps took their advance, “the men were put on board without clothing and, according to many of them, in a state of intoxication and without their consent.”

  The story of London crimping is a whole book in itself, but the facts must still be dug up from musty old records in Britain. Sailors were rolled and/or shanghaied in the East End, Soho, on Ratcliffe Highway, in Whitechapel, in Aldgate—all despite the efforts of Rev. R. C. (Boatswain) Smith and others like him. He founded the Well Street Sailors’ Home in 1835. James F. Stewart, Superintendent of the San Francisco Sailors’ Home, admired
and praised Smith, for “his main idea was to rescue the sailor from the shark landlord.” He and his followers had some help from the authorities in London. The Morning Star of January 7, 1868, carried a story on the Thames River police who were engaged in defending Poor Jack from the machinations of the crimps.

  On the Continent, various French and German ports supported crimps, but they were not so infested as were Britannia’s harbors. In Hamburg, the British Vice Consul found that shipping masters and boarding masters were not the close allies they were in the States or in England. He found it possible in German ports to “check the exactions,” as he put it, of the more rapacious boardinghouse keepers by getting the major shipping agent to refuse to take men from them until they lowered their demands. He stated that “in the United States the crimps have a keener sense of their interests; at most ports the two classes appear to work in complete harmony; often, indeed, the same individual performs a double function.” But such was not the case of the Elbe River port.

  Bill Coffman’s old shipmate, Fitz, was slugged and robbed in Antwerp. He took refuge, or so he thought, in a sailors’ boardinghouse. The owner agreed to find him a berth on a coasting vessel. Instead, Fitz woke up one morning to find himself aboard the old slow coach Peter Iredale in the Scheldt, heading for the English Channel, Cape Horn and Portland, Oregon. The four-poster went ashore at Clatsop Spit, just south of the Columbia River bar, and is still there. Her metal hull, which any tourist on the Oregon Coast may readily visit, is a strange monument to the days of buckoism and shanghaiing.

  Le Havre had an American crimp, Harry Lynch, plus others of more Gallic mien. Thanks to the tight control of seamen in the port of Le Havre, incidentally, a dangerous assassin was captured in October 1864. Jean Baptiste Troppman, murderer of the entire Kinck family, was arrested in a sailors’ drinking house at 57 Rue Royale by a marine gendarme whose normal duty was to drive tardy sailors aboard their ships at night.