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

  When Captain Raphael Semmes, commander of the Confederate raider Alabama, put into Cape Town, South Africa, during the Civil War, fourteen of his men deserted. Six succumbed to the usual dissipations and debaucheries of a port city and the other eight were seduced by the Yankee Consul into deserting the Rebel cause. Semmes had to have men to get to sea. So he went to a local crimp for help.

  The crimp turned up eleven “volunteers” on the beach, but the British authorities would not let Semmes ship seamen in Cape Town since to crew a warship bent on raiding U.S. commerce was not deemed conducive to continued neutrality. Semmes, however, offered to pay the crimp for eleven “gentlemen-passengers” if they would care to take passage on the Alabama. They did, or at least the crimp, speaking for them, said they would be delighted. The eleven whiskey-reeking “gentlemen” were brought aboard. Semmes paid the crimp their “fares” and the Alabama stood out to sea. Captain Semmes compared his passenger-recruits to Falstaff’s ragged battalion and described them in terms worthy of Wellington—“a precious set of rascals... faithless liars, thieves and drunkards.”

  The Indian Ocean port of Calcutta boasted a refuge for seamen in the Sailors’ Home but it was captured by crimps, if we can believe James H. Williams. Eventually—some time before 1889—it was recaptured from the land sharks for the forces of good by the protector of seamen in that city on the Hooghly, Father Hopkins, the seamen’s chaplain of Calcutta.

  Way Down East, shanghaiing was not common. But there was an incident of it in Nova Scotia in 1899. However, the culprits were not crimps but a ship’s master and his second mate. Captain Banning Blanchard of the Herbert Black was at Bear River, Nova Scotia, a spot which enjoys one of the greatest ranges in tides of the entire world. Twice a day the Herbert Black grounded and finally she strained her seams and began to leak. Blanchard had her towed to Digby Bay to await a crew recruited in Boston. But two successive crews deserted after getting fed up with all-day pumping. The captain, needing a crew desperately in order to get under way, decided to shanghai one. He heard of ten men who were on their way to Yarmouth from Boston to crew the British bark Launberger. Blanchard and his second mate (his chief mate had deserted) boarded the train at Digby and hijacked, or shanghaied, seven of the ten men. A sheriff’s posse came after them without having thought to procure a search warrant, and they were not allowed aboard by Captain Blanchard. They promised to return from Digby with one the next day but Blanchard did not wait. He set sail after dark although his shanghaied crew refused to sign articles and, instead, demanded that the leaking, unseaworthy bark put back to port. Blanchard, who was backed solely by his second mate and cook, ignored their demands and set sail for Argentina. When the Brazilian coast near Pernambuco was sighted, the crew thought they had the captain by the short hairs. They refused to pump.” “Let her sink!” was their answer to his orders. So, like Stout Cortez, Blanchard damaged his boats. Now the only way to survive was for the crew to keep the Herbert Black, now leaking like a colander, afloat. The moment they hit the outer roads of Buenos Aires’ La Plata estuary, however, the shanghaied, palmblistered and aching-muscled Bostonians deserted to a man via any small boat they could halloo alongside.

  Nova Scotia’s neighbor, New Brunswick, had crimps. The 1,000-ton bark, B. Hilton, built in Shelburne, N. S., in 1874, put into St. Johns some years later. She was to load lumber for Liverpool. However, her captain found the harbor clogged with ships whose crews had deserted (egged on by crimps). The men were used to crew other ships short of hands, but there simply were not enough men to go around; there was always a backlog of short-handed ships in the harbor. The captain of the B. Hilton decided to go right to sea when he was ready, not waiting even for the fog to lift. Most of his crew, whom he typified as “the offscourings of the earth,” were drunk and quarrelsome. They had no intention of going to sea and were only waiting for the hook to be let go. Clustered about the bark were small boats waiting to take deserters ashore to boardinghouses. To the chagrin of both crew and runners, the captain did not anchor. He had a towboat haul the B. Hilton out and then gave the order to make sail. The men were afraid to refuse. While they were aloft, shaking out sail, the captain and mate searched the forecastle and confiscated all whiskey and weapons. The men finally mustered up enough courage to mutiny, whereupon the captain cut off their food. He then armed the steward with kettles of boiling water. After three days of enforced diet, seven men marched aft to seize food. They were armed with knives but the captain and mate stood them off with cocked revolvers, only one of which was loaded. The captain hoisted a distress flag which caused a steamer to stop, and the crew agreed to go in her to Halifax. (They hoped to be able to ship out from there and not get in trouble for their mutinous conduct.) But at Halifax, the police came out in a rowboat. They kept the runners’ boats away and arrested the mutineers. The men got six weeks in jail, except for the two ringleaders, who drew sentences of three months each in the Halifax jail.

  Certain inland ports were as infested with crimps as the deepwater towns of the world. This was particularly true of Quebec. The city had practically no seafaring population. Quebeckers much preferred building ships to sailing them. So crimps were needed to crew the ten to one hundred new vessels launched each year in the city. Since ships in the St. Lawrence trade signed their men on for the round trip at British or Continental ports, and thus never, or hardly ever, paid off in the Ontarian port, no supply of seamen came in and crews had to be either recruited in the Maritime Provinces or, unwillingly, pulled in from the streets of Quebec. Pollok, Gilmour and Company used to ship crews of real sailors to Quebec to man their newly built ships but they were the exception. Most of the new bottoms were crewed by novice seamen cajoled or dragged out of the timber trade.

  Sailors were in great demand in Ontario. Their wages rose during the 1820s from £14 to £20 for the run to England. The Quebec Chronicle reported, “Eighteen guineas is now commonly asked for the run; and with this the captain must not only frequently comply but beg and pray to get them aboard.” In 1856 A.B.s were paid £10 per month to man Quebec ships. forecastle hands were making more than mates of large sailing ships elsewhere, who were lucky to get over £7. Some men were receiving more than masters in other trades. By 1870, A.B.s were receiving £12 in wages and £6 advance. No wonder crimps flourished on Champlain Street, to buy and sell sailors like bullocks.

  One sailors’ boardinghouse was called the Strop and Block. In front of it was a signboard reading:

  Brother Sailor, I pray thee stop,

  And give me a hand to strop this block,

  For if you will not heed my call,

  I cannot strop this block at all.

  Captain Alfred H. Durkee, master of the Balclutha, now the flagship of the San Francisco Maritime Museum’s fleet, remembered well the antics of the crimps, whom he described as “rogues.” Durkee recalled that a Quebec crimp, in the grand tradition, put a corpse aboard a ship, taking the new man directly to his bunk and collecting blood money and an advance for him.

  Jim Ward and Mike Huck were two of the better-known crimps of Quebec. Masters and mates fought to keep their crews but the runners would board ships in the St. Lawrence and would hold up the ships’ officers with pistols, then either bribe or force the crews to leave. The crews usually needed little in the way of threats or even urging after gulping down the whiskey offered so freely by the runners. Loyal men who stuck by their ship and its officers were beaten or even shot.

  Shipowners and masters protested, of course, but the crimps had political pull. When local authorities mildly scolded one Quebec shipping master, he answered, “Well, if it wasn’t for us, how would you get your ships across to Europe? Isn’t it better for us to get one or two sailors out of each ship to man your new vessel than for you to go to the expense of bringing crews from England? You are getting your ships away without delay and we are running the risks of the business and doing the dirty wor
k.”

  A small force of about twenty-five police tried to patrol the ten-mile-long water front and its three or four hundred ships, but they took little action against the crimps. Masters and mates took matters into their own hands, of course, dropping grindstones, kentledge and anvils into crimps’ small boats when they came alongside. One captain, in May 1872, was insulted and knocked down on the water-front steps by a crimp. He fell near a ship’s carpenter’s chest, grabbed a broadax and, with a mighty swing, almost cut the crimp in two at the waist. The crimps and runners swore vengeance, but the shipmaster surrendered to sympathetic police and he was later smuggled down to Farther Point Pilot Station and put aboard an outboard ship.

  On one occasion Captain George W. Haws of the Calista Haws grabbed a nasty crimp by the seat of the pants and threw him overboard into the river. The sodden crimp swam about till he encountered someone willing to pick him up. He made no further attempt to board the Calista Haws. However, in May 1855, a gang of crimps boarded the ship Sir Harry Smith at Point Levis to secure the duffel of a sailor who had deserted to them. The eight crimps attacked the captain, the same George W. Haws, and his brother, Richard. They beat the two men brutally with slung shots. The runaway sailor and one crimp were later arrested but the others got away.

  William Davie was alone one day in the cabin of his ship, which lay close to the G. T. Davie and Son’s shipyard at Levis, when a party of crimps forced their way aboard. Davie picked up a rifle as they stormed his cabin but, instead of firing on them, he used it as a club. He was soon overpowered and when his dockyard men arrived they found that the crimps had spread-eagled him and had hauled their victim up and down the poop ladder. The steps injured his back so badly that he never recovered. His friends shook their heads sadly over his reluctance to shoot into the land sharks. If he had even leveled the rifle on them, he would have held them off, they were sure.

  Henry Fry was outstanding in his opposition to the Quebec crimps. This shipowner and Lloyds of London agent fought them virtually single-handed at the risk of his life. Finally, in 1873, when Fry was President of the Dominion Board of Trade, he organized a meeting of business and shipping men to discuss crimping. A resolution was passed which read: “The crimping system as carried on in Quebec is a scandal and a disgrace, not only to the city of Quebec, but to the whole Dominion, and the Dominion Government should take energetic measures for its suppression.” Public attention to crimping brought effective laws and it became a penitentiary offense in Canada. However, just as in San Francisco or New York, it was not so much effective laws or an enlightened public but the fading of sail and the decline of windship building which ended crimping. During the 1870s the number of ships built on Quebec ways dwindled and the ruffians of Champlain Street went elsewhere for their prey.

  Across the Dominion from Quebec lay Victoria, B. C., a small-scale London, even to its crimps. Hjalmar Rutzebeck, a young Dane whose alias was Svend Norman, deserted from the German hellship Osterbeck in Victoria only to be drugged in a water-front pub and shanghaied aboard the Tarpenbeck, sister ship of the vessel he had just quit. Six other men were shanghaied aboard the Antofagasta-bound ship: a Norwegian sailor, two Polish laborers, a Latin American mulatto and two Texas cowboys.

  Honolulu had a lot of sailor-deserters perennially on the beach, thanks to the charms of its climate and its lovely vahines. The Friend, as early as October 1, 1850, was blasting shipmasters for also throwing useless, worn-out seamen on shore. The paper cited the case of a one-legged Portuguese from the Azores, dropped by a Yankee vessel, and a lascar off a British ship, who was minus both legs. In the case of the Portuguese, the Friend stated, “No U.S. officer, commodore or consul has the power to send him home or to a port in the United States, or even to pay a penny for his support. This is wrong! It is unjust! It is inhuman! American vessels ought not to be allowed to induce foreign seamen to ship under the U.S. flag unless the law protects and provides for them when sick and disabled.” Not being an American citizen, the Portuguese could get no help from the American consul, although on the bookshelf of the Consulate stood the Manual For Consuls with its specific charge—“One essential object of the consular appointment is the protection of American mariners—a class of our fellow citizens whose habits of life require a kind guardianship of their persons and interests in foreign countries, but at the same time a strict vigilance over their conduct.”

  In Honolulu the unfortunate loophole in the protective American law led to the formation of a Ladies’ Strangers’ Friend Society, which tried to help foreign sailors who had deserted or who had been run off their ships in Hawaii. But in 1861, although the Portuguese was clerking in a small store on Nuuanu Street, the legless Indian sailor was still dragging himself through Honolulu’s streets as a beggar.

  In 1899 there was little crimping in Honolulu. When four men jumped from a ship there the police quickly caught two of them and handed them back to their captain. But the very next year saw a crimping organization set up, with runners boarding vessels and offering to run the crews off for only $150 per man. Fifty dollars of this would be kicked back to agreeable captains. Since the crimp would collect advances when the deserters next shipped out, he could spare the pay-off money to conniving officers. But the crimps were met with angry refusals and had to try a new dodge. They got the crew of a vessel to bring action against her master, Captain Griffith. The ship was libeled and it cost the captain $209. 40 to get her away from port.

  In New Zealand, Shanghai Jensen held forth in his place in Auckland called the Kaipara. P. A. Eaddy mentioned him in his reminiscences.

  As for New South Wales, both Newcastle and Sydney had their share of crimps. The Sydney Morning Herald of August 17, 1906, carried a story on their cruel treatment of sailors in Australian ports. In a debate in the New South Wales Parliament at about the same time, it was claimed that 70 percent of the boarding masters and saloonkeepers of Sydney’s Watt Street and environs were involved in the crimping or shanghaiing of sailors.

  South America was a hotbed of shanghaiing. Conditions in some of the wild and woolly port cities below the Equator could be equated with those in the frontier cattle or mining towns of the old West. The U.S. Consul stationed in one of Brazil’s ports in 1884 spoke of the prevailing practice—“When men cannot be had in the regular way, they are shanghaied, as it is called. The modus operandi, more or less, is this: The man is drugged or made intoxicated and in this state taken on shipboard at night or, in other words, kidnaped. There are several aggravated cases at this port….”

  Mike Russell was an American crimp in Rio de Janeiro. Aquilla Ernest Clark, shanghaied in Portland, Oregon, put up at Russell’s house when he arrived in Rio. In comparing Russell with Jim Turk, Bunco Kelly and Larry Sullivan in terms of shanghaiing ability, Clark rated the three Pacific Northwest crimps as “novices.” Russell had killed a U.S. Marine, accidentally it was said, while trying to shanghai him. The death occurred in a scuffle in which Russell jabbed an umbrella in the marine’s eye. But, like a surprising number of his breed, Mike Russell enjoyed the reputation of being a square-shooter. He had an affable air and a pleasant manner. He took Clark into his boardinghouse, an old Portuguese residence surrounded by a high stone wall. He gave him clothing and was kind to him. He did not even shanghai Clark. But he did persuade him to join a segment of the Brazilian Navy in a revolution against the Government. The rebellion collapsed and Clark was about to face a firing squad when the influential Mr. Russell interceded for him and saved his life.

  According to P. A. Eaddy, author of Hull Down, Nigger Thompson was the worst shanghaier of Valparaiso, Chile. In Antofagasta, the top land shark was Paul the Diver. In Iquique, Chile, in 1906, shanghaied seamen were worth ninety pesos a head. At Pisagua, Chile, the famous Chilean brandy, Pisco (the moment of truth in the Barbary Coast’s traditional Pisco Punch) was doped for sailors. The British Isles had not a whit of trouble in obtaining fourteen me
n from the crimps of that miserable port in 1906. Hjalmar Rutzebeck stated that the most prominent crimp of Pisagua around that time was Johnnie the Rogue. He may well have been the entrepreneur who supplied the British Isles. Like all the other crimps in Latin America, he worked hand in glove with the policia. The underpaid gendarmerie accepted their bite (mordida), or bribe, and suddenly could see no evil, hear no evil, on the Pisaguan water front.

  Information on Callao comes in part from the apocryphal account of Herbert Hamblen. According to him, a man named Green ran a low sailors’ boardinghouse there, and a nearby dive, Yellow Jake’s, also preyed on seamen. Little force was necessary to get a fellow to ship out of Callao, Peru, however. He would be only too happy to put as much distance between himself and the hellish guano piles called the Chincha Islands, even if it meant signing away his wages for months. Crimping must have been a profitable business when fleets of Yankee clippers soiled themselves with the filthy Peruvian nitrate cargoes. John Cooney, one of the blacklegs run out of San Francisco by the Vigilantes in 1855 after the murder of James King of William, fled to Callao where he soon was keeping a boardinghouse. He remained in this business only eight months but kept his interest in the house and still was part owner in 1859 when he showed up again in Frisco.

  Richard Lund Hale, a forty-niner from New England, visiting Callao Roads on July 17, 1854, wrote home of the disturbing conditions there: “There is a most unjust and wicked practice here on the Pacific Coast and I believe it is resorted to in European countries!— the impressment of men as sailors. We have two examples of this cruel custom aboard ship [the Pauline]... These men [crimps] are merciless rascals who fill their orders and secure men in any manner in which they can get hold of them... One ship put to sea from Callao with a crew supposed to be composed of able first-class seamen. But, on being mustered, it was found there were but two fit for duty. The others were gathered from all kinds of professions and trades, including even an ex-lawyer and a schoolteacher, while the rest were laborers. The greater number were carried on the ship unconscious—drunk or drugged.”