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

  Hale was an eyewitness to the delivery of the two men aboard the Pauline. They were thrown unconscious into bunks in the forecastle. When the ship was at sea, bound for Baltimore, with a month’s wages taken in advance by the shark, they awoke. One victim of the Callao press gang turned into a fair sailor but the other, Pietro Cappo, was anything but a sea dog. He knew nothing of the sea or ships, and he was so nearsighted he could not tell the wheel from the windlass. In broken English he explained that the last thing he remembered was playing his grind-organ in front of a sailors’ boardinghouse where the kindhearted landlord gave him some money and a drink. He woke up on the Pauline, his pockets empty, without his organ, his beloved monkey gone. Cappo used to tear at his curly black hair, sobbing, “Aah, my monka, my monka, he take away!” He would beseech Captain Coburn, “Take-a me back-a! Oh, take-a me back-a!”

  Perhaps the poor Italian organ grinder was a victim of the colorful Callao crimp, Jimmy the Pig. He was a Dane who shanghaied his countryman, Hjalmar Rutzebeck, after seizing his sea bag and chest for three weeks’ board. Jimmy the Pig charged £16 blood money for his victims, delivered aboard ship. (C. O. D.)

  Only forty-two years ago, Attorney Silas B. Axtell wrote an article in the Coast Seamen’s Journal entitled “Crimping in Foreign Ports.” He addressed it to the United States Department of Commerce. Axtell found crimping still rampant in Latin American ports. Seamen seeking a berth on American vessels were forced to pay from one-half to one month’s wages just to get the job. The British Government made some attempts to put a stop to this grafting, but the U.S. Government, at least in Axtell’s opinion, had formed an alliance with the crimps, and American consuls were not keen on protecting Yanqui sailors. In his opinion, the worst ports for crimping during World War I were Valparaiso and Buenos Aires.

  Silas Axtell cited the case of the Kerr Steamship Company vessel Kersan. He claimed that the chief mate beat up a member of the crew, Shelley, in Buenos Aires for getting a berth without paying a ten-spot to the shipping master to whom the captain and mate had “sold” the ship. This modest blood-money demand of $10 does not compare with the extortions of Larry Sullivan and others of twenty years earlier, but it was enough to cause the conviction of the mate in November 1917 and his being presented with a $500 fine and a free but enforced vacation from the sea for six months. The trial judge, Justice Howe, when he examined the records of the New York Shipping Commissioner, found fifteen to twenty men of the Kersan had had from $10 to $35 deducted from their wages as advance notes, for which they secured nothing. The money was split among shipping master, captain, and mate. The Journal editorialized: “We would like to know if they think that a Government, admittedly engaged in a war, is justified even by the exigencies of war to hand our seamen over to the tender mercies of ‘the most despicable class in existence’ “

  Across the wide Pacific in the Orient there was a far-flung handful of boarding masters. Consul General Warren Green mentioned some in Kanagawa, Japan, in 1885. When Captain Nathaniel Browne brought the bark Europa into Whampoa, China, and Hong Kong, all of his crew but three was lured away by crimps. Not all sailors on the beach in China, of course, had been lured there by crimps. Seamen who had been mistreated on shipboard were allowed by American consuls on the China Coast to abandon their ships without forfeiting their wages. But sailors had restrictions placed upon them by treaties with China and were denied normal passport privileges. It was a case of “parental solicitude,” not concern over civil rights, which led the Government to encourage consulates to help seamen in this fashion. The American consuls in China also extended relief to sick, shipwrecked or otherwise distressed Yankee sailors in the Far East, too. Quite a pool of sailors was created in the treaty ports by these desertions.

  Definitely a minority opinion of seamen was that held by the Judge of the Supreme Court in Shanghai in the 1870s. He agreed with most observers that sailors were not of the highest class of men, mentally or morally. But he disagreed sharply with the great majority who felt that Jolly Jack Tar was easily imposed upon, bullied and betrayed. The Justice drew on his Shanghai experience, it is supposed, when he wrote to Lord Shaftsbury in 1873:

  “The ‘noble British tar’ is almost a creature of the past... His place is filled by dissipated, disease-worn men, the victims of vice, who take no pride in either themselves or the ships they are employed in, who are physically and morally unfit for the employment they have obtained and who, in emergencies, are not to be relied upon….

  “I know of no class of men who are more alive to their own interests, more able to make a good bargain for themselves, or to keep themselves clear of being imposed on than seamen.”

  By just what quirk of rationalization His Honor arrived at the latter opinion, we do not know. But from the overwhelming mass of evidence before us we do know that his belief simply was not true, in Shanghai or anywhere else on the globe.

  The shanghaier is no more. He is gone like the roc, the passenger pigeon and the dodo. But unlike these aves, we say of this bird of prey—“Good riddance!” You will not find him stuffed in the Smithsonian. You won’t even find one pickled in toto in the pages of any book (except this one) although he is mentioned often enough, in passing, in many volumes. He was a fearsome phenomenon of mankind’s growing pains in one particular sector; an irritation or affliction of the civilizing process in man and society. The shanghaier was much discussed, like Mark Twain’s weather, but little was done about him.

  There is no one “classic” crimp of all time. They all had similarities but also peculiarities which distinguished one from the other. They were all the most rugged of individualists, from Johnny (Chicken) Devine to Larry Sullivan. And their victims varied as does night from day. A real professional sailor like James H. Williams was just as likely to get himself shanghaied as a green lad like Aquilla Clark. Perhaps the prize for the best all-time “shanghaiee” would go, not to a corpse of Bunco Kelly’s or a cigar-store Indian but to the unnamed but unforgettable Bostonian who was shanghaied four times in quick succession by the same landlord.

  His case was first detailed by the Boston Mercantile Journal and then picked up by the February 1839 Sailors’ Magazine. This sailor boy arrived in Boston from the Baltic in the late 1830s. He put up at a water-front lodging and entrusted his wages to the sailor landlord for safekeeping in his strongbox. Within a fortnight his obliging host had bundled him off to sea, deep in debt, and had secured his advance wages. The sailor returned to Boston without having profited at all by his experience. He went to the same boarding master who, this time, shanghaied him into the U.S. Navy. After serving his time on the U.S.S. Erie, he returned to the same land shark and was again shanghaied out of Boston, dead drunk and broke. Returning from his third shanghai passage, he appeared at first to have outgrown his former stupidity. He refused to drink any grog. But he still handed over his money to the same avaricious landlord. When the idiot sailor asked his avaricious and treacherous host for his money, so that he could buy some clothing, he was told that he was already $20 in debt. When he could not pay up and he refused to sail, the boarding master threw him in jail. After four or five weeks of making little rocks out of big ones, he was happy to be rushed aboard a windjammer by his tried and untrue landlord, who pocketed his $15 advance. When he returned to New England for the fifth time, he was a new man. He kept strictly sober and he refused to put up at the place kept by his nemesis. (He apparently now considered the boarding master somewhat undependable.) But the landlord simply accused him of being $50 in debt to him and successfully attached his wages. No court in the United States in the 1830s would take the word of a sailor against that of a water-front businessman, taxpayer, property owner and voter. Had there been psychiatrists in those dark, dead days the headshrinkers would doubtless have opined that the Boston sailor was “shanghai prone.”

  It would be in bad taste to lament the passing of the shanghaiing breed, though the cr
imps were colorful, fascinating characters. But even those who suffered most under the shanghaier’s demands and exactions, the sailors themselves, could write his obituary not only with pleasure and relief but with an ironic humor. This was the case when Jim Turk, the Tacoma crimp, kicked the bucket in that Puget Sound port in 1895. The Coast Seamen’s Journal ran an eight-stanza poem on Turk which included such sentiment as the following:

  For shipmates he’s got Paddy West,

  And Johnny Doyle and all the rest,

  Who shanghaied crews of gay galoots,

  And shipped them off without sea boots.

  Jim Turk is dead! Long live Jim Turk.

  If he’s rewarded for his work,

  It may be guessed at half a glance,

  He’s got a run and no advance.

  7. “The Red Record”

  ANDY FURUSETH was far too intelligent to imagine that seamen’s rights could be obtained by beating up scabs or by blowing up shanghai boardinghouses. He realized that he and the Union had to win legislative help and widespread public support. Furuseth knew of a tremendous weapon which American trade unions had used sparingly —the power of the press. Andy was firm in his belief that the pen was, indeed, mightier than the sword. But he was not so naive that he thought the newspapers would abandon wealthy friends, advertisers and, perhaps stockholders, to embrace the cause of men who were still considered in many quarters to be Utile more than seaborne tramps. He decided that the Coast Seamen’s Union must have its own paper.

  And so the Coast Seamen’s Journal was born. It later became The Seamen’s Journal and a newspaper which, in the words of Dr. Paul S. Taylor of the University of California, “ranks as one of the leading papers of organized labor... Too much cannot be said of the importance of the work of the Journal on behalf of the Union and the cause of seamen the world over.”

  The Norwegian was lucky. In the Union he had a small core of disciples who were intellectuals like himself—Walter Macarthur, Xaver Leder, Paul Scharrenberg and others. And, surprisingly, the “seagoing tramps” of the Embarcadero rank and file were largely literate. A heavy proportion of the coasting seamen were Scandinavians who had enjoyed a good basic education in their homelands’ common schools before heeding the call of deep water. A few, like Furuseth, were actually well read. This situation, in itself, helps give the lie to the arguments of the anti-seamen’s groups who described sailors as hopeless, ignorant drifters.

  Furuseth had seen how divided his Union could be when pressure was applied on it by shipowners, politicians, crimps, or the police. He envisaged the Journal as a tool for welding the membership together more tightly, by keeping it well informed at all times.

  It is often thought that the dark, stocky Scot, Walter Macarthur, was the first editor of the Journal. Such was not the case. But Macarthur probably did create the famous “Red Record” feature of the paper.

  In 1887 the Coast Seamen’s Union was two years old and had an active membership of 2,000 men. But not one of them had ever written a line for publication. There was, as might be expected, a temptation to hire a trained Journalist to run the Union’s paper, but this suggestion was quashed by the membership, who voted to conduct its newspaper only with members. The weekly Journal would speak with the authentic voice of the seagoing worker. However, conducted by a loosely organized here-today-and-gone-tomorrow bunch of tough hombres, the Journal had predicted for it a short if happy fife, by people who knew the newspaper game.

  The Union organized a publications committee which was charged with the task of selecting an editor. This committee was composed of “Comrades” Furuseth, Hofmeyer, Leder, Harst and Fuhrmann. The committee’s choice was a good one—Xaver H. Leder. Born in Germany, Leder had been educated in a gymnasium there and was a master of both the English and German languages. For a rough sailorman, he also had an unusual skill—a talent for poetry and parody.

  Dozens of striking names for the new periodical were suggested but all of them were thrown out. Considered were such tides as Bosun’s Locker, Man at the Wheel, Spunyarn, The Lookout and The Sheet Anchor. The committee, remembering the dual purpose of the paper, felt that all these salty terms were too technical for the lay reading public they hoped to attract, so they were rejected and the simple and matter-of-fact title, the Coast Seamen’s Journal, was chosen.

  The first number appeared on November 2, 1887. There were many who shuddered when they saw the front page of the first issue. An artist, E. P. Delpet, had been commissioned to draw a cut for the masthead. He had done so, and nobly, sketching anchors and a lighthouse (signifying the Union) on five rocks symbolic of the five ports served by the Union—San Francisco, San Pedro, San Diego, Eureka and Port Townsend. But he had placed a full-rigged ship, under all sail, in the center of the engraving. And this vessel, with its yards and sails all shipped on the after side of the masts, was sailing hell-for-leather, stern-first, for the five rocks! All good seamen groaned at the artist’s ignorance of ships and navigation. And doubtless the Union leaders got goose flesh wondering if the artist’s faux pas should be considered an omen. Editor Leder had to use the cut on the first issue of the paper but in addition to the customary salutatory he ran a note on the clumsy art work—“We hope to succeed in shifting yards, and all on the fore part of the masts, and try to get her to fill the other way before she strikes.”

  The early numbers of the Journal were largely devoted to ventilating the oppressive evils of the twin systems of shanghaiing and buckoism. Contributors were cautious at first and used noms de plume —Old Salt, Rover, Fitz, Nes-Red-Na, Veritas and Cosmos, or initials such as E. C. M. and W. J. M. (Macarthur). But a few bold spirits like John Harst and Black Joe Trewren signed their full names to their pieces. Leder welcomed all contributors and printed as many of their articles as he could. Many of them had to undergo quite a bit of editorial tinkering and bowdlerizing at his hands, for the membership was still more proficient in profanity than in prose. Yet, when the rust was chipped off the built-in intellectualism of many of the men in the Union, they turned into veritable maritime Pindars. So much poetry flooded across Leder’s desk that, as Macarthur later mused, “It began to look as though the Union membership consisted largely of penmen and poets.”

  The earliest issues were all speedily and completely bought up but when the novelty wore off, Leder was faced with the cold, harsh facts of Journalistic life. The paper simply could not pay for itself despite the Herculean efforts of a newly elected business manager. Leder found that he had to present bills on the Journal to Union headquarters. (The editor himself was so poor that he had to carry a spear o’nights in the local stage plays in order to earn beer and sandwich money.)

  It was as clear to Andrew Furuseth as to Leder that voluntary subscriptions alone would not be able to support the Coast Seamen’s Journal. So, boldly, Furuseth and his lieutenants adopted compulsory subscription to the Journal as part of the duties of Union membership. There was a roar of disapproval from the nonreaders, but the edict was pushed through. Furuseth knew that the Journal was one of the best weapons in his arsenal and that it might very well be the secret weapon which would win the sailor’s war against social injustice. He argued that the paper, whether read by all members or not, was conducted in the interests of all members. It benefited all members. The rank and file went along with this, and dues were upped from $6 to $9 per year and the Union assumed the cost of its infant periodical.

  Leder and Furuseth both heeded as much as possible the wishes of the majority of the membership. But they were adamant when attempts were made to get them to turn down advertisements in the Journal for outfitters and boarding masters, “the enemy.” They were once again successful in arguing their position—that the newspaper needed the revenue and that the sailors would be getting back in advertising fees a little of the money which had been sweated out of them by the land sharks. However, ads for saloons were barred on mor
al grounds. There was a surprising amount of teetotaling feeling even among the hard-drinking sailors. Temperance pledges were published in the Journal and wide publicity was given to such news as the schooner Comet’s resolution—“That drunkenness is the greatest enemy of the sailor.”

  After a time, the Coast Seamen’s Journal became quite literary in its own rough-hewn way. For a labor periodical it was practically a combination of the Tatler and Spectator. Leder even satirized crimping in poetry. His “The Raving,” a parody of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.” starred shanghaiers Blind John Curtin and Traitor Carpenter and had such deathless lines as—

  Once upon a midnight dreary,

  While I waited, weak and weary,

  For a crew of scabs which Curtin promised me the day before...

  No wonder that successors of the gifted Xaver Leder, who had a sea gull quothing the “Nevermore!”, found it hard to maintain his high standard of creativity.

  Eventually, the Journal set up a Poet’s Corner which, according to Walter Macarthur, was the first to offer public recognition to Edwin Markham’s Man With a Hoe and Rudyard Kipling’s Ballad of the Bolivar. Serials were run in the Journal, too, and there was also general news of the day. The periodical was marked by variety and catholicity of interest and was anything but the typical parochial labor sheet.