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

  For the next seven years Furuseth sailed on a number of Norwegian, Swedish, French, British, and American ships. He changed his name to Andrew. He probably put in some time on the Newfoundland Banks, fishing. He became a real deepwater sailor with the customary distrust—amounting to scorn—for steamships and their so-called seamen. He was a windjammer man and he considered crewmen on steam vessels as seagoing clerks, machinists and laborers—but sailors? Never! By the time Andrew Furuseth was twenty-six years old, he knew the world though he saw it mostly from the porthole of a crowded, clammy forecastle. But he also saw it from the printed page. Andy Furuseth always had his nose poked into a book. He may have been called “Professor” by his shipmates, but this strange introspection and the long hours of brooding by “the Professor” on night watch would one day make free men of them.

  When he was twenty-six, Furuseth jumped ship, as so many had done before him, to have a good look at Frisco. But Furuseth took root. It was August 1880. He found himself a sailor’s boardinghouse and continued to sail in deepwater vessels but always returned “home.” In 1883, according to his old friend, Silas B. Axtell, he jumped ship in Tacoma, Washington, from a British barkentine. He was pursued by men with bloodhounds, as though he were a fugitive murderer. He gave them the slip but he never forgot the feeling of injustice at being hunted down by men and dogs like an animal—for being a sailor.

  In 1885, to escape from the clutches of his land-shark boarding master, he packed his duffel and moved to a rooming house at 26 Steuart Street occupied entirely by Scandinavian sailors. Immediately, the power of the crimps in San Francisco was made clear to him. When he had gone along with the boarding master of his house, he had had “chances” (job offers) without interruption or difficulty over a period of four years. When he broke with the land shark, he found himself walking the beach for six long weeks without a berth. Unlike most of his kind, Furuseth neither surrendered nor did he confine his resentment at “the system” to ranting and raving in forecastle and water-front saloon. The tough Norwegian from Romedal decided to do something about it. Treated like a pariah in the oceangoing trade, he became a coasting sailor and fisherman. The pay was better, in any case, and as a Columbia River salmon fisherman there was always the chance of pulling down some real money on shares. Since almost 90 percent of the men in the coasting trade were Scands, he felt right at home. Besides going north with the fishing fleet, Furuseth shipped before the mast on the lumber schooners which crowded San Francisco Bay.

  But this was not a surrender. Furuseth began, step by step, his fight against “the system.” As Robert La Follette said, “He could not abandon his beloved sea calling and he would not submit to slavery... In all the years of this historic struggle for human liberty, which finally culminated with President Wilson’s signing of the Seamen’s Law, March 4, 1915, Andrew Furuseth was the one man who had faith, the vision, and the courage necessary to sustain the contest. He launched the movement. He kept it afloat... [he] brought it safely into port.”

  Not only greatness, but even leadership itself, would have to be thrust upon Furuseth. He had none of that brutish ego which made for good mates and good boatswains in the days of nineteenth-century sailing. He was too introspective, too educated, too intellectual. But, you did not mess around with Furuseth or you would regret it. He was tall, over six feet, well built and tough as a boot. He had never been a bosun but he had acted in that capacity more than once. He had thick and long flowing hair framing a face dominated by a beak of a nose, and the piercing eyes and high cheekbones, not of a Norseman but of an American Indian; although President William Green of the A. F. of L. would, much later, typify him as “physically the replica of an old Viking.” He was a born leader, if an unwilling one at first. He had no desire to assume the natural leadership of his fo’c’sle. His roughhousing comrades could not understand his interest in reading and thinking and even—rare in a stinking forecastle—meditating. Their interests were simple and basic—women and booze, booze and women. And payday. Furuseth hungered for knowledge. If Abe Lincoln lay before the fireplace studying his books, Andy Furuseth hunkered up in his bunk to catch the feeble light thrown by the forecastle lamp and puzzled his way through books which should have been over his head. He was a fo’c’sle philosopher though he would have laughed at the pomposity of the term, along with his mates. Andrew Furuseth was a man of reason in a jungle-like society, where men were driven to work and clubbed to duty.

  On March 4, 1885, the sailors of San Francisco were shocked when news came that monthly wages for hands would be cut down to $20 for inside ports—Frisco, Tacoma, Seattle and so forth—and to $25 for outside ports—the choppy little, exposed, open ports or dogholes at such lumbering towns as Mendocino City or Albion. The seamen refused to accept this decision but they did not know how to take action to fight it. They vented their wrath in vituperative bull sessions on the wharves. They aired their gripes but did little else about them. They did take one effective step. They persuaded other crews to desert their vessels because of the wage cut. They were not yet well-enough organized even to attempt a formal strike.

  With the seamen floundering about helplessly, it was easy—as has often been the case in American labor history—for radicals to seize leadership. Sigismund Danielwicz, a coasting sailor of sorts but mainly a socialist of the IWA (International Workmen’s Association), just back from a bit of Hawaiian labor agitation, urged the angered seamen to meet on the Folsom Street Wharf on the evening of March 6, 1885. Several hundred curious or irate sailors, plus the usual hangers-on and a sprinkling of lost drunks, found their way there to hear a series of IWA speakers, mounted on lumber piles, pounding home the message “Organize! Organize!” It was so dark the audience could not even see the speaker’s faces, but they liked what they heard. When they were asked to dig into the pockets of their dungarees in order to help hire the Irish-American Hall for the night of March 7, two hundred and twenty men did so, contributing $34. 60. (Times were hard and pockets low in 1885.) The beginnings made amid the piles of redwood and fir were consolidated at this second meeting of the infant Coast Seamen’s Union, where a commendable resolution was passed—that no owner, captain, boardinghouse keeper or professional politician should ever be allowed to join, or even attend a meeting of, the union.

  A few days later, the radical, Burnette G. Haskell, leader of the IWA in San Francisco, grabbed the helm. He and his cohorts prepared and submitted a constitution and by-laws for the four hundred and fifty-six members of the new union. They were accepted. The Coast Seamen’s Union then took its first action. It struck at Frisco’s shanghaiing land sharks. A boycott was declared on all crimps’ boardinghouses which shipped nonunion men.

  The language of the preamble of the constitution reflects Haskell’s thinking, “We find each year that not only our own condition as seafaring men grows worse and worse but that the same is true of all other branches of honorable toil, the workers sink into poverty while the idlers pile up the millions….” The constitution itself provided for regular, weekly meetings; a union representative, to be elected by the crew, on each vessel so that reports on conditions of work could be filed with the union; a black list of all persons and places considered detrimental to the union; patrolmen who covered the six beats laid out on the Embarcadero and who were to board every incoming ship to check union cards. The union would not only provide uniforms for its members for parades but would arm them “in view of their rights as American citizens to bear arms,” as volunteer forces to protect American liberties when they were menaced from home or from abroad. (Here Haskell’s fuzzy militaristic socialism is evident.) Members might not ship out via clothing houses or by the boarding masters’ shipping office, but only through the union. Union wages were fixed and members took an oath: “I pledge my honor as a man that I will be faithful to this Union until death. That I will work for its interests and will look upon every member as my brother. That I will not w
ork for less than Union wages and that I will obey all orders of the Union. I promise that I will never reveal the proceedings of the Union to its injury and to people who have no right to the same. And if I break this promise, I ask every brother here to treat me as a rascal, unworthy of friendship or acquaintance. So help me God!”

  On March 11, the sailors gathered again, this time to elect officers. George Thompson, who had “chaired” the alfresco meeting on Folsom Wharf, was elected President, and Rasmus Nielson, Secretary. The real control of the union, however, did not rest with these sailormen. It was firmly in the hands of the clever and experienced Socialist International Advisory Committee which, thanks to Haskell, was required in the constitution. This politburo for the Coast Seamen’s Union was composed of Burnette Haskell, Danielwicz, James J. Martin, P. Ross Martin and Martin Schneider. They called most of the shots from union headquarters, which was in their own IWA office at 6 Eddy Street.

  The next two months saw the sailors fighting the shipowners in an attempt to prevent them from shipping crews at the reduced wages. Colored seamen and deepwater sailors were welcomed into the union but few of the latter joined. The Coast Seamen’s Union learned that, although they had 2, 200 of the 3, 500 coasting sailors signed up, their control was not tight enough to win. Many union men, through force of habit or force of the crimps, continued to ship via the Coasting Boarding Masters’ Association houses. Luckily, many coasting sailors were out at the time, including Furuseth. Their absence on the fishing grounds kept the supply of forecastle labor low and tended to keep wages from dropping out of sight. But the battle ended in little better than a draw, and certainly in no victory for the seamen.

  The real crusade of American merchant seamen was not simply over wages, of course, as might have been the case with draymen or foundry workers. Theirs was a much more basic fight, for civil rights. They had to throw off the bonds of serfdom placed on them centuries before by the age-old crimping system ashore and by tyrannical work conditions afloat. The union struck out immediately in an attempt to wrest control of the labor force from the bloodsucking boarding masters and crimps, who were absolute masters of the destiny of every sailor, from the hoary old salt with thirty years’ experience to the greenest ship’s boy or apprentice. Less than a month after it was organized, the union had set up its own shipping office at 7 Spear Street, with Ed Crangle in charge. Crangle was also union boatman, in command of the CSU’s Whitehall, the Union, the largest on the bay. Thus San Francisco led the way in creating the first shipping master in the world chosen by the seamen of the port themselves. The union appointed a committee which called upon the thirty major shipowners. All but two of them were won over to the union shipping office by the argument that by shipping their men there, and avoiding the crimps’ blood-money “tax,” their sailors would be better off financially and much less likely to strike. (The owners later went back on this agreement, if it was ever that solid a commitment, and warred with the union.) The next step was also directed at the crimps who had turned prominent union men out of their boardinghouses into the streets. The Coast Seamen’s Union, at Furuseth’s old Scandinavian boardinghouse on Steuart Street, opened its own rooming house, called “the Straw House” for the donkey-breakfast mattresses it could only afford. Arrangements were made with the Anchor Restaurant to board the tars for a reasonable rate, and later a Cooperative Union Boardinghouse was established at 217 Broadway. The crimps were well intrenched, however, and these moves were not enough to win control of the jobs on the Embarcadero from them. In order to keep nonunion men from sailing out at scab wages, the sailor bhoys resorted to the slugfests and brawls to which they were trained, conditioned and—it might almost be said—bred. These catalyzed more donnybrooks, as the scabs retaliated in kind, egged on by boarding masters and runners of all pelts.

  For all this guerrilla warfare on the Embarcadero, the crimps did not yet take the union seriously. But, realize it or not, they were already locked in an all-out, life-or-death struggle in which one of the institutions would have to go under.

  For a year, the union consolidated its power and in the spring of 1886 surprised the entire city—even itself—by being able to demand and win a higher scale of wages on all coasting vessels. The pay went up to $35 per month for Puget Sound and all inside ports, $40 for outside ports, and $30 for Mexican and South Seas ports. The foes of organized seamen began to stir restlessly. Men were scarce and in San Francisco that May, shanghaiing was particularly bad. Crimps and owners alike really took alarm when, in June, a hundred seamen walked out in sympathy with the striking firemen of John D. Spreckels’s Oceanic Steamship Company. The aroused shipowners now formed an association to support Oceanic. Their first edict was addressed to shipmasters—no man was to be hired except through the shipping office to be set up by the association. All men hired would have to surrender their union books and would receive “grade books,” a sort of industrial passport in which captains would place their “visas” in the form of comments on the sailor’s service, his deportment, tractability or whatever. Without this book, no hand would be allowed to sign on any vessel belonging to an association member. And with the book, of course, the association would have a record of any complaints by seamen over wages or conditions. An unsatisfactory mark or grade would flunk a so-called troublemaker right out of a job, permanently. This was union busting with techniques borrowed from the little red schoolhouse.

  Some of the men who had switched from the crimps to the union’s boardinghouse and shipping office proved to be fair-weather sailors when it blew up a gale on the water front. They panicked when they saw pierhead loafers and sodbusters, who didn’t know a capstan from the captain, being offered jobs in their places. A number capitulated by surrendering their union books and picking up grade books.

  Burnette Haskell on August 26 called a meeting of all water-front unions to demand a general strike. The idea was voted down; it was entirely up to the sailors. They must either surrender, accept the grade books and give up their gains—and plenty more—or they must fight. They chose to fight and 3,000 men walked off the ships of the coasting fleet. September 1886 was a bloody month on the water front. Union guards and pickets tried to stop crimps from shipping men through the new Shipowners’ Association office. Many men were beaten and a number were killed. The union then tried to negotiate with the Association but that arrogant body, sniffing victory in the air, insisted on unconditional surrender. The union, by now plagued with desertions and short on funds, quit on September 30, 1886. To all intents and purposes, the union was as completely wrecked as Humpty Dumpty after his descent. The membership pretty much broke up. Some sailors turned scab, others swallowed the anchor, “shipping on a wheat farm” or trying some other kind of landsmen’s work.

  Four months later, a rara avis on the water front—an intellectual and literate man—appeared to take charge of the wreckage of the Coast Seamen’s Union. He was Andy Furuseth. He had not been able to join the group of sailors who, on March 6, 1885, organized themselves on the lumber-heaped Folsom Street Wharf. He was at sea when the little band of men plotted in the dusk as if they were Balkan conspirators. He joined the CSU on June 3, 1885, and was elected Secretary in 1886 but turned the position down. His head for figures won him a berth on the Financial Committee of the union and when Rasmus Nielson died in January 1887, Furuseth was again the logical choice for the secretary’s position. This was the key post, the only full-time, paid position except for that of patrolman on the Embarcadero and agent in the ports of Seattle, San Pedro, San Diego, and Eureka. The office of president had been abolished, and in place of this titular head, a chairman was elected at each meeting. It was the secretary’s job to collect all dues and, even more, to see that they didn’t stray, to keep all records and to answer all correspondence. He had to supervise the branches of the union in other ports, keep the minutes of the meetings, and handle applications for membership. In short, he ran the whole bloom
in’ show.

  Furuseth’s joining the Coast Seamen’s Union would change his life but, more importantly, it would change the life of every other seaman on the Embarcadero, every sailor in every port of the seven seas, and thousands of yet-unborn sailormen, even those today in spotlessly clean motorships, overgrown yachts and ocean liners who wouldn’t know Old Andy from Typhoid Mary.

  The lonely, ascetic Furuseth, with no family and no friends—save his books—was the ideal man for the job. He wanted to make it possible for the sailor, like other Americans, “to have a wife and a home and a couple of kids,” but he denied himself this sort of life. Like a priest, his “job” became his life. Some writers have described him as a very religious man. Yet men who worked with him on the docks will say just the opposite. Actually, he was no churchgoer. He was more ethical, moral, than religious. Someone, possibly his biographer, Hyman Weintraub, suggested that Furuseth did not belong to any organized church or religion but that he “worshipped the Goddess of Liberty.” This sounds very much like the truth about Andy. Louis Adamic, too, once said, “Freedom was Andy’s religion.” He often worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day. In fact, he worked around the clock. You don’t punch in and punch out when your goal is to make America’s seamen into freemen. Furuseth was never off duty. He lived and breathed Seamen’s Union from 7 a.m., when he opened the office at 513 1/2 East Street (the Embarcadero) until he fell asleep over a book at home. When the union was not strapped or on strike, Furuseth and the other paid officers received $10-$15 per week. When things got stormy, their salaries were cut either in half or in whole, depending on the stringencies of the situation.