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

  You can still find old-timers on the Embarcadero who knew Andy. Otto Weiroth, an old sailor who jumped ship at the Cape to join the Dutchmen in the Boer War against the British, is one. He later jumped ship in Frisco, about 1909. He would occasionally walk home with Andy to his lonely little room in a 14th Street boardinghouse near Market. Then they would chew the fat a while. He remembers Furuseth’s quarters—an old iron bed, one window, a closet empty except for a worn, dark overcoat. All the other clothes Furuseth had he wore on his back, mainly a dark-blue “undertaker’s suit.” But dominating the little room was a sea chest, an old trunk jammed with books. These were his only real possessions in the world. As the old-timers will reiterate, “Christ! He didn’t have a goddam thing.” In this cell of a room Andy read, of nights, under a naked light bulb. Weiroth remembers he talked about only three things, union business, travel—and books. His old comrades will swear, in more ways than one, to the character of this lonely man. “He was honest as they make ‘em. He had a one-track mind; he was all for the sailor, first, last and all the time, and the hell with anything else.” In being such an honest man, Furuseth was apparently a rare bird on the water front. If you can believe the men who sailed from the Embarcadero in the years between the earthquake and World War I, the union men “were mostly a bunch of bastards with their hands out for cumshaw when they gave out jobs.”

  With the whole weight of the union on his shoulders, Furuseth once again plunged into the task of rebuilding morale. Money was no problem this time, even after the defection of the two officers. The 2,317 members in good standing were backed by a fat cat of a treasury (for those days) of $37,000. The union on March 19, 1893, reopened its shipping office, or hiring hall. Ed Crangle was again named shipping master and rotary hiring was introduced, giving all men a shot at a chance. It looked as though the crimp was on his way out in San Francisco since the SUP could now virtually control all jobs, in the coasting trade, at least.

  Again, just at the wrong time, as the Depression of 1893 broke, internal dissension wracked the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific. Furuseth, in trying to keep his charges in line, had to condemn some slackers, drunks and incompetents. Fo’c’sle lawyers twisted his house cleaning into favoritism. The oversupply of sailors, many nonunion, on the water front led again to bitter conflict with the shipowners. The brief honeymoon was quite over. The union resisted a wage cut, but shortly Furuseth found himself in the peculiar position of strikebreaking, and against his own union! His San Diego branch tried to hold up a vessel for more wages than the union scale. He sent a crew from S. F. to replace the holdouts. He defended his rash action by arguing that if the union wanted the respect of owners and employers, it must earn that respect by operating on fair, businesslike principles, not by chiseling on wages. To Andy, in the words of U.S. Circuit Court Judge William Denman, a contract was “a sacred document which he enforced on his men to the letter.” Furuseth just said, “The union gave an inch in order to gain a fathom.” But he was almost alone in the union in possessing a wide-angle as well as a long-range view of its role. He did not know the term “public relations” but he certainly knew what good will meant. Furuseth was out to get for seamen the good will of the people, even the shipowners themselves, if he could—and it turned out in many cases that he could. He was determined to create a friendly climate of opinion toward seamen in general and to wipe out the age-old stereotype of the merchant sailor as a drunken ne’er-do-well.

  What a strategist he became, in time! He cautioned moderation when fights brewed. He kept the initiation fee down during the Depression, to be sure that not one single sailor would be driven out of the union and into the waiting arms of the crimps. He set a high moral tone for the union and if the membership could not always understand it, much less live up to it, they were proud of their austere leader for his ideals and grateful for the prestige he won, singlehanded, for the American merchant marine man. When employers bandied about charges of hoodlumism and racketeering, Furuseth intoned Biblically, “The labor movement received its charter on Mount Sinai when God, through Moses, handed down the law in which we read ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ to which Thomas Carlyle, the truth-speaker of the nineteenth century, adds, ‘Thou shalt not be stolen from’”

  Shipowners during the Depression got crimps to find them men to man their vessels from the swelling ranks of the unemployed. Furuseth fought back by taking nonunion men out of the sailors’ boardinghouses and sending them inland at the union’s expense. He put his coasting sailors to work in the deepwater trade to fight the strikebreaking deepwatermen. With a nose for the legality of things, he was able to harass owners by bringing suit for the recovery of advances made to crimps above the limit set by law. When courtroom delays were not enough, “working the oracle” was resorted to. This was a sort of industrial guerrilla warfare in which “dummies” were sent aboard departing vessels. These union men waited until the very last moment, then would heave their dunnage over the side onto the dock and follow it with themselves. This would delay sailing. The action was held to be lawful by most courts under the 1874 amendment to the Shipping Commission Act of 1872, which stated that seamen in American ports had the right to quit work at will. Some of the brawnier union patrolmen turned deaf ears on Furuseth’s pleas for nonviolence, bouncing scabs off the timbers of the Embarcadero’s piers, too. Not all these tactics would win the public’s wholehearted approval, but it was a case of fighting fire with fire.

  Just when victory seemed in the sea bag—Furuseth even having reported to the membership that the shipowners were ready to give in on all points of issue—the tables were rudely turned on the seafarers. The San Francisco Employers’ Association urged a lockout and this body brought all the shipowners into line under the leadership of G. C. Williams. Williams, an ex-reporter and ex-labor man, himself, was hired by the Employers’ Association and then lent to the shipowners who gave him the title of Secretary of the Shipowners’ Association. (This turned out to be a high-faluting synonym not only for strikebreaker but for union breaker.) The union learned that Mr. Williams was actually G. C. Walhew, on the lam from the law authorities of Michigan. “Criminal Walhew.” he was called in the Seamen’s Journal, and the editor pointed out how eager the Wolverine State Police were to sit down for a nice chat with him, particularly over the matter of bribing legislators in Lansing. Walhew/Williams had testified under his false name before the California Labor Commission, too, and was therefore guilty of perjury in his adopted state. He was apparently a cold-blooded, professional union wrecker and opportunist who would stop at nothing. His advice to the Seattle representative of the Shipowners’ Association, as reported by the Journal, was: “A dose of cold lead has a wonderful effect in quieting disorders.”

  The Norwegian fought back against this marshaling force as he had never fought before. When the Shipowners’ Association reopened Its own shipping office in opposition to the union’s, he had a circular distributed which offered free room and board at the union hall to men until they could ship out. The SUP rented a house in the country for this purpose, too. Furuseth dug into his own pockets to pay the bill, but still, one fourth of the union treasury was gone on these countermeasures already. He could hold his own with shipowners, shanghaiers, hired toughs like Walhew, who brought buckoism ashore, and even, to some degree, with a full-scale economic recession, too. But when an Act of God, of sorts, was thrown into the conflict, to turn the public away from the seamen, he was licked.

  Furuseth was making headway, pleading that “American seamen are the worst fed and the worst treated…. Conditions have so degenerated that no native American or self-respecting men of any flag will sail [in Yankee ships]….” He tried to create a fighting spirit and an optimistic one in his apathetic men. He ridiculed the oafish men hired as skilled seamen by owners. He also doubled the union’s Embarcadero patrols and drew out the rest of the union’s funds from the bank to fight the battle. But suddenly the battle
was won, and not by Furuseth and the seafarers. Furuseth tried to conduct an orderly, strategic withdrawal but his retreat was soon turned into a rout, the likes of which would not be seen again until Caporetto. The boardinghouse of Blind John Curtin, notorious crimp, was bombed and four men were killed. The union was held responsible and the whole force of public opinion crushed it. Whipped, the union even gave up its water-front patrols; it lowered its wage scale; it closed its shipping office. Now, not only its money and morale were gone but also, since the dynamiting of Curtin’s place on September 25, 1893, its prestige was bankrupt.

  A lesser man than Furuseth would have chucked the whole shebang and gone back to the fisheries. But Andy was a hardnosed and hardheaded man. He had read widely; he probably knew of Hernán Cortés Noche Triste, and the comeback that gentleman made. A patient, determined fighter for a cause he knew to be right, Furuseth wrote a message of hope to the men who still stuck by him. And from this call to arms in the bitterness of undeserved defeat came the motto and watchwords of the union as well as of the man himself, reminding his men that there was no use crying over lost battles—“Tomorrow is also a day.”

  “Like a clap of thunder from the clear sky came the dynamite outrage setting the whole city against us. We are innocent... but it is there and must be reckoned with in all our dealings for the future. Hence peace, even the Christian peace of turning the other cheek, must be our policy in the future….

  “Since we do submit, we do so without grumbling or crying…. That is our lot at present and through it we shall yet come up to our old standards, but we shall reach there through the mind…. Let us, comrades, take our medicine like stoics and from our trouble shall we rise again, ennobled and purified…. They cannot prevent us from staying with the union, paying our dues and joining other willing sailors into our ranks. Our money is our own—our souls also—and while we are true to ourselves, time is passing and we remember that tomorrow is also a day…. Like the bird sucking sweets from the poisoned flower, let us from our troubles find such strength and devotion to our cause.”

  Only seven years after the first debacle, the union was again plummeted to the depths of defeat. But, if Furuseth had had misgivings in 1886, he had no doubts in 1893 that the sailors would rise again. He mustered union strength immediately in the eastern United States and he launched a national legislative program. In addition to his bulldog tenacity and his eloquence (in spite of the fact he never shook the Scandinavian “y” for “j”—thus, injunction always came out “inyoonction”), Furuseth possessed a considerable knowledge of maritime law. And this was not the garbled nonsense of the typical “sea lawyer.” It often came as a surprise and a shock to the Commissioner of Navigation and the expensive attorneys hired by shipowners when Furuseth had to set them straight on the law. Actually, his ace in the hole was not a great knowledge of the law but rather his intimate knowledge of the great inequities in it. He could appeal to moral, religious and humanitarian instincts in judges, legislators and even in lawyers, if they retained any of these instincts, by documenting the countless cases of shanghaiing, the too-common cases of brutality of masters and mates, and the cupidity of owners willing to put profits before safety on the high seas. Furuseth liked to dunk his arguments in a religious dressing in these situations. In an attack on the involuntary servitude of seamen, which he tided “Work is Worship,” he said, “The bondsman can feel no responsibility, he can have no sense of morality, of self-respect, or of honor…. He [the slave] is alone…. Deprived of human estate he is degraded below the animal or vegetable kingdom. In having thoughts he cannot utter, he is like an animal; in having impulses he cannot follow, he is less…. In his inability to obey the laws of his being, he is less….”

  He also found loopholes in the law. Shipowners themselves were responsible for the knothole in the legal protective fence they had thrown up around themselves in 1872 and 1874. Obliging the owners, Congress had exempted the coasting trade from the terms of the 1872 Shipping Commissioners Act. This was to avoid the inconvenience of having to sign coasting sailors on and off their vessels repeatedly on the many short runs they made each year. But, of course, the coin had two sides. If the owners were exempt, so were the sailors from penalties which earlier had applied to their trade. Unwittingly, the shipowners had begun the release of one group, at least, of merchant seamen from the constrictive hold of centuries-old serfdom. Coasting sailors were free men, or almost so. A sailor of this kind could now quit his job just as a hod carrier or a sewer worker could do, without being clapped in jail and probably beaten up in the process, for “desertion.”

  On the surface, Furuseth appeared to be going along with the dropped wages and the hated grade books reinstated by the jubilant shipowners. But he “worked the oracle” beautifully. Over the side with his “dummies” would go the profits on a voyage while the vessel lay at dock. This might be repeated time after time and if the captain dared to sail, Furuseth would have the law on him for sailing shorthanded, unsafely. The Norwegian knew to a dollar how costly these delays were and he counted on this pinch to lever wages up. It did. He also used it as a lever to do away with the detested grade books, or “fink books,” those seagoing report cards evolved for the purpose of building up a black list and keeping sailors in line. He had figured correctly; they were abolished shortly.

  The shipowners did not take these attacks without a fight. On August 19, 1890, their lobbyists and other friends in Washington were able to push a law through which made coasting men liable to the penalties of the 1872 law if they signed articles before a shipping commissioner. Andy, of course, immediately urged his sailors to avoid shipping commissioners like the plague. Once again, however, he saw how poor sailors were at working together as a cohesive unit. Some of the coasters as well as the deepwatermen signed in the U.S. Shipping Commissioner’s office and signed their money away to the crimps in advances. The owners and crimps began to regain control of the labor supply.

  The canny Norseman redoubled his efforts to get legislative relief. After much study with his legislative committee, he released in the Journal an “Appeal to Congress.” This suggested about thirty reforms in maritime law. Among the planks of this program of reform were requirements that shipowners be prevented from paying advances on wages; that vessels be obliged to carry a full crew at all times and to replace deserters. Also, the “Appeal” asked that owners be required to provide transportation to the United States for seamen discharged in foreign ports; that forecastle space be enlarged from 70 cubic feet to 120 cubic feet per man and that provisions be improved. It urged that the deck crew be divided into two watches, with no unnecessary work to be done on Sundays and holidays. Also, punishment for desertion and disobedience should be reduced from its traditional (and outdated) severity. It was proposed that the master’s option be done away with—the choice allowed to a captain of deciding whether or not to pay the earned portion of their wages to his men upon arrival in port. The “Appeal” asked that a majority of the crew be able to demand a seaworthiness survey of their vessel. And, finally, the Government should provide a discharge book to replace the grade book, a book from which seamen could discard unfavorable references or discharges. None of these proposals, save perhaps the last, sound in the least radical or out of line today, but in the nineties, shipowners were not willing to O.K. such “outrageous demands.”

  Much as Furuseth had once wanted to get out of the administration of the union, so too he originally wished to steer clear of politics. But he saw what was needed and he plunged fearlessly in. He and the union endorsed James G. Maguire, the Democratic candidate from California’s Fourth District, San Francisco’s Embarcadero area. The rotund Irishman repaid them by adopting the seamen’s program wholesale, and he fought for it in Congress like a real son of Erin. Furuseth supported him to the hilt. The Norwegian was even accused of being a member of the Neptune Club, the Democratic Parry’s water-front organization. He denied it,
saying “As an executive officer of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, I do not believe that it would be wise to affiliate myself with a political party.”

  Andy wanted W. J. B. Mackay to go to Washington in March 1894, as requested by Congressman Maguire, to explain the seamen’s bills before Congress. He could not make it so Furuseth did, just to fill in for Mackay. He thus began a long and distinguished career as the sailors’ lobbyist. Although Furuseth and three other men testified for two and a half hours in favor of the Maguire bills, the shipowners flooded Congress with anti-Maguire mail, and General Henry H. Bingham filibustered the bills into oblivion. Late summer of 1894 found Furuseth back in San Francisco pulling the disintegrating union together. Often no quorum was available for a meeting. Some members suggested that, to cut expenses, the SUP might end the Seamen’s Journal. To this Andy replied forcefully: “The last thing we should think of touching is the Journal. Make it stronger, brighter, better if possible; but you may do anything else but reduce it now, when we need it more than ever. We need it to speak to the people of the United States, to tell them of our misery, our hunger, our hope. We need it to urge our claims on Congress. We need it to help defeat our opponents.” On a twelve-to-eight vote, the Journal was saved.

  In the fall, Furuseth and the union again backed Maguire, all the while protesting against being identified with the Democratic Parry. “I am not a politician and have never talked politics, purely as such, in public. I speak from the standpoint of a seaman and a citizen. There can be no suspicion of politics in the assertion that a nation cannot be secure in peace nor victorious in war if she is dependent upon strangers, mercenaries, to guard the nation’s rights. I speak for that party, any party, any governmental system, which will restore to the nation a patriotic marine.”