SHANGHAIING
DAYS
Books by Richard H. Dillon
Embarcadero
The Gila Trail
Shanghaiing Days
California Trail Herd
The Hatchet Men
Meriwether Lewis
J. Ross Browne: Confidential Agent in Old California
Fool’s Gold: The Decline and Fall of
Captain John Sutter of California
Humbugs and Heroes: A Gallery of California Pioneers
Burnt-out Fires
Siskiyou Trail: The Hudson’s Bay Company
Route to California
Images of Chinatown:
Louis J. Stellman’s Chinatown Photographs
We Have Met the Enemy:
Oliver Hazard Perry, Wilderness Commodore
Delta Country: Narrative
North American Indian Wars
Indian Wars, 1850-1890
Wells, Fargo Detective: A Biography of James B. Hume
Texas Argonauts: Isaac H. Duval
and the California Gold Rush
The Legend of Grizzly Adams:
California’s Greatest Mountain Man
SHANGHAIING
DAYS
By
Richard H. Dillon
Sanger, California
TheWriteThought.com
To
Hans Christian Adamson
Copyright © 1961 By Richard H. Dillon
All rights reserved. No part of this book—except for short passages for comment and review purposes—may be reproduced in any form by any means, electronic, digital or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher:
The Write Thought, Inc.
1254 Commerce Way
Sanger, California 93657
559-876-2170
[email protected]
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-61809-058-4
ePub ISBN: 978-1-61809-059-1
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61809-060-7
Library of Congress Catalog
Card Number: 61-5418
Cover photograph: Built in 1886, The Balclutha is a steel-hulled square-rigger clipper ship that sailed under British registry to San Francisco and around the world before transferring to American registry where she was renamed the Star of Alaska, shown in this photograph during the early 1900s. In 1954, the Balclutha was restored and remains a National Historical Landmark at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.
Contents
1. Greyhounds And Hellships
2. Sky Pilots and Pen Pushers
3. “Bully” Waterman
4. Bucko Mates and Masters
5. Shanghaiing Days in Frisco
6. Other Shanghai Ports
7. “The Red Record”
8. Tomorrow Is Also a Day
INTRODUCTION:
John Forecastle
MERCHANT seamen have come a long way since the time of Imperial Rome and muscular Greece. Then they were considered to be either slaves or chattel. Their lot was little better than that of the chained prisoners of war who groaned at the oar banks of cumbersome triremes and quinqueremes. They were treated by their masters with a cruelty which today would be considered sadism but which in that day passed for discipline.
True, John Forecastle—the “jolly Jack Tar” of the merchant navy—has come a long way but few of us realize that the sailor’s greatest fight for human rights had to be made, belatedly, in the last century. Much of this forgotten civil rights battle took place as recently as fifty to seventy-five years ago, the main battlefields being the decks of Pacific sailing ships or the wharves of the San Francisco Embarcadero.
The sailor had always known his lot to be a hard one and had accepted it with a sort of grousing stoicism. The popular shipboard paraphrase of the Fourth Commandment contained, at least in the days of sail, far more truth than poetry:
Six days shalt thou labor
As hard as thou art able
On the seventh scrub the deck
And then clean the cable.
What the merchant sailor—particularly the American seaman— finally began to protest during the mid-nineteenth century was his total deprivation of civil rights, both ashore and afloat. He was slow to win any major gains in his struggle, thanks not only to the powerful forces which opposed him but also to the distrust, if not hostility, of a public which would have been horrified at the words of Columbus’s companion, Martin Alonso Pinzón—“The word of a sailor is worth more than the scribbles of a notary.” To the American citizen of 1850, a merchant seaman was either a drifting ne’er-do-well or a witless child. Thanks to this unfair stereotype, the merchant seamen found their life to be hell afloat and purgatory ashore.
After the collapse of the Roman Empire, seamen, along with many of their fellow laborers, began the long and slow ascent from slavery to serfdom. Codes of maritime law such as the Consolato del Mare of Barcelona evolved, but these Catalonian and other medieval statutes were mainly concerned with the protection of owners, vessels and cargoes. Little if any attention was paid to the crewmen except to formally countenance barbaric punishment of them for misconduct or dereliction of duty.
As the Middle Ages advanced, however, Baltic and North Sea maritime codes began to evolve which differed from those of the Mediterranean in that they were based on the master-servant relationship rather than upon slavery. Punishment was savage enough on the Nordic ships but a seaman was at least—and at last—considered to be an individual with some freedom, if not responsibility. With the great voyages of discovery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the era of colonization which followed, seafaring became a skilled occupation whose practitioners were as greatly respected for their abilities as they were in demand in the labor market. Small wonder Pinzón would speak so highly of them.
From the maritime laws of Wisby, the rolls of Oleron and the Hanseatic League codes, there developed French, British and American maritime laws during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Best known, perhaps, of these were the British Navigation Acts, since they triggered Our Revolutionary War. The first of these Navigation Acts, that of 1729, may also be considered to be the precursor of the basic American maritime legislation, that of 1790.
As the nineteenth century dawned, a social consciousness was awakening in mankind and particularly in the English-speaking countries of the world. The emphasis upon punishment in shipboard discipline metamorphosed slowly into a paternalism, but it was an excruciatingly slow process. It was not until the twentieth century that legislation guaranteed the health, welfare and safety of the American seafarer. The sailor of 1910 still led an austere life, worse than that of any peacetime soldier, for example, but however hard his working conditions, no matter how long his hours or how low his wages, he had at long last acquired certain recognized human rights. There were those ashore who were ready to fight beside him to see that his escape from serfdom was not a temporary thing.
During the middle of the nineteenth century, shipbuilding reached a zenith in the construction of the beautiful and
efficient China and California clippers. They were true masterpieces of sail. Unfortunately, the great improvements in marine architecture and shipbuilding, which allowed sail to compete with steam for an additional quarter-century, were not matched by any comparable betterment of the make-up of the crews of merchant ships. Much has been made of the decline of the U.S. Navy in the period between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. Far more drastic was the decline in the caliber of the men of the American merchant marine in a similar, though longer, period. The typical John Forecastles of the entire 1800s were slipshod seamen, often drunk as hoot owls, quarrelsome and sometimes downright mutinous. By the turn of the present century, “hobo crews” were the norm, not the unusual, in sailing ships.
The middle of the nineteenth century thus saw at the same time the highest development in ship design and the lowest state of seagoing labor. A cycle of “poor jobs, poor men” was set in motion after the War of 1812 and, like some weird parody of Gresham’s monetary law, the bad men drove the good men out of circulation. Larger hulls and loftier spars did not mean more comfortable fo’c’sles or more indulgent mates. Quite the contrary; the demand for speed and cargo space meant short supplies and underfeeding, overcrowding of quarters and the ministrations of driving captains and bucko mates, lusting for the bonuses dangled before their eyes by impatient and greedy shipowners. Poor crews plus bad working conditions bred even poorer crews and worse conditions. More and more, crews were composed of misfits and the lazy and incompetent men had to be driven to work like animals. Brutalized afloat, they were easy victims for the crimps, boardinghouse masters, prostitutes, gouging haberdashers and saloonkeepers on shore.
The men cried out for help but the law was still more concerned with policing and disciplining crews than in protecting their rights, few that they were, as human beings. The public—still callous to poverty, rampant drunkenness and Negro slavery—could not be bothered with the plight of wild and irresponsible Jack Tar.
Always deep in debt, merchant seamen had to fatten the very “protectors” who sucked the life out of them. They turned over advance money, allotments and blood-money deductions to shipping masters, runners and land sharks of all breeds. About the only foul-weather friends Jack found ashore were the religious men and women who founded bethels and chapels and Ladies’ Seamen’s Protective Societies. Unfortunately, these folk never understood their charges nor were they ever understood by the reckless and rootless young men off the barques and full-rigged ships. The latter were more interested in booze and women than in tracts and salvation.
The well-intentioned sky pilots were able to do little, however mightily they tried, toward bettering the seaman’s lot either at sea or ashore. Their efforts, in the long run, were as ineffectual as those of the popular writers of a hundred years ago who took up the sailor’s cause—men like Richard Henry Dana and J. Ross Browne. Laws helped but legislation alone could not do it, any more than the growth of humanitarianism alone could do it. It slowly became obvious to John Forecastle that if he were to be saved he would have to do it himself.
However, a new factor did begin to work in the seaman’s favor in the mid-Victorian period—the Industrial Revolution. It was a powerful ally. What finally ended the twin tyranny of bucko mates and shanghaiing crimps in America was the decline of sail. Steam brought an entirely new set of conditions for seafarers. For the most part, they were immeasurably better conditions. The boom days of the land sharks preying on seamen were now numbered. A smaller, better-trained labor force—more mechanics than sailormen, the old shellbacks would growl—was now needed. Compared to the treatment meted out to men of sail, the men of steam were pampered.
As late as the 1890s, however, the National Seamen’s Union, in fighting for economic and legal rights for sailors, insisted that a seaman under the terms of a contract was still subject to a form of serfdom or involuntary servitude, since both his person and his earnings were in the absolute control of his employers and creditors. While the union recognized that rigid discipline was needed at sea, it insisted that ashore or in safe harbor a seaman was entitled to the personal liberty and freedom of action possessed by every other worker save himself.
This simple belief, the ideological core of the battle which American seamen had fought for almost a hundred years and which they would still have to fight for during at least another decade and a half, was regarded by owners, ships’ officers and a large share of the general public as an amalgam of revolutionary heresies and economic impossibilities. The biggest engagements of this war for civil rights, this escape from serfdom, were fought on the Pacific Coast. The battles would be fought and the victory would be won in San Francisco.
R. H. D.
1. Greyhounds And Hellships
THE ancestry of the American merchant marine is somewhat open to question. There is definitely something of a bar sinister about the whole business since it did not receive a parental blessing upon its birth in colonial days. It is even difficult to determine when and where it was born. Most would cite the launching of George Popham’s “faire pinnace” at the mouth of the Kennebec in 1607 as the beginning point. Others, however, might offer the dugout canoes burnt and hewn of logs by the Indians of the Chesapeake much earlier. In any case, by the 1630s, there existed in the American colonies a fair-sized coasting fleet of sloops, shallops, pinnaces, bugeyes and pinks. These smallish craft hustled cargo from point to point like busy water beetles.
Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts was a shipowner himself as early as 1631. In that year his bark, the Blessing of the Bay, was launched on the Mystic River at Medford. Hugh Peters built a 300-ton ship at Salem just ten years later—a colossal one for that day; the Mayflower itself was of only 180 tons burden.
With the second quarter of the seventeenth century, transatlantic passages became much easier. It cost the equivalent of $100 to ship a horse to the old country and a human could “enjoy” the ten to twelve week, ‘tween-decks trip for half of that. And, need it be said, in intimate company with his stock, blooded or otherwise. An early merchantman, the Trial, pioneered the Mediterranean trade by bringing back to Boston from Malaga a cargo of olive oil, wool and linen. The merchant marine had to enjoy a rather slow growth in these early years since, as fast as new vessels were on the ways, older vessels were on the reefs. Sailing craft were short-lived without dependable navigational instruments, charts, lighthouses or buoys. Voyaging continued to be a big gamble until around 1730 when Thomas Godfrey invented the sextant and, shortly thereafter, John Harrison perfected the chronometer.
American seamen started out as respected, skilled and well-paid laborers. Ashore, manual laborers were lucky to be either free or paid. Many were indentured bondsmen. Paid workers had to compete with Negro slaves. Slowly, however, the position of the laboring landsman grew better after an inauspicious beginning. Strangely, the lot of the American seaman did not improve. It remained at a level for a long time and then, instead of bettering, it worsened sharply in the middle and late nineteenth century. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Jack Tar had received about £4 per month. He was protected from his worst enemy—himself (or so said the Puritans)—by being forbidden to purchase alcohol. Actually, the Puritanical businessmen were most worried over the piling up of expensive vessels and cargoes since, as they said, “Many miscarriages are committed by Saylers.”
During the long Civil War period of the 1640s and 1650s in England, trade with the Thirteen Colonies languished so much that Massachusetts sloops steered for Bermuda and Cuba. By 1650 there was a thriving coastwise trade and a West Indies commerce in addition to the remains of the transatlantic trade with the homeland. The British Navigation Acts of 1663 and later cracked down upon this upstart trade, but our pip-squeak merchant marine continued to be an irritant, though hardly a threat, to British shipping. Mother England continued to chastise our merchant navy by requiring that cargo be shipped to America in British
ships under the command of British masters supervising crews three-fourths of which had to be Britishers. When Customs Official Edward Randolph complained about evasions, the Navigation Acts were tightened up sharply and smuggling became a part of the American culture. Privateering, or raiding Spanish and French vessels, came into vogue at this time, too.
The Board of Trade and Plantations took over American shipping problems in 1696 but the Yankees still proved hard to handle. By 1700, Boston had one hundred and ninety-four seagoing ships, and one hundred and twenty-four vessels had New York as their home port. This led Lord Bellomont to state, “I believe I may venture to say there are more good vessels belonging to the town of Boston than to all Scotland and Ireland, unless one should reckon the small craft, such as herring boats.” Soon, Thames shipbuilders were complaining of the completion by their American cousins of seven hundred ships in New England between 1712 and 1720. Laws were made more strict but Americans became more expert in ignoring or evading them. More and more profits were to be found in seagoing commerce as a rum trade, a whaling trade and a slave trade flourished. New England was shortly making enough rum to float all the “faire pinnaces” of its early days. Our whalers out of Nantucket and New Bedford took their ships to the far corners of the globe to learn the pelagic secrets of Greenland, South America, the Pacific and the polar seas. Though they were to be dealt a heavy blow by the Revolutionary War, they sprang back after that conflict bigger and better than ever. Many redoubtable American merchant seamen were in the ranks which assaulted and captured Louisbourg from the French in 1745, and John Bull should have been grateful. But when the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War (usually called the French and Indian War in the Colonies) it came deucedly close to ending the still tadpolish American merchant marine.
Shanghaiing Days: The Thrilling account of 19th Century Hell-Ships, Bucko Mates and Masters, and Dangerous Ports-of-Call from San Francisco to Singapore Page 1
