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

  Men were occasionally paid off British ships in San Francisco (after the three years, or when the vessel was laid up) but since it was considered a privilege to be paid off in a foreign port, the lime-juicers often were docked one, two, or even three months’ wages, ostensibly for the expense of later hiring men to replace them. The American system, of course, was to pay off a crew in each port of arrival. Occasionally an English captain would allow his crewmen a little pocket money, perhaps a dollar a week—the pay of a messenger boy in the 1890s. A few gave $2 to $4 per week. And many gave not a red cent, deliberately egging the crew to desert, just to “run the men out of the ship.” When a crew was a little hard to bamboozle, a captain would hire a boarding master to run his crew off his ship. One crimp showed the crew the paper which bore each man’s name and the amount he would get from the captain for causing them to desert. When Fell talked to the captain, saying, “I suppose your sailors ran away in Frisco?” the master answered, “Yes, we’ve had three crews this voyage. Wages were paid only to those who took her home from San Francisco to Liverpool, of course.”

  The men were run out of their ships so that they would forfeit their wages and thus save the owners money. The ships’ masters used all kinds of devices to encourage desertion during hard times such as the depression of 1893, for example, when grain ships might be laid up for months without a cargo. Pocket money was denied the men, and no tailor money given them; they were forbidden shore leave, nagged and overworked until the exasperated seamen welcomed the crimps with eager arms. Small wonder that, in the 1890s, between 800 and 1,100 seamen deserted their ships every year.

  In 1897 a large number of British ships were laid up from six to eight months or longer, owing to bad freights. Many crews deserted. Others were paid off. They took their wages minus one or two months’ pay, which was deducted for the expense to the master of hiring new men in six months from some boarding master. Paid off at the British Consulate at 506 Battery Street, the sailors found their “friends” from Kearny Street and the Barbary Coast waiting upon them at the very Consul’s door.

  The crooked tailors so regularly overcharged the poor sailors that it became the custom, the rule, to charge a commission on any sailor’s bill, running up a four-shilling pair of dungarees to five or six shillings. A Port Costa “selected” haberdasher gave them schooners of steam beer as a token of his esteem but arranged with the corner saloon to put their drinks on his clothing bill. The captain of their ship would pay him and deduct the sum from the amount coming to the seaman.

  Fell realized that there were a lot of ne’er-do-wells on shipboard. He once wrote, “There are, of course, a number of men who are regular ‘birds of passage,’ who seldom or never make a whole voyage in a ship and who may always be expected to desert.” But he knew that the vast majority were not of this stripe and he fought valiantly for his belief that British merchant seamen were entitled to regular wages, at sea or in port, just like Royal Navy men. He once asked a boarding master, “What would be the result if seamen were allowed a week’s wages each week they were in port?” The boarding master’s answer was, “Oh, that’s a different ticket. If they got half that, not half of them would desert their ships.”

  During slack times, Fell saw crimps sitting on the Vallejo Street Wharf day after day, for long hours at a time, devising new plans for “benefiting” the hundreds of sailors arriving each month. Or he would see them lurking frequently and patiently on “Lime-juice Corner.” Why did San Francisco’s crimps vie for the privilege of causing a poor, penniless limey to desert? The answer is that while the man had no money or valuables on him, his carcass was valuable. Yes, the sailor, pound for pound, was a most valuable piece of merchandise on the San Francisco water front and he was bought and sold and stolen.

  By a rule of the Port of San Francisco, seamen who shipped on a long voyage were required to leave behind two months’ advance pay —£8—paid in advance and deducted from their wages, which would finally be theirs at the end of the complete voyage. The seamen were supposed to get this advance for their own needs but only after lodging and clothing bills were settled. There was seldom any “hereafter.” Usually, when the tailors and boardinghouses finished robbing him, he would not get so much as a plugged guinea. The £8 did not go far among boarding master, tailor, shipping master, runners, et al. There were a few exceptions to the rule and Fell knew of one or two honest boardinghouse keepers who were not only honest but also charitable enough to keep a seaman in a boardinghouse, well-fed, when he would otherwise (in slack times) have to beg, steal or go hungry.

  Letters were sent to the London Times in 1897 to show the profit made by owners by running their crews off their ships in San Francisco and other foreign ports. One captain was violently hostile toward Fell and the Seamen’s Institute because “You try to persuade the men not to desert their ships!”

  Fell’s Seamen’s Institute, set in the midst of “boardinghouse row” at 33 Steuart Street, was a success from the start. He was not able to lick the shanghaiing system of San Francisco but he did make the English merchant tar’s life in port more comfortable and secure. With the opening of the Institute on June 2, 1893, the merchant seaman had a USO-like program set up for him. There were billiard tables, bagatelle games, British books and newspapers, tobacco, concerts, Sunday services, “athletic evenings”—mostly sack races, three-legged races, egg-and-spoon, blindfold, and lemon races. To wind up a strenuous evening, Fell would organize tugs of war between groups of brawny fo’c’sle hands. There were picnics on the Fourth of July, Washington’s Birthday and Queen Victoria’s Birthday. On Christmas Day there was always a huge feast, enjoyed by two or three hundred men on the average, after football games on the Presidio parade ground. New Year’s Eve was, of course, a big night at the Seamen’s Institute.

  Fell began a program in 1893 which, by the time of the 1906 earthquake, was a real threat to the organized shanghaiing gentry. Coupled with various other legal, political and economic forces, it helped eventually to topple the crimps from their control of the water front and its laboring force. The handwriting was on the wall by 1898. In that one year, British seamen placed £1, 300 in cash in Reverend Fell’s hands at the Institute, either for safekeeping or for transmittal to England. Oh, how the crimps cursed the Anglican padre! Of great satisfaction to Fell also was the decline in desertions from British vessels. Before the Seamen’s Institute, for example, an average of sixty apprentices a year would jump ship. After 1893, the average dropped to only twelve a year.

  Writers as well as parsons stood by the men of the sea during the raid-nineteenth century. When Richard Henry Dana introduced his classic Two Years Before the Mast with a prefatory note, he declared, “A voice from the forecastle has hardly yet been heard.” Although a number of works had already directed attention and sympathy toward seamen—such works as Nathaniel Ames’s A Mariner’s Sketches (1830), which supplied not only Dana but also Melville with inspiration and perhaps material—little real knowledge of their hard life had penetrated into the general public’s consciousness. Dana intended his book* to awaken the public; this was its raison d’être: “If it should interest the general reader and call more attention to the welfare of seamen, or give any information as to their real condition which may serve to raise them in the rank of beings, and to promote in any measure their religious and moral improvement and diminish the hardship of their daily life, the end of its publication will be answered.”

  The gentleman of good family was quickly initiated into the realities, as distinguished from the romance, of sea life when, on his very first day on the brig Pilgrim, bound for California, the captain gave them a short speech of welcome. Since it happened to be the Sabbath, he was milder mannered than usual.

  “Now, my men, we have begun a long voyage. If we get along well together we shall have a comfortable time. If we don’t, we shall have hell afloat. All you’ve got to do is obey your orde
rs and do your duty like men, then you’ll fare well enough. If you don’t, you’ll fare hard enough, I can tell you!”

  Later in the voyage, when the crew appointed a spokesman to respectfully present their grievances over a shortage of bread to the lord paramount of the poop, that worthy really warmed to his subject: “Well, what do you want? Away with you! Go forward every one of you. I’ll have you! I’ll work you up! You don’t have enough to do. You’ve mistaken your man. I’m F—T—, all the way from Down East. I’ve been through the mill, ground and bolted and come out a regular-built Down East johnnycake, good when it’s hot but when it’s cold, sour and indigestible—and you’ll find me so!”

  The captain terminated his poetic bluster with the blunt threat, “If you ain’t carefull, I’ll make a hell of this ship!”

  With the crew properly cowed, things went well enough until the brig was off San Pedro, California, where a phlegmatic Middle States man (but no landlubber) offended the irascible captain by his slow speech and deliberate ways. He was, for all of that, a good sailor and one who always did his share of work, but the captain did not give a damn. He called him surly and lazy and began to haze him. Dana knew that the man, Sam, would soon be needled enough to give the captain cause to prescribe for him the cruelest form of punishment carried on aboard ship, flogging.

  There were many who had decried this form of punishment as cruel and inhuman. The Reverend Timothy Dwight Hunt, in an article in The Friend of Honolulu titled “Wants of Seamen,” called attention to this hellish holdover from the days of barbarism: “It is a fact that seamen are not governed like reasonable men. They are ordered about more like slaves than men and often by those much their inferiors either in family rank, in morals or intelligence…. Flogging stirs up mutiny; tyranny drives to recklessness and threats to boldness in transgression…. For a trivial offense, which most likely he himself provoked, the offender is lashed to the shrouds and flogged as one would be ashamed to flog his brute…. One wonder is that such a degree and amount of misrule has not been more prolific of mutiny….” In a masterpiece of understatement, he added, “The sons of the ocean will always be bastards or deformed, should they always cower under oaths and stripes…. Good rule and a just appreciation of men’s rights have been long on the advance [but] they have been slow in their march on the ocean.”

  There were those who defended the cruel practice as necessary to preserve discipline aboard ship. One such was William L. Jackson, mate of the American whaleship Inez, who claimed that the merchant service attracted only the dregs of manhood. “I should be very glad to get a whole ship’s crew of reasonable men for it appears to me as if the ends of the earth (not forgetting the Sandwich Islands) has been ransacked for the greatest contrarieties of dispositions and characters to make out a whaleship’s company. There is no class that lives anything like so lazy and idle a life….”

  In one respect Jackson was right. He placed the blame for the plight of seamen ashore right where it belonged—at the feet of all landsmen. Declaring that the sailor’s pea jacket was an insurmountable barrier between himself and society, Jackson hit the mark when he said, “That is the fault of aloof shore folk, not masters and mates.”

  Herman Melville later added an “Amen” to this charge, asking the American public “What in your heart do you think of that fellow staggering along the dock? Do you not give him a wide berth, shun him, and account him but little above the brutes that perish? Will you throw open your parlors to him; invite him to dinner? Or give him a season ticket to your pew in church? No. You will do no such thing; but at a distance you will perhaps subscribe a dollar or two for the building of a hospital to accommodate sailors already broken down; or for distribution of excellent books among tars who cannot read.”

  With this hostility and suspicion directed toward merchant seamen by an ignorant public, there was no outcry when the knout was used for reasons of “discipline.” Flogging was still carried on in the United States Navy and was common in both the whaling fleets and aboard the general commercial carriers of the American merchant marine. All three major nineteenth-century American writers on sea themes— Richard Henry Dana, J. Ross Browne, and Herman Melville—spoke out strongly against flogging, as well as against the all-around barbaric treatment meted out to Yankee seamen in general, but it took years before these voices crying in the wilderness were heard and heeded.

  In his Two Years Before the Mast, Dana recalled that one day he and his friend, John the Swede, heard a scuffle in the hold. The captain’s voice came up, “You see your condition? Will you ever give me any more of your jaw?”

  “I never gave you any, sir,” came the half-choked reply. The two men recognized the speaker as the landsman, Sam.

  “That’s not what I ask you. Will you ever be impudent to me again?”

  “I never have been, sir.”

  “Answer my question or I’ll make a spread eagle of you! I’ll flog you, by God!”

  “I’m no Negro slave,” retorted the seaman.

  “Then I’ll make you one! Seize that man up, Mister!” The command went to the mate. “Seize him up. Make a spread eagle of him. I’ll teach you all who is master aboard.”

  Sam made no resistance but John the Swede made the mistake of asking the captain, respectfully, “What are you going to flog that man for, sir?”

  The captain turned on the Scandinavian, livid, ordered the steward to bring up irons and had his second mate, Russell, iron John.

  “Let me alone,” said the Swede, “I’m willing to be put in irons. You need not use any force.”

  In the meantime, Sam was seized up in the shrouds. The captain began lashing him with a bight of rope on the bare back, using all his strength. Six times he struck, then he shouted, “Will you ever give me any more of your jaw?” Three more lashes brought muttered words from Sam’s lips and the furious captain rained more blows on him, then had him cut down.

  “Now for you,” he said to the Swede, taking the irons off him. John ducked aside and ran to the forecastle. When the third officer grappled with him, John threw him aside. The captain, on the quarter-deck, “his face as red as blood.” swung his rope and called to his three officers, “Drag him aft! Lay hold of him! I’ll sweeten him.”

  The Swedish sailor was soon seized up but he asked the captain; “Have I ever refused my duty, sir? Have you ever known me to hang back or be insolent, or not to know my work?”

  “No, but it is not for that that I flog you. I flog you for your interference—for asking questions.”

  “Can’t a man ask a question here without being flogged?”

  “No!” roared the captain. “Nobody shall open his mouth aboard this vessel but myself.” He began beating the seaman with all the power of his muscles and was soon beside himself with sadistic pleasure. “If you want to know what I flog you for I’ll tell you. It’s because I like to do it. Because-I-like-to-do-it. It suits me. That’s what I do it for!”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ! Oh, Jesus Christ!” moaned the Scandinavian.

  “Don’t call on Jesus Christ,” shouted the captain. “He can’t help you. Call on Captain T----. He’s the man. He can help you. Jesus Christ can’t help you now!”

  While the Swede writhed in the shrouds, the captain paced the deck and addressed the crew. “You see your condition. You see where I’ve got you all, and you know what to expect. You’ve been mistaken in me. You didn’t know what I was. Now you know what I am! I’ll make you toe the mark, every soul of you, or I’ll flog you all, fore and aft, from the boy up. You’ve got a driver over you. Yes, a slave driver —a Negro driver. I’ll see who’ll tell me he isn’t a Negro slave.”

  After being cut down, the Swede asked the steward for salve for his stripes but the captain overheard his request and refused him any medication and, instead, ordered him to an oar of the boat which was to take him ashore. Dana was disgusted
and almost physically sick at this display of brutality. One wonders what the Spanish Californians thought of this display of Yankee civilization. Flogging was not common on the hide droghers plying the California coast. As Dana put it, “Spread eagles were a new kind of bird in California.”

  Later, the captain decided to “ride down” the onetime second mate he had broken to an A.B. When the latter was flogged, he jumped ship at San Diego. Dana’s pal, Tom Harris, told him of other brutal captains. One of them had never been known to hand anything to a sailor. He would put it on deck and kick it to him. Another had killed a Boston lad by keeping him hard at work while ill of coast fever off Sumatra, forcing him to sleep in the hot, close steerage. Dana was happy to see the last of the Pilgrim and her sadistic master, however typical he might be of the driving captains of that day.

  Dana, like the sky pilots, was in favor of temperance ships, but he realized that this was not the sole answer to the uplifting of the seaman’s lot. He also knew that usually when rum was taken away from a crew nothing else was substituted by penny-pinching masters and owners—neither coffee, chocolate or even the “water betwitched and tea begrudged,” as they termed the thin swill issued them as tea.

  It is regrettable that once on land, Dana speedily doffed his pea jacket to put on the frock coat of a gentleman. His view of his onetime forecastle companions reverted toward that of any upper-class landsman. While he loathed flogging, he confessed after a time ashore, “Yet, when the proposition is made to abolish it entirely and at once—to prohibit the captain from ever, under any circumstances, inflicting corporal punishment—I am obliged to pause and, I must say, to doubt exceedingly the expediency of making any positive enactment which shall have that effect.” Dana tried to justify his retreat by declaring that, as seamen improved, punishment would become less necessary and, at the same time, the character of officers would be raised and the punishment would tend to become disreputable, a barbarity, and would disappear. There would be no need to prohibit it in all cases and degrees by “positive enactment.” It is obvious that Richard Henry Dana had a considerable talent for wishful thinking.