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

  Richard Dana was particularly outraged by the court’s discounting the testimony of the abused sailors. This reluctance to accept their word turned the United States statute of March 3, 1835, into a scrap of paper. This law provided for a fine of $1,000 and imprisonment of five years, or both, for any officer who should beat or use cruel punishment upon one of his crew. The law was not only ineffective; it was all but a dead letter.

  Dana denounced all courts’ unwillingness to accept the sworn testimony of seamen. When the defense counsel in the Caravan case pointed out that, since all of the witnesses had been punished by the defendants, their testimony could not be relied upon, Dana countered by citing the well-known quasi-religious superstition of sailormen. He considered them far more impressed with the obligation of an oath than many other groups. And, even more important, he reminded the public and the bar that sailors were naïve, ignorant and anything but artful. Any one of them, or group of them, trying to lie in court could be easily tripped up by cunning lawyers. And yet, in court cases of this kind, the breaking down of a simple sailor’s testimony almost never occurred. Although Dana could not know it in 1839, this would continue to be the case throughout the century.

  Henry Burr, a Frenchman in spite of his name, was the first of the Caravan’s crew to get a taste of officers’ knuckles. He had shipped at Liverpool as cook but his culinary incompetence was so outstanding, even in a field marked by general ineptitude, that he was kicked out of the galley and into the foc’s’le within a few days of sailing. A real “farmer,” he was no good there either. When he could not help reefing the fore-topsail, the mate encouraged him to learn how by striking him twenty to thirty times with a piece of rope. Couch kept this up until the cashiered cook fell to the deck. Then the mate kicked the Frenchman unconscious.

  About an hour after observing this spectacle, the crew heard sharp cries from the quarter-deck. Looking down from aloft, they saw the captain picking up and carrying on where his first officer had left off on Cookie. When Captain Nichols had worked off his excess energy, the apparently lifeless Burr was lowered into the forecastle by a rope. But a cook, even an ex-cook, can be as tough as the proverbial son of a sea cook. Burr was revived by his mates and was soon up and around, though he spat blood for a full day. The next morning the captain ordered him on deck and placed him on a spar in the cold rain of early April. This did the trick where fists had failed. When his shipmates again lowered him into their quarters with rough tenderness, there was no restoring him. The following day the morning watch found him stiff in death in his bunk.

  During the trial of the Caravan’s officers, the District Attorney showed the jury and court a piece of bamboo with a sail needle projecting from one end for about three quarters of a inch. It was the daily custom of mate and captain to use this devilish goad on Burr’s arms, legs and back. The steward testified that the captain had told Couch, “We might use up every rope in the ship on the damned Frenchman without beating anything into him.” So, the ingenious mate, just brimful of Yankee know-haw, had devised an instrument of torture, crowing, “I’ll put some life into Burr!”

  The second mate was not ready to go along with the campaign of brutality charted by his superior officers. One day he seriously asked First if he was not afraid that Burr’s ghost would not come back to haunt him. As he did, he pointed to the ship’s miserable dog, its head badly swollen from the pricker used by the Caravan’s two bestial jesters. He remarked, “The Frenchman died of the same ‘disease’ as that dog is dying of.” The mate just told him to go to hell.

  The court was told that the captain liked to keep the Frenchman busy holystoning the deck all day long, refreshing him from time to time by throwing buckets of water over him. One witness, asked if he had ever seen Burr doused in this fashion, answered, “Hell, I hardly ever saw him dry!”

  What perhaps infuriated Dana most was the fact that the defense freely admitted that Burr was beaten and jabbed with the needle but attempted to justify such behavior because of the “well-known malingering habits of seamen.” as counsel put it. Incredibly, the officers’ attorney contended that the prickle was not cruel or unusual punishment, any more than a spur was a cruel way in which to quicken a horse’s movements. Apparently, in 1839, what was good enough for horses was good enough for sailors.

  The captain vouchsafed that “the Frog” was suffering from consumption but that his death, obviously, came not from brutality, discipline or exposure, but from tuberculosis or “natural decline.” Irrelevant testimony was also introduced to show that Mate Couch was a poor man who was the only support of a mother and sister. A claque of respected shipmasters, insurance men and merchants was then herded in to intone praises of Captain Nichols’ prior good behavior and character. Dana snorted, “One might as well set up in extenuation of an act of murder the character of the criminal when a child in his cradle!”

  It must be said in fairness to Judge Story that, in charging the jury, he indicated that the use of the sail needle must be judged as cruelty; he doubted the right of any captain to punish severely a man for not knowing the duties of a foremast hand when he had shipped as a cook; he observed that a tubercular in poor health should not have been sent aloft in bad weather. Finally, he instructed the jury to consider the captain as an accessory, aiding and abetting the mate in his punishing proclivities.

  The jury went along with Justice Story to the extent of returning a Guilty verdict against the two men. But it recommended the mate to the clemency of the court since he was directly under the orders of Captain Nichols. The judge told the men to be eternally grateful that they were not indicted on manslaughter charges. But Dana caustically repeated the justice’s words which had tended to excuse the men’s conduct—“The rashness of youth, the inconsiderateness of youth, the pride of youth in command, demanded some allowance.” Dana pointed out bitterly how preposterous was this plea of youthfulness in excusing such subhuman sadism as that practiced by Mate Couch: “If a man of five and twenty is too young to suffer the full penalty upon a conviction for deliberate and aggravated cruelty, how much of a penalty is a man of thirty to suffer, and how old must a man be before he is fully answerable?”

  As a result of the prevailing climate of opinion, for killing one cook-turned-seaman, the captain was given only ninety days in prison and a fine of $100. Poor Mr. Couch, the inventive sadist, was sentenced to thirty days in jail and a fine of $10. The judge, to further ease their burdens, offered them their choice of jails! They both chose Newburyport in order to be near their distraught families.

  The Caravan trial reeked of the hypocrisy which afflicted American courts when treating our seamen one hundred or one hundred and fifty years ago. Unfortunately, only a man like Dana could see this and he was fifty years ahead of his time. However, it must be admitted that there were segments of the hardhearted public of that day which were surprised by the lenience of the sentences pronounced on Nichols and Couch. Dana told the public not to be either shocked or surprised. Did it not recall the case of Captain Winn in the very same courtroom only a year or so earlier? Winn had imprisoned his mate, John B. Bassett, “from malice, hatred and revenge” on a voyage to Fiji. The master, to teach his second in command a good lesson, locked him in a small stateroom, covering the skylight with lead. He kept Bassett in this solitary confinement for three months. A bit of food was brought him once every twenty-four hours, at different times in order to torment him and to interrupt his sleep. It came sometimes by day, sometimes by night, and sometimes not at all. The tropical weather was so hot that the mate went naked all the time in the filth, foul air and vermin of his seagoing cell. Finally returned to duty, he once again fell under the captain’s wrath and received three more months’ solitary confinement in the hellhole. According to Dana, the six months’ treatment resulted in brain fever from which Basset was not expected to recover at the time of the Caravan trial.

  Captain Winn was conv
icted of cruelty but the judge had reminded the court that the affair was the captain’s first misstep; that highly respected witnesses spoke warmly of his good character (ashore); and that he had a dear wife and wee ones dependent on him for support. (No one thought to ask Bassett if he had a loving wife and little ones.) Winn was given ninety days in jail and, like Captain Nichols of the Caravan, he was offered his choice of jails. He passed his stretch comfortably in well-furnished rooms near his home.

  Decisions such as these made a mockery of the law and actually bred more cruelty and violence aboard ships, Dana was convinced. “It is on the long voyages to distant coasts that seamen need most the preventive protection of the law; and there it seems this law is most likely to fail them…. There is no crime, short of murder, which a captain may not commit without much fear of the result, and even murder would be difficult of proof.”

  Richard Henry Dana knew that he spoke the truth when he said, “It is not in human nature to bear the treatment which crews are often subject to.” But, in 1839, his was a lone voice crying out in a wilderness dominated by man’s inhumanity to man.

  The effect of Judge Story’s “moderation” was quickly evident in the treatment of American deepwatermen. A case in point was the incident on the whaleship Brooklyn of New London in 1846. Captain Samuel Jeffry sent his cabin boy to the cooper, Joseph C. Dunforth, to fetch an ax. The cooper told the boy the ax was on the carpenter’s bench. As the lad turned to go, the cooper warned him, “Don’t cut nails with it and spoil it!” Exactly what the boy told the captain is not known, but the latter came storming up to the man busy at his barrels, shouting “How dare you refuse me ship’s tools?”

  “I didn’t, sir.” stammered the astonished cooper.

  “You’re a damned liar!”

  “No, sir, I’m not, sir...”

  “You’re a damned, lying son of a bitch. You are anything but a man. If you were a man, I’d give you a damned good thrashing!”

  Dunforth, a small fellow, replied as calmly as he could as his anger mounted, “I believe I am a man, what little there is of me.”

  But the captain, purpling, cried, “Why, you damned, lying good-for-nothing son of a bitch!” He jumped at the cooper, caught him by the hair, hit him, and then grabbed him by his whiskers. Dunforth, still not fighting back, turned and in so doing, caused Captain Jeffry to fall over the tool chest onto the deck, with Dunforth on top of him.

  “Let me up!” he bellowed.

  Dunforth answered, “If you’ll let go of my hair, you can get up.”

  The captain, blind with rage, ignored this and shouted again, “Let me up, you damned, stinking bastard!” He yanked at the man’s whiskers and Dunforth got off him.

  “Now, go to work!” the captain virtually screamed at him.

  But the stubborn cooper stood his ground. He would not lift his hands to defend himself but he did say, “If I’ve done anything wrong, seize me up and flog me like a man.”

  Jeffry replied, “I don’t think it’s worth my while.” But, suddenly experiencing another change of heart, he flung himself on the cooper again, grabbing him by the hair while Dunforth, in his stubborn, pitiful pride, repeated, “Seize me up and flog me, but don’t use me this way, like a brute.”

  The captain, damning him again and again, struck him a cutting blow on the side of the face and snarled, “That’s the kind of usage you’ll get the remainder of this cruise. By God, I’ll kill you!”

  When the captain finally tired, he let the cooper up but warned him, “Don’t you go back to your cabin or I’ll choke you to death!” Dunforth said he did not want to go to his cabin. He’d live in the steerage. And he did so until he reached port and escaped from the hell afloat that was the American whaleship Brooklyn.

  The Challenge case of 1851 had some little effect in improving conditions at sea. Cruelty cases were not common for the next few years and some judgments were made in favor of the forecastle over the quarter-deck. In 1852 the U.S. District Court in San Francisco found Assistant Engineer Nicholas Fitzmaurice guilty of cruelty in tying seaman John Devine against a steamer’s engine room wall for an hour and a half. After this period of subjection to the intense heat, the man showed signs of exhaustion. He was hauled on deck but died there. That same year found a passenger on a ship hailing the captain into court in an action resembling seamen’s brutality cases. The passenger, a Mr. Whelan, claimed that Captain Randall of the Northerner had assaulted him, thrown him into the hold in irons and dragged him before the Vigilance Committee in Frisco on false charges of mutiny. Whelan won his case.

  John Nugent, editor of the San Francisco Herald in the 1850s, was probably unaware of quarter-deck tyranny, rather than callous of it, when he editorialized over the American sailor’s addiction to desertion in Yerba Buena Cove: “This offense is becoming quite common of late. In former times, when the gold excitement was at its height and every consideration and almost every tie was sacrificed to hurry to the mines, there was some excuse for sailors deserting their colors. A captain, bringing his vessel into the harbor, had to make up his mind to leave her there. Neither love nor money could induce the enthusiastic tar, before whose fancy floated visions of golden sands and fortunes acquired in a day, to navigate a ship. But now things are greatly changed. Mariners voluntarily ship to go on a cruise. Shipping offices have become common where vessels are provided with crews. [Yet] we have great complaints from shippers of the loss and delay to which they are subjected in consequence of a portion of their crew clearing out immediately before the sailing of a vessel—often too, after having been paid a portion of their wages in an advance, thus adding something like swindling to a breach of faith.”

  Nugent may have had something there. Perhaps foc’s’le men did take too much courage from the Challenge case. Perhaps they did get a bit cocky. They were certainly more unruly. When the American packet Saratoga left New York for Liverpool in June 1853, a mutiny broke out while the ship was still in tow! Captain Benjamin Trask had to signal the towboat to stop, hoist a signal of distress and drop anchor. He and his mates drove the crew below hatches at pistol point and then turned them over to the harbor police. As the men were marched off in irons, several gallons of bad whiskey and rum went over the side. Perhaps symptomatic also of the briefly turned tide against poop-deck tyranny was the action of John McGowan. He was carpenter on the Lord Dufferin. When the normally well-cowed idler McGowan got angry at the captain, Alexander Mathews, he was not about to keep his hands at his side like the cooper of the Brooklyn. No, sir. McGowan fetched himself a knife and carved Mathews up like a roast turkey.

  But there was certainly no new laissez-faire spirit aboard the clipper Surprise, bound to Penang in 1856. Six days out, the second mate, Mr. J. Dow, gave a man coming down from aloft a thumping before his feet had hardly touched the deck. The unexpected blow caused the sailor to growl something under his breath. This act of “insubordination” angered the mate, who ran aft to get himself a belaying pin. He struck the man with it and ordered him to help man the capstan. The seaman kept talking back, so the mate ran aft again for his trusty belaying pin. The bloody-nosed seaman grabbed up a capstan bar and prepared to joust with the second mate. But the efficient Mr. Dow, accustomed to handling such situations, just rapped him on the knuckles so that he dropped the heavy bar. Then he beat him on the head and back as he fled. All the fight was soon gone out of the man.

  Dow was particularly rough on a green hand, Charles A. Abbey, who was unfortunate enough to be susceptible to seasickness. Second threw a coil of rope at him and then struck him on the back of the head twice in warming up for a real bout of buckoism. This occurred on a Sunday, when Abbey was helping another boy to clear the topmast studding-boom brace from some other rigging. Dow suddenly hit him from behind with all his strength. “God damn you, will you let that boy take it aloft, will you? Will you?” He knocked Abbey to the deck, jumped
on him, hit him on the back and head with both fists and pounded his heel against Abbey’s head, swearing all the while. Abbey tried to go aloft as ordered but could not even get to his feet. The second mate grabbed another belaying pin and was about to club him with it when he saw it was of iron, not wood, and would probably kill the boy. He threw it aside and let the lad crawl away. Abbey recalled, “I could not come out on the next watch, my head was so sore. That he inwardly injured me, I am confident, for I still find great difficulty in breathing. It was more than twelve times that he struck me.”

  The mate turned on another sailor and, for some trifling accident, took up a club and beat him terribly, cursing violently. Captain Charles A. Ranlett, who stood by, watching, finally stopped him. “Hey, hey, hey! Stop swearing! If you can’t get along without swearing and knocking the men so, you may quit. I won’t have it.” Abbey noticed that the mate did not swear so much after that when he was beating up on the men.

  Finally, one of the sailors, a fellow known only as Bill, had had a bellyful. Struck twice by the mate for having let go a wrong halyard, he pulled out his knife and made two stabs at the officer’s chest. Luckily for Dow—and probably for Bill—he missed. The mate ran aft to the carpenter’s bench, caught up the first thing he saw—a broadax—and returned to the fray. Bill shouted bitterly, “Oh, you bring an ax here to me, you son of a bitch!” Possessed of that rare, cocksure brand of confidence normal only to bucko mates—a kind of courage which impresses one if it does not make the villains more endearing—the second officer handed the ax to one of the crew and took off after the knife wielder with only his bare hands. “Stop, or I’ll butcher you, now mind!” he was shouting.