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

  The first victim of the Sunrise tyranny was a twenty-year-old Frenchman who went by the name of Charles Brown. The first mate apparently kicked him every day, usually two or three times a day. Harris made him work twenty hours a day. He took great delight in throwing the Frenchie violently to the deck where he became a target for Harris’s ponderous boots. He stood this all right, but after being forced to stand motionless on deck for twenty-four hours without food or water, he abandoned the ship and his life for relief in the ocean’s depths.

  John Condiff, a thirty-five-year-old Englishman, was next reported “missing.” He was treated even more cruelly than Brown. His existence was a nightmare. He was not allowed to sleep in the forecastle but was put under the gallant forecastle where he was compelled to sleep for fifteen nights with the hogs. The man, half demented from a life of beatings, little food or sleep, and endless work, found life too miserable to endure. He employed what strength he had to end his life.

  The third man to die, T. K. Corrigan, a sixteen-year-old Irish boy, was the special object of Frank Harris’s brutality. After the usual allotment of kicks and blows from rope and club he was forced, like Brown, to stand on deck for twenty-four hours without eating or sleeping. After this he was sent to the topsail yard from which he either jumped or fell from exhaustion and was lost over the side.

  The mate often told the men that they would never reach San Francisco, that he would force them to jump overboard first. When he had the men drained of strength from overwork and punishment, he delighted in sending them aloft. There he would play a cruel trick on them, trying to throw the weakened men from their places by letting the halyards go. For thirty-six hours he kept Belle scraping the deck. When he had passed out from lack of sleep and could no longer scrape, Harris tore the scraper from his hand and struck him on the head with it. In Belle’s words, “the crew were all licked fearfully.”

  The captain and the “monster, Harris” were always growling at Second Mate Maloney for not joining in their cruel sport with the men.

  The Alta, as always, was a fair paper and it did not convict the officers in its columns before trial. It ended its story thus: “If Harris and Captain Clarke are innocent, they owe it to themselves to prove it. And we hope for the sake of the American marine that they can do so.”

  Captain Clarke sent a statement to the Alta to explain his side of the Sunrise affair.

  “The ship left Sandy Hook on the 6th of May and on the 9th, Charles Brown, one of the missing crew was reported to me as filthy and that ‘vermin were running away with him’ I ordered him a bath, cut his hair, and clothes were given to him.

  “On the 14th of May, Mr. Harris reported that Brown could not be found. Nothing could be learned about him except that he was seen near the foresheet on the sail and I suppose the foresheet knocked him overboard as the ship was going eight knots an hour and was rolling.

  “I deny that he was struck while on board.

  “John Condiff shipped as an able seaman. After we got to sea, he told me he was a grocery man. He made his brag in the forecastle in my hearing, that we would have to do the best we could with him. He was sent up to clear the royal buntline but could not get up. He was put scraping the decks but scraped the wrong way. He was put curling ropes but curled the wrong way. He was put on the lookout and went to sleep.

  “On May 19th, wind northwest, the ship going about four knots, I was on deck by the after hatch. My wife stood by me. I saw the man go forward. The mate was aft and, in about twenty minutes, the second mate came aft and told me that the man could not be found. I had a diligent search made, myself assisting the mate. I sent a man aloft but we could see nothing of him. No cry was heard or I should have heard it.

  “I was informed at breakfast that Corrigan could not be found. To the extent of my knowledge, he had as much rest as any one on board, which was his regular watch. I traced the matter up and found the last thing seen of him was in the fore rigging, going up to the fore yard to clear some of the gear. I suppose he had slipped and fell in the sea.

  “As to C. Belle, I do not know of his experiencing any ill treatment except being put in irons for refusing to obey some order. As to sleeping with hogs, I saw John Condiff asleep under the gallant forecastle and asked why he slept there and was told he snored so and was so full of vermin that the sailors refused to sleep with him.

  “No man was kept 36 hours without food. They got 1/3 more than the Government allowance. The first I heard of the halyards being let go was in the harbor of San Francisco. The second mate told me he was afraid Belle would arrest him for assault and battery. He left without my permission while I was at dinner.

  “Belle shipped as an able seaman but cannot speak English. He had the same facilities to keep clean that the other seamen had, and I have advanced him about $60 worth of clothes.

  “My orders to my officers were: ‘If any punishment is needed, apply to me. When men don’t do right, let them understand that they will have their watch below’ There was no striking, with one or two exceptions, and these I stopped.”

  All this was very pat and plausible but the public joined the editor of the Alta when he remarked, “We fail to see in Captain Clarke’s statement anything approaching a proper defense of the charges made against him by Belle. This man Belle is a living evidence of cruel treatment. Harris does not seem to speak at all... He denies nothing... The matter should be transferred to the Courts for investigation.”

  On September 29, several of the crew sat down in the forecastle and wrote a letter to the Alta, stating the facts of the case. It got ashore somehow, perhaps via runners, and made page one. “It is our intention, as soon as we are allowed to go on shore, to report to the proper authorities what has occurred during our passage to this port.

  “If God ever permitted two fiends to exist on earth, the Captain and First Mate of the Sunrise deserve to be so called….”

  Of Charles Brown, the crewmen had this to say: “If ever man suffered the tortures of hell here on earth, while living, he did. Not a day, hardly an hour, passed that he was not kicked or beat. In fact, he was a complete cripple from the effects of the abuse.”

  Of the English sailor, Condiff—“He was beaten and abused to that extent that he was hardly able to stand on his feet. His legs were swollen up to double their natural size, and his body was in large bumps all over.” According to the crew, when he complained about his condition to the captain, the latter answered him, “You son of a bitch, go to your work!” So he jumped over the side, too. “Others on board have suffered almost as much but with the help of God have been allowed to weather it out.”

  The two bosuns, eleven sailors, carpenter, cook and steward who signed the statement placed the entire blame on the captain: “He alone was the cause of the whole, as he could have stopped it had he been so disposed.”

  And still nothing was done by the authorities. The battered men remained on board the Sunrise except for Belle. Now an impatient Henry George began to demand action: “Is it not the business of some of the United States officers to have captain and mate arrested for manslaughter, if not for deliberate murder? That the crew do not care to enter a complaint is very natural as, under our system of punishing poor people who dare to make complaints, they would be sent to prison for an indefinite time... Are these brutes of the sea to go from here with impunity to torture other men, until they, too, are willing to take a leap into eternity?”

  George kept hammering away. The next day he wrote: “Are the diabolical crimes perpetrated under the American flag upon the Sunrise to go unpunished?” He added, “The mate has already disappeared; by tomorrow, the captain may have disappeared while at any moment the witnesses of the fiendish cruelty, which three men are presumed to have leaped into eternity to escape, may be shanghaied aboard some outgoing ship…. The men tortured to death on board the American ship Sunrise were foreigner
s. They probably thought that under the Stars and Stripes the lowest would find protection. How little did they know of our republicanism, and of the impunity which we give our sea captains to torture and kill.”

  The Chronicle took up the tongs also, joining the Alta and Post in shaming the authorities for their seventy-two hours of inaction. “If the ship Sunrise had come into this port short of a bale of goods or a ton of cargo, the captain would have been compelled to account for its loss, but for the three human lives gone, none demand an account….

  “If a Chinaman had smuggled a pound of opium or a ragged, barefoot boy had peddled ten cents worth of unstamped matches, the whole machinery of the United States courts would be put in motion…. But three or four murdered sailors are of too little consequence to move the ponderous machinery to action.”

  When First Mate Harris joined Maloney in skipping out, the Alta groaned: “The worst feature of the terrible tragedy, or series of tragedies, is the escape of the arch-criminal Harris.” Sarcastically, the paper “doubted the propriety of permitting a man charged with the murder of three of his fellow-men to escape the just punishment of the law.”

  Finally, George took matters into his own hands. He formally entered a complaint against Clarke, Harris and Maloney for cruelty to Charles Brown. At 9: 30 a.m. on September 30, 1873, U.S. Marshal Finnegass arrested Clarke and jailed him. But he was quickly released on bail when T. H. Allen and other water-front businessmen posted a $5,000 bond for him. To make sure Clarke did not flee the city like his mates, George entered two more complaints against him (thus boosting his bond) for beating Corrigan and Condiff. The Chronicle and Alta, in a rare—almost unique—burst of support for a rival sheet, applauded Henry George’s action.

  George pulled no punches. An outspoken foe of crimping as well as buckoism, and quite cognizant of the intimate connection between the two evil practices, he editorialized that, for shanghaiing the landsmen Brown, Corrigan and Condiff in New York, all stupefied with drugs, “Captain Clarke, had justice been done, would have been swinging to the yardarm of his own ship within 24 hours after she reached a civilized port.”

  Henry George really hit the ceiling when he heard of the next move to whitewash Captain Clarke. This was an attempt to bribe the crew. He sent one of his best reporters hustling down to the four seamens’ boardinghouses on the water front where the crew was now lodged. He asked the first landlord if there was any truth to the story of bribery.

  “Well, I don’t know much about it, but I saw Captain [A. F. ] Scott, who is a friend of Clarke’s, in close confab with some of the landlords at whose houses the Sunrise crew are stopping, and I know that although the crew have not been paid off yet, they have plenty of money. They openly declared that they’ve received a bribe of $50 each to sign a document exonerating the captain.”

  The other landlords, though they uniformly condemned the brutality of the ship’s officers, were reticent about the bribery affair. So the reporter quizzed Charles Gordon, a sailor staying at Sanders’ Hotel. He had heard Thomas R. Furt, probably the most intelligent and literate of the Sunrise’s crew, boasting that he had received not $50 but $200 to keep his mouth shut. (Apparently a premium was placed on eloquence.) The Post hunted up the Petersburg Virginian, who had become the natural leader of the crew, and got him to talk:

  “I may have said I’d received $200 but I was a little intoxicated. No one has given me a bribe.”

  “Were you offered a bribe?” countered the reporter.

  “Yes, a man offered me $500 on Sanders’ counter this morning to clear out.”

  “Who was the man?”

  “That I can’t tell you. I have pledged myself not to reveal his name.”

  “Do you think that any of the crew have been bribed?” “I have no doubt of it.”

  “Do you think any of them will try to escape?” “Yes, I do,” answered Furt.

  Now the Government got worried. Furt and fourteen of his mates were quickly lodged in comfortable quarters in the county jail. Furt’s bail was raised from $250 to $1,000. The U.S. District Attorney did not want his star witness following defendants Harris and Maloney into the wild blue yonder.

  Henry George was not surprised in the least that the brutalized sailors would accept bribes to keep their traps shut. “Is it not known,” he asked, “on every ocean in the world that San Francisco is a port where justice has no ears for the complaint of a seaman against a captain-—a place where the killing of a sailor is considered no crime? It is a fact which ought to make every American blush but, nevertheless, it is a fact that by no other nation in the world are such cruelties permitted to be practiced upon sailors as are permitted in American ships.”

  The Government had its hands full in securing the sailor witnesses. In order to arrest them and prevent their scattering, the U.S. Deputy Marshal used a trick to nab them as they were blowing their hush money on a grand drunken spree. He passed the word around the Embarcadero that if they were at the Shipping Commissioner’s office at 2 p.m., they’d be paid off. They were paid and promised whiskey if they would go to the Marshal’s office. They did so, like so many lemmings, and were whisked into jail.

  The Sunrise “monsters” were the talk of the Coast. The Sacramento Record observed: “So many cases of this kind have come to light in San Francisco of late years and so little has been effected in the way of bringing justice to bear upon brutal shipmasters and officers that the port has come to be regarded as a sort of city of refuge for the worst scoundrels in the mercantile marine and has got a bad name on that account all over the world…. As usual in these cases, the beginning of the evil seems to have been the shanghaiing of men for the crew of the Sunrise. It is time that an example was made of some of the pirate captains and ruffianly mates who make ships hells afloat.”

  An Englishman wrote to the Post to show how Britain treated brutes of the ilk of Harris and Clarke. He cited a case in 1859 or 1860 when a Captain Rogers and his mate were tried for having caused the death of only one man by bad treatment. According to this correspondent, Rogers was hanged and his mate given penal servitude for life by the Liverpool assizes.

  Henry George thought that he saw the fine hand of Captain Abel F. Scott again when Charles Belle was suddenly shanghaied out of San Francisco. The man who had first spilled the beans had not been rounded up by U.S. Deputy Marshal Ben Carver but had been nabbed by some of Frisco’s efficient shanghaiers. However, Carver was no slouch. He captured Belle, hiding in the rigging of the St. Marks, as the vessel lay in the stream ready to sail. Carver also found the missing ship’s carpenter, Eusebe Sagerson, hiding out on Pacific Street and took him, too, into custody.

  Henry George warned the District Attorney that a packed jury could be expected next. He then solemnly stated: “We are not, as a general thing, in favor of Vigilance Committees and fully appreciate the dangers of mob law but if, after a fair trial, Captain Clarke of the Sunrise shall be found guilty of one tithe of the crimes charged against him and yet escapes retribution, we are in favor of a Vigilance Committee which will do upon some of these murdering ships’ captains the justice which the officers of the law refuse to do.” The Chronicle added an amen by stating, “The thing to do is to hang just one sea captain or one first mate.”

  With tempers running this high, it is not surprising that people began to see Sunrise Harris lurking under practically every bed in town. Then a hot rumor hit the Post—Harris had been spotted leaving San Francisco on the overland train. George, though a little dubious of this story, feeling that the culprit was still in the city, got the D. A., L. D. Latimer, to telegraph the Marshal at Truckee, high in the Sierra, to stop the train and arrest the suspect. This he did, but the prisoner turned out to be an innocent man named James C. White, who resembled Harris.

  On October 6 the publisher of the Post, William M. Hinton, offered a $400 reward for “Farrell alias Harris.” (H
arris had shipped out of San Francisco on the Sunrise on her last eastward passage, under the name Farrell. He had had to stow away in New York to avoid the consequences of his abuse of the crew at that time. Furt claimed that he had dragged an old sailor, crippled with rheumatism, on deck, stripped him and poured ten buckets of water over him. The next day, the old-timer was dead in his berth. In New York, Farrell had shaved off his beard and shipped for Frisco as Harris. A U.S. Marshal came aboard in New York harbor but did not recognize Farrell in the now clean-shaven Harris. According to the crew, when Captain Clarke quarreled with him on the bloody passage to S. F., he would point out how he had saved him from the sheriff. He would further needle him at these times by ignoring his alias and calling him “Mr. Farrell.”) The Post’s reward described him as a well-built, good-looking man of about thirty-two or thirty-three years, about five feet, seven inches in height, with black hair and dark brown eyes. This attractive picture was blemished somewhat by Harris’s lacking an upper front tooth.

  The reward had results. Four men left Oakland, heavily supplied with gear and weapons, to track down Harris in the hinterland. All over the state men were eying each other suspiciously. On October 11, the Post had an abortive scoop when a dispatch from Sheriff J. H. Adams of Santa Clara County announced the capture of Harris. Deputy U.S. Marshal Carver, Thomas R. Furt of the crew, and a Post reporter took the afternoon train to San Jose to identify and take possession of the prisoner.

  Deputy Sheriff Mike Cowles, a colorful western lawman of the old tradition, had arrested a suspicious character answering Harris’s description at the Mills Hotel in Saratoga Springs. He had burst in on the man, saying, “I want you, my chicken. Better get up and dress.” “Have you got a warrant?” demanded the man. “Yes, I guess I have.” said Cowles, “and a good one, too,” pointing a derringer at the man. “I’m going to take you in.” “It serves me goddamned right,” said the prisoner.