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

  Shanghaiing must have been a lucrative trade, indeed. Ties with City Hall in the days of Abe Ruef, Chris (Blind Boss) Buckley and other political bosses who preceded them, were close and the crimps could clean up $50,000 a year even if they had to pay their fiercely competitive runners up to $300 or $500 a week. Honest skippers found it expedient to play ball with the land sharks or their City Hall allies could always drum up a charge of “trash on deck” or “throwing garbage overside” to embarrass, harass and delay them. If these maneuvers did not work, then a fire below decks, auger holes below the waterline, an unshackled anchor cable or a cut hawser would usually turn the trick.

  There were some wags among the prominent shanghaiers of old Frisco—Patsy Corrigan, Johnny Fearem, Mike Connor, Shanghai Kelly, Tommy Chandler, and George Reuben—who specialized only in Squareheads (Germans). Mike Connor had a place on the Embarcadero but in the 1880s he gave it up and opened the Chain Locker Saloon and Boarding House on Main and Bryant Streets. He was a crimp but he made a fetish of always speaking the “technical” truth. So, when he had to tell a shipmaster that some hick he had shanghaied was a real deepwaterman, he always swore on a Bible that the fellow had been around the Horn. The first thing he would do when delivered a man by his runners would be to lay a cow’s horn on the floor and make the would-be sailor walk around it. In his back yard he installed a ship’s wheel, a mast with a jib, halyards and rigging. Here he gave his alfalfa A.B.s the rudiments of seamanship before sending them aboard.

  Shanghai Kelly, the short, heavy Irishman with the red beard and redder temper, kept his saloon and boardinghouse at 33 Pacific Street, between Drumm and Davis. Underneath its pilings flowed the tide. He preferred sailors to students or hicks, not because of any guilt complex over sending landsmen unwillingly to sea but simply because the beaten-down sailors were more tractable and easy to bulldoze. But he would take anything he could get, dead or alive. He is claimed to have shipped out corpses and even a Market Street cigar-store Indian. The brave was pitched overboard by the taken-in captain when day dawned and it drifted ashore. Rescued from the Cliff House beach, it was reclaimed by its tobacconist owner and set up once again in its place of honor on Market Street. Like Miss Piggott, Kelly had his own special shanghaiing drink—concocted of schnapps, beer and drugs. He also liked to dope cigars with opium. Chinatown cigarmakers turned out these “Shanghai smokes” especially for Kelly. He also supplied sailors with women—“free,” of course.

  During the 1870s, Kelly found himself bereft of seamen at a most inopportune time. The New York hellship Reefer lay anchored off the city with two other vessels, all three needing seamen badly. Kelly had to pull off a tour de force to find men for the trio of vessels but, by golly, he did. He chartered the old paddle-wheeler, Goliah, the first tug on San Francisco Bay, and announced that he was celebrating his birthday with a grand picnic. Drinks would be free. He issued a blanket invitation to his Barbary Coast neighbors and the hoi polloi responded by gathering in the wharf in great numbers. Shanghai Kelly counted out ninety strapping picnickers and cast off. The old Goliah wheezed down the bay and out through the Gate, its wake littered with “dead soldiers” consigned to the waves by Kelly’s imbibing friends. Whole casks of liquor were drained in toasting hale-fellow Kelly’s health. The booze, of course, contained knockout drops and soon all aboard, save Kelly and his cronies, were out cold. A crew for each of the three ships was hoisted over the side.

  Kelly was a lucky bloke and, as usual, Fate dealt him a good hand. On the way back to the Embarcadero, the Goliah picked up some of the survivors of the Yankee Blade, the clipper wrecked off Point Conception. The arrival of the shipwreckees caused so much excitement on the waterfront that no one remembered to ask Kelly what had become of his picnickers.

  But according to George Fred Tilton, the whaler, the toughest boardinghouse in Frisco (in the ‘80s, at any rate), was that of Shanghai Clarke. In Tilton’s words, he was “one hard hombre.” Captain Tilton always figured that the smallpox case he acquired on the whaler Belvedere was due to this Frisco crimp outfitting a shanghaied hand with old, second-hand or third-hand clothes from some disease-pocked, or already dead, sailor on the beach.

  Corpses were shipped out by Kelly and others as dead-to-the-world drunks. Some of San Francisco’s “perfect crimes” would have been solved had shipmasters not rolled overboard the corpses which turned up among a knot of drunken and shanghaied men. The outbound captain seldom made any inquiries. He would just mark the man’s death down as due to acute alcoholism. He would be just as unlikely to report the incident to the police when he called again in port. Bodies were always being found floating in San Francisco Bay. There was a reward for same, and pulling them in proved to be a fairly lucrative business for some of the bay’s boatmen.

  Shipmasters were not only fooled with cadavers but also with dummies. And not just cigar-store Indians. Weighted dummies were hustled aboard ships at night, of course, when visibility was poor. Fog was a great friend of the San Francisco crimp, too, in passing off dummies or dead men as drugged hands. Nikko, the Lapp runner, specialized in selling dummies to captains. He gave them a lifelike, twitching appearance by imprisoning rats in their coat sleeves. A real artist was lost to the shanghaiing fraternity when Nikko, desolate over Miss Piggott’s death in the early 1870s, migrated to Olaf Frisson’s saloon on Harrison Street. The Norwegian was that rare bird, an honest barkeep, and Nikko followed him down the straight and narrow path from that time on. Never again would he tend a trap door or serve up a “Miss Piggott Special”—whiskey, brandy, gin and laudanum or opium.

  From the earliest days, San Francisco was a toper, a city of saloons. The New World, Our House, the Kremlin, the Tontine and Barry & Patten’s were pioneers. They were soon followed by the Empire, the Bella Union, La Sociedad, the El Dorado, the Parker House, the Washington, the Verandah, the Sazerac, the Old Corner, Martin & Horton’s, Squarza’s, Faust’s Cellar, and the Rip Van Winkle, kept by the City Marshal, Malachi Fallon. Fallon’s place had a ship’s figurehead of Rip, on the corner in place of a lettered shingle. It was handy to the notorious gambling hells, the Crystal, the Osceola and others. Poor sailors often found these places too “swell” and too expensive for their tastes, so they adopted certain saloons for their own. Dutch Charley’s was one such favorite. In April 1855 a sailor, Pete Williams, was stabbed in a drunken fight there by John McCarney. In August another “murderous affray” occurred and an Italian wounded William French severely. On the last day of August the police finally closed “the notorious den” and took Dutch Charley into custody. On January 30, 1875, Dutch Charley was kicked to death by Antonio Hidalgo at Hunter’s Point Dry Dock. (Ironically, Hidalgo means “gentleman” in Spanish.)

  In Sydney Town or the Barbary Coast, a running civic sore on the face of San Francisco, were the worst deadfalls in all America. Barry and Patten, the two respected and respectable saloonkeepers of Montgomery Street, called these spots “shabby little dens,” filled with “skulking knaves, fellows who always had a way of sliding out of sight when you looked at them.” These were the alehouses which catered to transported English blacklegs, to ticket-of-leave men, to Aussie macquereaux and their tarts—and, naturally, to homeless sailor boys. Here rolling drunks was big business. Crimping became so refined in such establishments that a whole new term was born in San Francisco to describe the practice—shanghaiing.

  Other brutish bars included The Shades, which served as a sort of clubhouse for Sam Roberts and the other ruffians of the gang called the Hounds, which almost took over the city in 1849. After the Vigilantes ran the Hounds out of town, The Shades converted to the more respectable business of shanghaiing sailors. Other dives included the Tam O’Shanter, the Hilo Johnny and the Noggin of Ale. The police found Hell Haggerty’s bars, the Golden Rule and the Goat and Compass, to be chronic trouble spots. They also had to keep a close eye on the Dolly Varden, where much drugged liquor was dispens
ed. Ned Allen’s Bull Run on Pacific Street and Sullivan Alley was no tea shoppe, either. This spot attracted so many toughs and resultant donnybrooks that the police dubbed it Hell’s Kitchen & Dance Hall. With no G. I. Bill to induce him to take up book learning, Civil War Union veteran Allen and his bouncer, One Year Tim, gathered together a stable of the loosest waitresses and “hostesses” in the world. He delighted in dousing their liquor with cantharides or Spanish fly. His colorful career was closed when he ran amok (perhaps he’d sampled his own drugged rotgut), brandishing a bizarre weapon—an ivory tusk—and another Barbary Coast Ranger let just a little too much daylight into him with his clasp knife.

  In the 1880s the newspapers fulminated particularly against The Devil’s Acre, a pie-shaped block formed by Broadway, Kearny and Montgomery Streets. Here there flourished a nest of disorderly houses where, as a contemporary said, “the habitués sun themselves at the doors of their dens and exchange billingsgate.” The headquarters of this social set was a cellar saloon called The Slaughterhouse. When its reputation became even blacker, it came to be called The Morgue. By 1890, San Francisco boasted 3, 117 licensed saloons, many of which were of the caliber of The Morgue. This was one water hole for every ninety-six persons. By 1870, Frisco’s saloons were bringing the City Hall $125,000 in revenue per year from liquor licenses alone. No one knows how much changed hands in pay-offs, protection money and other varieties of bribes. There were many unlicensed places, too. The blind pigs or blind tigers peddled the very cheapest, most adulterated redeye to bums, alcoholics and sailors.

  Seamen liked to hit all these spots, to check the action, to ogle the waitresses (and fondle them if they had some silver in their jeans), to stare raptly at the hootchy-kootchy dancers and décolleté chorus girls. They would cruise up and down Terrific Street, as they called Pacific Street after dark, trying to sidestep the forms of sleeping drunks, spews of vomit and shards of broken glass. These were tough times on the Barbary Coast, but exciting ones. Monied miners staggered along, arm in arm with painted Camilles, or nymphs du pave, as the newspapers called them. Sailors just paid off would hit the hurdy-gurdy houses or the Mexican fandango houses. They cased Maiden Lane, then Morton Street, but known to all as Iodoform Alley, a thoroughfare of harlotry running between Kearny and Stockton Streets.

  If stone-broke or fearful of shanghaiers, sailormen might restrict their activities to the bizarre Cobweb Palace on Meiggs Wharf. This bar, Uttered with dust and cobweb-covered curios—war clubs, masks, screens, and statues—plus a menagerie of monkeys and other animals, was presided over by an eccentric ex-sailor, Abe Warner. He was no more likely to throw out one of his breed, even if down on his luck, than he was to clean up his filthy mew.

  Many of the saloons and boardinghouses survived only by preying on sailors. It was only once in a blue moon that Jolly Jack Tar managed to get one-up on a boardinghouse boss or saloonkeeper. In 1859 a sailor named Humphreys almost got the best of a boarding master. He boarded with George F. Randall, promising to pay his bill once he would ship. But he repeatedly turned down chances found him by Randall. Ultimately, he refused to go to sea at all. Randall took the man’s traps to the shipping office and left them there as security for his board bill. The sailor brought the landlord into court but the case was dismissed. This was not much of a victory, but John Morris did better. He was a sailor who in 1859 came to James Higgins’ place and pleaded to be taken in till he could find a ship. He said he was starving. Out of kindness, Higgins gave in. He got him a ship but Morris wanted some money before he would ship. He signed on the vessel, got a due bill for his advance and gave it to Higgins, demanding the money. The landlord refused, explaining that he had eaten up the money during his stay. A fight followed and Higgins ordered Morris out of the house. Eventually he threw him out. The latter then made a complaint against the landlord. The California Police Gazette sympathized with the boarding master: “There is one thing to say in favor of the landlord, Mr. Higgins. He took the complainant out of the street, hungry, and, as he stated, almost starving and upon attempting to get his due when the complainant shipped, what was his reward? Our readers can see it. The complainant is a young man but we are much mistaken if he has not been educated in the Liverpool science of ‘bilking’ landlords. We know something about those practices and whenever a case comes under our notice—transactions to which we have been heretofore familiar—we will expose the defaulter in a little [while] in the plainest manner possible.”

  The sailor had even a harder time getting the best of water-front haberdashers. But William Blythe managed it. He was listed in the old San Francisco Police Department record books in June 1851 as being accused of “obtaining goods by false pretenses as a cheat.” He represented himself as Captain Vollmer of the ship Thalia (perhaps he had just left the bar of that name) when he entered the store of Mr. Goldstein on Montgomery Street. Captain Vollmer ordered a suit of clothes and took them along, promising to pay later. Goldstein finally smelled a rat and notified the police. When Blythe, alias Vollmer, was finally located, he was on Pacific Street Wharf in his new duds. Officer Charles A. Howard made him peel them off on the spot, don his old clothes, and march to jail.

  Some of the outfitters were kind men. George Fred Tilton always praised Jew Levi, as he called Solomon Levy, who had a store on the south side of Pacific Street between Montgomery and Sansome. Levy used to bail seamen out of jail and would lend money to whalers. Tilton was particularly grateful to Levy because the Jewish haberdasher had once gotten Tilton himself out of pokey. He had pitched in to help his half-kanaka friend, Fish, in a barroom brawl but made the mistake of decking a policeman instead of a brawler.

  The British Consul General in San Francisco had a low opinion of sailors’ outfitters. “The San Francisco tailor is a useful creation of modern roguery,” he reported home. “He will, if requested, present a bill to any amount for clothing supplied to deserters and the master will pass on it.” (And both men would profit, need it be said, from the imaginary transaction.)

  Other clothiers who catered to the sailor trade were Mrs. Dora Herz and her son, Ittzy, Abe Fromberg of the Great Eastern Auction Market, and O’Hanlon—a bit out of his element. But usually their motto was strictly business. The sailor seldom found a friend in their ranks. About the only friends the sailor had were the do-gooders in San Francisco who tried to take them under their wings. These included Father William Taylor, the street preacher; the sky pilots of the old hulk moored at the corner of Mission and Spear Streets, called the Seamen’s Bethel; and the gentlewomen of the city. Of course, the sailor made several attempts to help himself, too. In 1855 the sailors and longshoremen went on strike. There was great excitement along the wharves at this rash and unheard-of action. The City Marshal quieted the “great disturbance” by arresting three ringleaders. The sailors lay dormant, in terms of organization, until January 1866 when, in a meeting in Turnverein Hall on Broad Street, they voted to form a Seamen’s Society for the Pacific Coast. Nothing much came of this or of the founding in 1878 of the 600-member Seamen’s Protective Association, in a meeting held in the Western House on Steuart Street. They would have to bide their time and await Andy Furuseth’s arrival on the scene.

  In 1856 the ladies of San Francisco founded the Ladies’ Aid and Protection Society for the Benefit of Seamen. It was immediately confused with the Ladies’ Aid, of course, so the name was shortly changed to the Ladies’ Seamen’s Friend Society. By late 1856 its Reading Room and Library averaged fifty readers a day. The ladies expressed a hope that they would soon be able to build a home for the sailors’ “comfort, protection and salvation.” The Directoress, Mrs. C. Thomas, explained why the organization was necessary: “The sailor here is not allowed to land before he is waylaid. The runner of sailor boardinghouses—usually dens of more iniquity than the gambler’s hell—boards the ship as soon as she enters the harbor and plies poor Jack, thirsty from a long voyage and brackish water, with liquor tha
t is fatal at 500 yards. From that moment until the land sharks have bagged his wages, the sailor is a flying fish in fate, kept under the influence of liquor until his last dollar has been filched. Then, often without his knowledge, he is put on some outbound hulk with his month’s advance appropriated for alleged charges to his bill.”

  The ladies got right down to business. At their first meeting, their guest, Admiral (then Commander) Farragut, made a few polite remarks. In 1857 they leased the old Mercantile Hotel at 159 Front Street and secured the services of Captain Frederick Hennell as its superintendent. The building was renamed the Mariners’ Home but this was reconsidered and it was dubbed the Sailors’ Home. It charged the same rates as other houses but offered superior board and accommodations, plus the Reading Room and Library.

  In his first report, Superintendent Hennell told the good ladies: “I have every reason to believe that many sailors through the influence of the Home have been prevented from being shipped off in a state of insensibility and destitution, commonly called ‘shanghaiing’” If his boarders refused “to forsake rum,” he threw them out. He forbade dice, cards and gambling of all kinds but secured draughts, chess and backgammon games for his lodgers. On September 1, 1858, Hennell resigned and Mrs. Rebecca H. Lambert was appointed Matron. Captain O. W. Spencer was bookkeeper and cashier but the ladies were determined to run the show. After three months, housemother Lambert, “by a unanimous vote of the society,” was elected Superintendent of the Sailors’ Home. Captain Spencer immediately resigned, and Captain S. Elliott of the New York Sailors’ Home replaced him.