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

  Santa Barbara only once or twice made shanghaiing news. In 1884 Captain John F. Janes, editor of the San Pedro Shipping Gazette, had a story called “Barbara-ous Treatment of Shanghaied Sailors.” Thomas Dixon got some deserting sailors (who claimed they had been shanghaied on the Ancon in Frisco) arrested in Santa Barbara. The judge let them go after a pack of shyster lawyers got interested in their case. The deserting men turned around and sued Dixon for false imprisonment and got both the marshal and sheriff arrested— just about stripping Santa Barbara of law enforcement officers. The case went against Dixon. When he tried to address the court, according to his story, one of the shysters, McNulty, reached for a club—in the presence of the judge—with which to brain him. A constable disarmed the man but the next day when the judge tried to shut off the testimony of the sheriff and the marshal, the latter got to his feet and bellowed at His Honor, “God damn you! I’ll break you in pieces, I will, God damn you!” Dixon bitterly ended his account of his trial and tribulations by saying, “This is what Santa Barbara calls a court of justice!”

  In San Diego, crimping was a modest affair with strongarm methods seldom necessary by O’Brien, Dottridge or any of the others in the business. (It must be remembered that in all ports violence was usually not necessary. Trickery, cash, and booze were all better weapons of the shipping master and his cohorts.) The supply of sailors kept up with the San Diego demand. In the 1880’s disillusioned sailors who had tried their hands at agricultural work or as laborers on the Southern California Mountain Water Company’s dams trickled back into port. As in most of California’s minor ports, in San Diego violence was pretty much limited to scab-against-union battling. The most exciting incident occurred on the night of November 26, 1887, when Captain Robert Story of the British bark Dana found himself boarded by forty union men from Whitehalls, intent on removing three nonunion men. He flashed his pistol but another load came over the opposite rail and he prudently surrendered. The three scabs turned out to be British subjects, and for a time it looked as if the War of 1812 would resume after a lapse of about seventy-five years in San Diego Bay, only with the good guys and bad guys reversed. Rumors flew around Point Loma that one of Her Majesty’s men-o’-war was being dispatched to put down this San Diego piracy, but no bombs fell.

  A saloonkeeper in San Diego about this time tried to start a scab shipping office but some of the union sailors “sat upon him in good shape” and he thought better of it.

  One ship in San Diego Bay which carried a nonunion crew was not molested. This was the German Salisbury. The reluctance of boarding parties to tackle the Salisbury was not because of any union love for Der Kaiser but rather because the ship’s master had dug up an old brass, muzzle-loading cannon from somewhere, perhaps his own ballast. He loaded it with rusty nails, scrap iron and junk to command the deck from the break of the poop. The Salisbury never had to repel boarders. The silhouette of the deadly old swivel was enough to give both union men and crimps pause.

  When the Miltiades tied up in San Diego, her steward disembarked. He started to walk along the water front but did not get very far before a man fired a shot at him from behind a shed and wounded him in the leg. He was picked up by his mysterious attackers and carried to the nearest saloon where he was drenched (internally) with whiskey as his captors apologized profusely—“We thought you was somebody else.” In the case of the Miltiades, as in that of the Dana and the Salisbury, no one bothered to call the police. It was strictly a water-front affair.

  The pièce de résistance of San Diego water-front battling was the Otago case. Since she had a full union crew on board when a hole was blown in her hull on the night of November 28, 1887, most people felt this was not a crimps-versus-union-men fight. It was probably a personal quarrel between the skipper of the Otago and the captain of the Mexican steamer Carlos Pacheco. The mooring lines of the two vessels were on the same bollard. After the bark’s lines had been cut three times, her captain promised to shoot the master of the steam kettle if it happened again.

  Shortly after sunset the Carlos Pacheco let go her lines and slid out into the stream. As she backed away, an explosion rocked the harbor and a hole, big enough for a fat bosun to crawl through, appeared in the side of the Otago. No one aboard was hurt though the second mate of the nearby schooner Peerless suffered a “numbed finger” and had a hole blown through his dungarees by the torpedo, mine, infernal machine or whatever it was.

  When the Carlos Pacheco next steamed past Ballast Point, Captain Nelson was arrested. He was tried before Squire Monroe and acquitted on a technical point—the prosecution had failed to identify the owners of the Otago. Therefore, Nelson himself might be an owner. And, if so, he had a right to blow up his own ship.

  As the busiest Southern California port and the gateway to Los Angeles, San Pedro had a more exciting water front than San Diego even in its Otago days. Both crimps and union sailors made plenty of trouble there. Many deserters walked off ships in San Pedro, like the crew of the Penthesilea who marched on shore with each man wearing two suits of clothes, explaining to the watchman that it grew cold in California at night. (Since Britishers shipped for the round trip and were not paid off in California, many captains were only too happy to see the last of their hands. If they did not walk off fast enough they could usually be urged along with some threat of dirty work, like chipping rust on the side of the vessel.) In 1893, a shipping agent, Victor Lindquist, was arrested for enticing men to desert the barkentine Eureka, but he was acquitted.

  Another crimp of San Pedro was Coffee Jack Conar, late of Eureka. According to union sailormen he was a greedy leech with a bloated face who tried to pass himself off as a great friend of the sailors by offering them chewing tobacco, whiskey and “the decoying arms of some poor and unfortunate prostitute.” The Coast Seamen’s Journal described him as a vicious and vulgar parasite who gathered in the earnings of both sailor and prostitute in order to set up parlor houses in Eureka and San Pedro to further rob poor Jack. The Journal advised all seamen: “Do neither speak nor shake hands, do neither associate nor deal with Coffee Jack whenever you set foot ashore in San Pedro.” From time to time, various filler articles would appear at the bottom of a column of the Journal to remind its readers: “Do not forget the boycott on Coffee Jack whenever you come to San Pedro.” Much less detested was shipping master John Jacobsen.

  Captain John Janes, after apologizing to his readers for misleading them about a supposed shanghaiing in 1883 (“The story published some time ago about a butcher boy being shanghaied was all humbug. He was drunk or sparring a drink out of a reporter.”), boasted on November 17, 1883 that “There has not been one sailor shanghaied at San Pedro for six months.” Janes, editor of the Shipping Gazette of San Pedro was the same man who insinuatingly asked, in an article attacking J. R. Brierly, Collector of the Port of San Pedro, “Who was it shanghaied his father on board a ship at San Pedro?” By December 31, 1883, things were back to normal on the water front, apparently, and he had to publish an article “Another Sailor Shanghaied at San Pedro”—for the British bark Crown Prince. In 1895 the union accused a crimp named Davis of shanghaiing a boy on the schooner Reporter. The boy’s parents were taking the case to court when suddenly they dropped it. The supposition was that they had either been bribed or threatened.

  But, as in San Diego, much of the violence in San Pedro was connected with union-against-scab collisions, not with traditional shanghaiing. The Corona, Eva, Eureka, Northwest and other scab-crewed visitors to San Pedro in the 90s were usually welcomed to port by a “howling mob” of union men. The San Pedro Sun remarked, “The only way that nonunion men can be protected in San Pedro today is by carrying force enough to protect themselves, and everyone here knows it.”

  San Pedro was small at the turn of the century. It supported only a dozen saloons. This would hardly compare with Sausalito, let alone San Francisco. But, for all that, she was a cosmopolitan port
. That is why Shanghai Red Eisenberg moved his bar there from the Bund in Shanghai. The town was controlled, alternately, by the labor union element and the saloon crowd. The Seamen’s Bethel was a rotting old hulk on Rattlesnake Island, braced with cables. Its forecastle was turned into a lodging, its hold a public bathhouse, and its capstan was transformed into an Altar. In the 1880s, Captain Charles Farr, Curtis W. Walker and George W. Parsons got the Seamen’s Church Institute going in the old steamer Warrior. Yes, San Pedro was quite a sailor town, a small-scale Frisco.

  The little port of Redondo Beach, north of San Pedro, had a sea battle in 1893 in which forty shots were fired. This was about thirty-nine shots more than necessary to put Redondo in the news. A union boarding party tried to take a nonunion crew off the schooner Halcyon, lying offshore. Captain Rice resisted with shotgun and pistols. The card-carrying boarders were repulsed. Next day, as a fine May morning dawned, a boat was found drifting in the harbor with a dead man in it. It was a union man, Frenchy Silva. James McLaren, organizer of the Seamen’s Union in San Pedro, said that Frenchy’s killer ought to be hanged. The union advised the minister who officiated at Silva’s funeral—“Tell the people that the deceased was well and favorably known here and that he died in defense of what the sailors believe to be their legal rights.”

  The Los Angeles Times and other Southern California papers took an exceedingly dim view of union activity. The Times shrilled: “Residents of San Pedro are so completely terrorized by the union seamen as to fear even to give public expression to their thoughts on the subject.” Another story on the Halcyon battle asked, “What would justify a band of aliens to board a ship and drag from their bunks men whose only crime was that they were willing to work, and pitch them naked into an open sea, perhaps to drop them overboard with a stone attached?”

  Up in the Pacific Northwest, today’s metropolis, Seattle, had surprisingly little to contribute to the shanghaiing war. True, in 1887 after Port Townsend became a union town, Dave the Shiner had his moment of glory shipping scabs all over the sound for $2 a head, but Tom Finnerty opened a union agency which soon put the brakes on Dave. Most Puget Sound crimping took place at the bustling port of Tacoma, though Port Townsend did its bit.

  In Tacoma, crimps like Billy Ryan, an ex-pug, flourished. He ran a joint near the Tacoma Mill for the owner, Dave Evans, who was busier with his plushier establishment, the Donnelly Hotel, uptown. On April 1, 1893, two other Tacoma crimps, Doyle and Baker, were made April fools by being slapped with $100 fines and one-year jail stretches for attempted shanghaiing. Here in Tacoma, too, crimps liked to reverse-shanghai men, to persuade them to desert. Captain Johnson of the Cabral lost his crew thus, and eighteen men jumped from the Samaritan. The Tacoma boys charged stiff blood-money rates and were adept at the old boycott. One contemporary description of their control stated that “The combination of boarding masters on Puget Sound is so strong that if the master of a vessel engages any men himself but cannot get the number of men required, they boycott the vessel and will not supply any men until the others have been turned away again.”

  When the W. F. Babcock called at Tacoma in 1895 she had such a bad name for buckoism that men refused absolutely to ship in her. Some of the crimps asked men in their houses to help shift her into the stream, promising to pay them well for this little chore. Once aboard, the men were ordered by the crimps to the cabin to sign articles for a Liverpool passage. Two men immediately jumped onto the dock but were knocked down by runners and recaptured. Frank Turk, one of Jim Turk’s sons, covered one with his revolver and threatened to brain him. Two more who refused to sign except at the U.S. Shipping Commissioner’s office were marched there at gun point. A Norwegian who refused to sign was carried to sea by brute force. To fill in the required crew, runners signed fictitious names to the articles and bunkoed two Japanese into shipping.

  In February of 1897, John Gronow, a Coast Seamen’s Union man of Port Townsend, reported to Walter Macarthur, editor of the Coast Seamen’s Journal that Charles Nelson, a union member, and eight other men were shanghaied aboard the bark Harvard at Tacoma for Pisagua, South America, by Dave Evans. Evans took a $40 advance from each man and kept half of their clothing. About the same time, a seaman named Johnson escaped from the Senator but eight others were shanghaied on her by Evans and his runner, Billy Ryan.

  In the Pacific Northwest, reported Gronow, there was a “solid front of crimps and shipowners, backed by Senator Frye.”

  When the Pyrenees sailed from Tacoma on October 14, 1900, it was with eight new men replacing deserters. The captain, who had paid $55 each for them, commented in a letter home, “I have only four sailors. The other four, I fancy, never saw a ship before.”

  The captain of the Queen Victoria had to pay a $55 bonus, too, for each man he shipped even though there were several decent seamen ready to ship independent of the crimps for only £4 and no advance. He did not dare to take them. He explained to his superiors, “If I shipped them, when the ship would be ready for sea, the shipping master would not give me a man... Such a state of affairs is unbearable and does not exist in any other port of the world.” Of the kingpin of the Sailors’ Home, David Evans, the captain wrote, “The single boarding and shipping master raises or lowers wages as he thinks fit.”

  When the Celtic Monarch was ready to leave Tacoma, she signed on fourteen new seamen who, although warned by the British Vice Consul, nevertheless blithely signed away to the crimps $50 each. Then the land sharks sold the same single suit of clothes, fourteen times over, to the men. When two of the crew tried to swim ashore, the crimps shot at them and dragged them back to the ship. The captain telegraphed word to stop payment of the advances but the money was legally signed away and the notes had to be honored.

  In the case of the Walter H. Wilson, that same year of 1899, the Port Townsend crimps supplied sixteen men who signed a blank crew list. After the signing, $40 was entered as having been drawn and received by each man. They never saw so much as a flattened pfennig of it, of course. They were then taken to Tacoma where, in that hospitable city, they were not only kept prisoners aboard the ship by guards, but the runner stole their clothes. According to the captain of the Almond Branch, in Tacoma even the union men had their hands out for blood money. He swore he had to pay one $55 in March 1900 to get a seaman, the money accepted for “services rendered.”

  German skippers had a taste of Tacoma hospitality at the turn of the century when the Henrietta was about to leave port. The night before sailing, bribe-waving crimps persuaded the entire crew to desert. When a new crew was available, punctually the next day, it cost the captain $75 a head.

  In late 1901 the Puget Sound crimps, Max Levy of Port Townsend and Seattle, and Dave Evans of Tacoma, combined to set up a stiff blood-money-fee scale backed with a near monopoly on seagoing labor. Captains like Thomas Dunning of the Wanderer had reluctantly to pay the $55. But Larry Sullivan, at Portland, did Levy and Evans one better and nicked Captain David Davies of the Glenogil for $75 per man. Davies had to pay this extortion although he had hired two of the eight men directly, without any help from Sullivan.

  Port Townsend, now something between a ghost town and a historical monument, was a booming port sixty years ago at the tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. It threatened, for the moment, both Seattle and Tacoma for shipping leadership in the far Northwest. In 1893 it was busy enough for a Ladies’ Seamen’s Friend Society to organize there for the purpose of setting up a boardinghouse or Sailors’ Home. The Coast Seamen’s Journal looked sourly at the ladies’ do-goodism, calling their Sailors’ Home “a scab ranch.” In Port Townsend, Max Levy turned foc’s’les into low-slung towers of Babel as he shipped Japanese, Chilean and even Siwash scabs. (The crimps of Townsend and Seattle, incidentally, could not even trust their erstwhile allies in the long-drawn war with union seamen. In Seattle a notorious crimp was beaten badly by scabs when he not only shipped them, but could not av
oid the temptation of robbing them, to boot.)

  In Port Townsend’s satellite, Port Blakely—today a real ghost town—deepwater sailors thrashed several crimps who decoyed them onto ships in order to shanghai them.

  According to the U.S. Shipping Commissioner, the 1884 law was “a wholesome restraining influence on the landlords,” but it had little apparent effect on Max Levy. He was the most notorious of Port Townsend crimps. In 1893 he almost got his just deserts, belatedly, when he beat up a sailor during some scab trials. But the first jury sitting on his case disagreed. The second jury, in spite of testimony from three witnesses (described as “disinterested” by the frankly biased Coast Seamen’s Journal), let him off. The Journal commented acidly, “The citizens here, with perhaps a few honorable exceptions, look favorably upon crimps and their methods... The blame rests more with them than the authorities.”

  Captain C. H. Haug of the Hamburg American Line remembered Levy and his runners for the whole of his life. “They nearly killed me and one of my shipmates because we took a beachcomber on board without their consent.” For fifty dollars a head, and up to three months’ advance—illegal, of course—Levy offered miners, lumberjacks and farmers to the bark Plus, after running the original crew off. The poor, flayed landlubbers had hardly a farthing coming when they reached Dublin. Levy took two complete crews off the ship America. He intercepted a third on the road from San Francisco to Seattle. The captain of the America swore, boasted, and bet that he would ship a crew without Max Levy’s help. He lost. After making up three crews at no inconsiderable expense, he still had to “buy” his hands from Max before he could sail.