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

  Mysterious Billy Smith was another who ran a sailors’ boardinghouse, with Jim and Harry White, in opposition to Larry Sullivan. This was before he became welterweight boxing champion of the world. He got into a fight with Sullivan on Second Street one time and whipped him, but after the battle victor and vanquished joined forces in the interest of monopoly in order to tighten control of the allocation of men to ships calling at Portland.

  Mike Enright was only a runner for Jim Turk but he was well known in Portland for his golden tongue. He could sell hicks a real bill of goods on the glories of the sailor’s life—the good salt air, seeing the world, and so forth. He was far more effective than either a club or chloral hydrate.

  When young Aquilla Ernest Clark came to Portland from the Oregon sticks in October 1891, he was a twenty-one-year-old eager to see the sights. On Burnside Street one day he met a nice fellow who told him that the best place in which to stay in town was the sailors’ boardinghouse at Second and Glisan Streets. He gave it a whirl. Clark found it a dimly lighted place with seamen sitting around, pulling on pipes and listening to a Scandinavian accordion player. After a good night’s rest, young Clark awoke to find his new-found host, Mr. Smith, offering to buy him and about eight other fellows breakfast. As they ate, Smith casually mentioned, “Larry Sullivan is putting on a party today. He’s chartered a river boat to make the trip to Astoria and then back to Portland. Maybe you fellows would like to go along.” Indeed they would. Clark and the others waited while a group of handsome young women arrived at the dock in one-horse cabs. Smith was the life of the party. He chattered with the girls and threw blankets over their shoulders as they shivered in the fog waiting for the steamboat. When the men and women marched aboard the Iralda good old Smith served whiskey and Peach Blow cocktails, the latter the invention of the manager of the Portland Hotel.

  A three-piece orchestra provided by Sullivan entertained the pleasure cruisers, and the girls, who proved to be anything but shy, grabbed up partners to dance. A tremendous dinner was served at one o’clock, featuring steak, pork, oysters, crab and salmon. This fare was washed down with bourbon, rye, rum and three kinds of wine. Clark was getting a little befuddled when the Iralda reached Astoria, but he understood Smith when the latter handed him and his friends a sheet of paper, saying, “We’re going ashore in Astoria so you can see what the town looks like. We’ll have an hour ashore and then we’ll go back to Portland. Just to make sure that all of you are on board when we leave, sign your name on this passenger list. Then when we are ready to go, we’ll be sure that everyone is here….”

  The group visited several Astoria bars with Smith, then he asked them if they would like to visit a real deepwater ship. “Sure,” the tipsy men chorused. Clark was one of the first to jump into a small boat which pulled them out to a steel-hulled craft. It turned out to be the T. F. Oakes of “Red Record” infamy. The men were marched below at gun point where it dawned on them that they had signed the ship’s articles, not an Iralda passenger list. They were manacled together, and Clark did not see Portland again for seven years. The ship got under way while they were still kept chained in the strong-room below decks, where they almost suffocated. Captain Reed and his bosun came down during the night, hung a lantern in one corner, and put a bucket on the floor. They left without a word. When the Oakes was at sea, the seasick men were unchained and driven on deck and made to hop to it. The passage to Le Havre was a hard one. Reed was no angel. He was later arrested twice for brutality and murder but got off. The Oakes, besides being a hellship, had the reputation of being a jinxed vessel. When she sailed to Nanaimo for coal, four whole crews deserted her. She was top-heavy, carrying 11,000 square yards of canvas, and when she called at New York all three of her masts had to be lowered to pass her under the Brooklyn Bridge. Nor did a change of name help the jinx ship. On March 13, 1898, the New York, ex-T. F. Oakes, went ashore in Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco. All of Spanish Town went down to the beach to see the wreck, and school was even let out for the children to see the death throes of the hellship. By that time, Clark and the rest of his shanghaied shipmates had long since bade her good-by, and without regrets.

  Captain Craigie of the Sierra Blanco, who had to pay $90 to secure a sailor, reported in 1890 that the Chief of Police of Portland was fired for shanghaiing aboard the Sierra Blanca a man hauled out of jail just for that purpose. Craigie claimed that the man turned out to be a responsible citizen, in jail on an unproved charge. When he had served out his time in the foc’s’le he returned to Portland and secured the dismissal of the Chief. It was Craigie who commented on the detective charged with enforcing Oregon Legislation by keeping runners off ships—“I understand that he very soon did not exert himself.” However, occasionally the crimps were spanked. Sullivan was fined $200, for example, on the complaint of a captain. But, when the master was ready to sail, he found he had lost practically all of his crew to Larry. The latter demanded and got the shocking sum of $117 blood money for each man.

  There was enough rivalry over control of sailors to prevent an absolute monopoly by Sullivan or anyone else. In March 1890, Mordaunt, agent for the Shipowners’ Association, fought a crimp on a British vessel for “possession” of a sailor. (Shades of the slave trade!) In November, Jim Turk and Bunco Kelly, both already under bonds for shanghaiing men, had a fight on the Columbia River over the spoils of crimping warfare. But when a shipping firm organized in opposition to Sullivan, Grant Brothers and McCarron, Larry Sullivan threatened to “rip things apart.” He did not need to, however. The new rival was content to accept Sullivan’s pay-off and Larry simply upped his prices to take care of the cost of the business deal. Conditions in Portland certainly did not improve in the nineties over earlier years. There is a story that a customs official was slugged and shanghaied but was hit too hard and had to be landed as a corpse before the shorthanded vessel sailed. Certainly the Coast Seamen’s Union, successful in San Francisco, Port Townsend, Victoria-Nanaimo, Eureka, San Pedro and San Diego, flopped when it tried to establish an agency of the union in Portland on October 5, 1891. And the 1898 Oregon legislature’s bill to license boardinghouses was defeated by the exertions of the crimps. The city remained the last stronghold of deepwater, hard-up crimping years after other ports had become “civilized.” The British Consul reported home in despair on April 10, 1899, that the crimps were not in the least bothered by the no-advance law. They just shifted their extorting to the blood-money bonus, raising this from $55 to $80 per man and sometimes more. That year Neilson Bird of the Clyde Sailing Ship Owners’ Association complained to the Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs that in the cases of the Scottish vessels Falklandbank and King David, “the owners have been simply robbed.” The Liverpool Shipowners’ Association also complained of its captains being bilked of up to $112 in blood money, adding that the demand of the crimps “has been enforced by physical means in some cases.” British seamen were persuaded by crimps to commit minor breaches of the law ashore, like breaking shop windows, in order to draw a jail sentence of some length. Thus their wages would have to be left behind for them. Then, the day after their ships sailed, the men would get a quick release and their wages—minus a healthy cut for the crimp’s service charge. In the case of the Cedarbank they got sailors arrested on trumped-up charges of stealing blankets, for the same purpose, and they also bribed men to lodge cruelty complaints against masters in order to delay sailings. When the captain of the Howard D. Troop took a firm stand and secured men without the crimps’ help from San Francisco, Richard McCarron, one of Sullivan’s cohorts, went to San Francisco, came up with the new crew, and almost persuaded them to desert en route. When this maneuver was thwarted, he had the master arrested on a phony kidnaping charge. Balfour, Guthrie & Company complained to George Taylor, President of the Portland Chamber of Commerce, about such activity, “No such state of affairs exists at any other port on the Coast.”

  Others bega
n to pepper away at Sullivan and gang. Consul Laidlaw of Great Britain complained to Governor T. T. Geer of Oregon. Geer, afraid of a loss of trade if British vessels began to steer clear of Portland, promised to correct the water-front labor abuses. A Mr. Mohler, manager of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company, also fearing a business loss, was reported by Laidlaw to have “stirred up the merchants in Portland to put down the crimping system here.” But their efforts were premature. As the master of the Dunstaffnage reported, “There is a gang of boarding masters here who appear to do as they please and run the town to suit their purposes. They have been able to put into office a mayor, a harbor master and a chief of police who uphold or wink at their nefarious practices.” After 1900, the crimps were more brazen than ever. Their blood-money demands sailed up to $135 in some cases, though the Oregon law limited shipping-service charges to a mere $10.

  Sullivan was arrested and fined $50 on the complaint of the master of the Nithsdale but, in order to sail, the latter had to surrender, pay the crimp what he asked, and also pay the fine imposed on Sullivan. The Portland Oregonian, a good paper, did not particularly fight the good fight at this juncture. It admitted that the crimping evil existed in Portland but it pleaded extenuating circumstances and suggested that boardinghouse keepers would be reasonable if a monopoly of the business were assured them! At first, Balfour, Guthrie and Company, too, practiced and recommended a policy of surrender. They urged shipowners not to fight Sullivan’s gang. “They are the strongest firm and if they are given the ‘go by’ it will simply mean that there will be another combination patched up and ships made to pay unmercifully.” About this time an unnamed Portland informant advised the French owners of the Belen to order her captain to give up his fight with Sullivan. “It is best for shipowners’ interests that captains be instructed not to make personal and lonely attempts to settle the vexed questions of desertions and shipping sailors at this port.”

  Eventually, however, the Britishers began to fight back. The Clyde and Liverpool owners’ associations instructed their captains, belatedly, to stand firm for “the suppression of the abuses of crimping... The two associations cannot recognize the payment of blood money in any form.” When Sullivan demanded $75 for men to crew the Orealla and Genista in 1900 and blocked attempts of Balfour, Guthrie and Company to secure men in Frisco for only $25, the exasperated Liverpool Shipowners’ Association cabled the company representing their interests in Portland—“Take strongest measures possible.” Balfour, Guthrie and Company did so. They hired the best detectives they could find, Sam Simmons and J. Ditchburn, to track down the men enticed to desert from the Orealla, the Genista, the Penthesilea, the Riversdale, the Decoan and the Australia, forty men in all. But they had little luck. The men had undoubtedly been transported across the Columbia to Washington where the Oregon laws against harboring deserters did not prevail.

  Little improvement, if any, was discernible immediately after the decision of law-abiding people to fight the crimps. The master of the Penthesilea wrote, “As soon as they get a seaman ashore they fill him with whiskey or some sort of poison which takes a man’s senses away and then they get him into their house and ask him all sorts of questions about the ship, captain and officers, and try if they cannot get a case up to claim the wages from the ship. This place [Portland] is something like what New York was thirty years ago... The only way to keep sailors here is to have the boarding masters shot or to drive them out of the place, as they are men of no principle whatever.”

  The master of the German ship Alsterifer agreed. Writing home to Hamburg in December 1900, he groaned, “You cannot believe how these fellows are working. It almost seems as though they hold the whole law and authorities in their hands. Sullivan himself said to the German Consul, 7 am the law in Portland!”

  The lawlessness was becoming insufferable. Crimps openly defied the authorities and bragged that if a judge should decide a case against them, they would have him removed. The chief officer of the Buckingham, who had kicked runners off his ship, was found unconscious and near death, behind a shed on the wharf. This case was meant as a pointed reminder of what happened to those who did not play ball with the crimps. Captain Adam of the Port Logan confessed, “I shall consider myself fortunate if I get off with $1,000 advance and blood money. They came on board last night and took the clothing of Nelsen, A.B. He is now on board the ship and refused to go with them and the boardinghouse sharks tell me that if he stops [i. e., stays] in the ship, I will have to pay for him as if I had shipped another man…. “Captain Porter, who posted a U.S. deputy marshal aboard his ship Riverdale to keep runners off, reported, “They [runners] threatened all sorts of things, and that they would take all my crew if it cost them $500 per man, and that they would have the record and ‘Shanghai a skipper’!”

  C. Heim Labbé, French Consular Agent in Portland, actively fought the Shipping Masters’ Association of Puget Sound, as the crimps called themselves, and even tried to take on “le tout puissant Sullivan.” The reason why is evident from the communiqué sent to the British Board of Trade by Her Majesty’s Vice Consul in Le Havre on the “scandalous proceedings” in the Pacific Northwest. He spoke of the French vessels which had “the misfortune to visit Portland... a reign of terror prevails there.” The Journal du Havre joined in the Gallic chorus of protest on December 29, 1901, with an article tided “Indignes Procédés.” Of the General Mellinet case the Journal du Havre’s editor said, “Tous m’ont affirmé que Sullivan etait si puissant a Portland qu’il fallait le menager et acheter les matelots aux prix qu’ll voulait.”

  Captain Hearn of the ship Genista wrote to shipowners Messrs. Sandback, Tinne and Company of Liverpool in 1901: “The reason I could not write you a sailing letter from Portland was because I had to go in hiding until the ship got to sea.” Crimps had secured the arrest of the captain on a charge of criminal libel. When the grand jury tossed this out, they came up with another charge, and he was rearrested in a civil libel suit. The crimps asked $10,000 for the damages to their reputations (as if their reputations could be damaged). A friend tipped the captain off and he hid in a house and a grocery store, while the crimps offered a $100 reward to anyone finding him in order to serve the warrant for his arrest. They watched each train and steamer, and the game of hare and hounds began to take on the characteristics of one of Eric Ambler’s novels. The captain telephoned from his grocery hideout to Balfour, Guthrie and Company to have his ship towed from its anchorage to an anchorage on the Washington shore of the Columbia. He was determined to dodge the warrant. Next he got a Mr. Burns to send a fast steamboat to take him downriver after dark. A friend took him by buggy to a spot on the river five miles upstream from Portland, and he caught the boat. But the launch went aground in a dense fog, and his escape was threatened. After midnight, she got off and he arrived aboard his command around 2 p.m., too late to go to sea that night. At 7: 30 a.m., another steam launch brought a note from Mr. Cherry, British Vice Consul, that the sheriff was on his way. The captain left his ship as the steamer bearing the sheriff and his posse approached. He took shelter on the ship Halewood, at anchor close by. He got word to Cherry via the launch to send a tug to tow the Genista to sea. The tug picked him up and he stowed away aboard her. He climbed over the rail of the Genista “outside” after the sheriff abandoned his search and returned to town.

  Before the grand jury hearing, Sullivan and Grant had come to the captain and impudently said that they hoped he would not take the libel suit personally. They had nothing against him, they assured him; they just wanted to detain the ship in order to punish the owners who had “got their backs up against us.” Sullivan used this same technique in harassing Captain Batchelor of the Cedarbank with a suit for “maliciously prosecuting Grant and hurting his good name.”

  The Federal Government now joined local and state officials in an effort to crush the cocksure crimps. On October 8, 1902, a confidential communication was received by
the Marquess of Lansdowne from the British Embassy in Washington. It informed him that the U.S. Commissioner of Navigation had alerted the Embassy to the fact that a Secret Service agent had been placed at the disposal of the Justice Department to assist the U.S. Attorney in Portland “in obtaining evidence against the crimps.” This agent was George M. Hazen. He soon reported to the Treasury Department’s Chief of Secret Service Division, John E. Wilkie, that seamen were all signing away exactly $25 for clothes and board (the exact amount of advance allowed by law) and always reporting “value received” when, in truth, few saw any of the money, goods, or board. Hazen talked to the British, German, and French consuls in Portland, all of whom agreed that crimping was doing great harm to the shipping of the port. They insisted that the crimps feared U.S. laws but not state laws. They also told Hazen that the Harbor Master of Portland was supposed to protect seafaring men, but did not. Agent Hazen found few masters willing to testify against the crimps, because of the costly delay to their ships which a trial would mean. At one point he reported that he had five French captains ready to serve as witnesses against the shipping masters, but they could not be delayed any longer in sailing, so they all signed a letter abandoning the prosecution.

  However, Hazen found an ally in G. E. Chamberlain, the State of Oregon’s District Attorney in Portland, and Governor-elect. He was eager to prosecute the bloodsuckers of the water front—“Grant and Sullivan are his political enemies and he does not speak to either of them and would be only too glad to prosecute them.”