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

  In 1891, when the masthead was again changed, it boasted a new design by William P. Sandstad, a real sailor. Lobbying had always been considered an important function of the Journal, from the start four years earlier, but now the paper’s policy was also changed to a much more aggressive campaign in this area. All stops were pulled to secure legislative reform of maritime and navigational laws. As early as 1891 it could be seen that the paper was doing a good job of educating public opinion, converting the great mass of Americans from hostility or indifference to friendly support.

  Xaver Leder served as editor from 1887 to March 25, 1889, and was then succeeded by W. J. B. Mackay. In 1893, 1894 or 1895 (according to whose memory you trust) the most famous and most able of the union’s editors, Walter J. Macarthur, took over the Journal. (It is likely he was associate or assistant editor in 1893-94.) He was editor until 1913 except for the year 1900. Macarthur was succeeded by Paul Scharrenberg. During the latter’s editorship, the Coast Seamen’s Journal became the Seamen’s Journal. The title, changed in 1922, reflected the now broader interests of the paper as it became the official organ of the International Sailors’ Union. By this time it was probably the oldest continuously published labor-union paper in the world.

  It was always the proud boast of Walter Macarthur that the Coast Seamen’s Journal never missed an issue, even in April 1906 when every other paper in San Francisco suspended. In the week following the disastrous earthquake and fire, a four-page Journal appeared, and when a month had passed it was back to its full size of sixteen pages.

  Far and away the most famous and important feature of the Coast Seamen’s Journal was the “Red Record.” Yet its origin and history are shrouded in a sticky cobweb of confusion. Walter Macarthur is often reported as having taken over the editorship from W. J. B. Mackay in 1893, yet the early numbers for 1894—in which the “Red Record” first appeared—still carry Mackay as editor. The first number which had Macarthur listed in print as editor was not until Wednesday, January 16, 1895. Either Macarthur was shy, forgetful, or too lazy to reset the type in this column, or else he was still Mackay’s assistant. And although Macarthur is usually credited with conceiving the idea of the “Red Record.” yet it first appeared when Mackay was still listed as editor. (To make matters worse, though all writers of maritime history speak of the “Red Record” pamphlet, which was worked up and distributed in the hundreds or thousands, only a single copy can be found today.)

  The Coast Seamen’s Journal had always run stories of buckoism and shanghaiing but in the February 14, 1894 issue, a great number of cases of shipboard brutality were grouped together in a feature called the “Red Record.” The column was subtitled “Being A Bare Outline of Some of the Cases of Cruelty Perpetrated upon American Seamen between November 1887 and the Present Date—A Round, Unvarnished Tale. Ecce Tyrannus!” (It bore as its “trademark” an engraving in red ink of a fist with a bloody belaying pin.)

  The first ship ever listed in one of the “Red Record” columns was the Hidalgo, a whaler. She was not as black a hellship as many vessels listed later. Her captain, Williams, was accused only of withholding wages and a 150th lay from her crew, forcing his men to sign on a ship lying in Eureka and getting the U.S. Commissioner to arrest them and legally shanghai them to that Humboldt County port. The second case ever listed, that of the Tarn O’Shanter, related the arrest of First Mate Swan on the complaint of three sailors, the captain’s stout defense of his First, and the latter’s release on $450 bond. But according to the “Red Record,” the Hecla was a real floating hell. On her, Captain Snow and his First were said to have beaten the crew and to have tied a man to a stanchion for four days with food and water placed, tantalizingly, just beyond his reach. The case of the Solitaire was even worse. A man died on Captain Sewell’s ship the day after the mate beat him up and jumped on his chest as he lay on the deck. According to the foreguard, the body was then kept in the afterhold for four days until it was so black that the bruises could not be seen and the officers’ story of the man’s death from TB would be believed by the authorities. The second mate beat the bosun of the Solitaire so badly that he jumped ship in Dunkirk and did not stop running until he was safe in England. Other indictments of the Solitaire included the claim that an old rumpot was given booze by the ship’s officers in order to get him to “rat” on his forecastle comrades, and that another sailor was forced to lick spittle off the deck with his tongue. The Solitaire was the “star” of the first “Red Record” column. She appeared twice for censure. The second appearance concerned her arrival in Philadelphia in April 1889 where warrants were soon issued for Captain Sewell, First Mate F. Ryan, and Second Mate J. W. Robbins for brutality. (Two men, struck while aloft, had fallen to the deck and one had died.) According to the Journal, Sewell paid $440 hush money to the complainants in Philadelphia after letting his mates disappear as the ship was towed up the Delaware River.

  The “Red Record,” in mentioning the case of the John F. Kams, illuminated the lengths to which sailors would go in the late ‘80s to flee their shipboard hells. Four men tried to desert and escape the abuse of Captain McDonald’s mates by constructing and launching a crude raft in New York harbor. Three of the four drowned or died of exposure.

  The Llewellyn J. Morse was a beautiful down-easter. But even this beauty had her hellish moments under Captain Lavary, such as when his First, Watski, beat Arthur Connors with a pair of handcuffs and then imprisoned him in the lazarette for the heinous crime of singing. Watski was freed on $500 bond. Another ship which got a bad name, thanks either to Mackay or Macarthur, was Captain Heckster’s St. Andrew. His mates, Beveridge and Campbell, were arraigned in New York in 1889 for beating Elias Neilson, a Norwegian half-wit, till he died.

  Ironically, a ship which made the black list most frequently was the Commodore T. H. Allen, named for the commodore who had defended the brutes of the Challenge and the Sunrise. A seaman, McDonald, who had protested the third mate’s vile language, was beaten against a rail and suffered a dislocated shoulder. When he complained to the captain, Robert H. Merriam, that stalwart said, “It serves you damned well right.” The carpenter’s shop was turned into a brig where McDonald died. The Solitaire bobbed up again in the hellship news when Fred Hall, a greenhorn (shanghaied in Frisco), arrived in New York, cruelly beaten by the mates and without a cent of pay, for the captain had let the crimps take it all. The third mate, feeling sorry for the battered “farmer,” gave him 50 cents for ferryboat fare in New York.

  The “Red Record” of February 21, 1894, characterized Second Mate Lilybridge of Captain Oakes’s McLaurne as a heavy drinker who was always fighting mad. He beat a man with a capstan bar, en route to New York, and caused another to jump overboard twice (only to be recaptured each time) in Singapore. In the case of the Finance, the Journal observed the use of a time-honored technique by Captain Zollinger and Mate Evelyn. After they were arrested in New York in ‘89 for brutality, they saw to it that the complaining sailors were bundled up and shipped off so that the case was quickly dismissed. But the Finance, like the Solitaire, was a repeater. The “Record” jumped on Zollinger and Evelyn again for brutally assaulting four Negro stowaways and throwing them overboard near St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. Only because the second mate, Martin, disobeyed the captain’s orders and brought the vessel within thirty yards of shore, did the men escape drowning. One of them who could not swim was fished out by Second and landed by boat. Captain Zollinger, according to the “Red Record,” ducked out in New York to escape the charges brought against him by a passenger-witness.

  When the Standard arrived in San Francisco in 1889, her first mate, another Martin, guilty of beating the men, disappeared into the city to avoid the warrant served on him. In November of that same year, the Reuce arrived off the Golden Gate with the crew beaten by the second mate although seventeen of them were down with scurvy. The mate jumped ship as the Reuce was towed through the Gate, but a U
.S. District Court awarded $3,600 in civil damages to the seamen. In New York in December of 1889, the second mate of the Robert C. Belknap skipped out to dodge a manslaughter charge as she came into port with one sailor missing. A witness reported seeing the man go over the side on a line, to paint the ship’s hull. Then the second mate came along the deck, took out his knife, and cut the rope. The Reuce was in the news the following week, too, when the “Red Record” of February 28, 1894, damned Captain Adams and his mates for beating Charles Steinberg because his boots made marks on the deck, and for tricing up a man, Blohn, and forcing him to try to escape in the middle of San Francisco Bay, where his boat capsized and he was drowned.

  If anyone thought that the day of the hellships was over, he only had to read of the John Harvey to be disabused of that false assumption. She arrived in New York in 1890 with both Captain Harry Stewart and Mate Phelan accused of assaulting the men and the captain charged with shooting one man, wounding him in the temple.

  Occasionally, arrests would be made. Mate Gillespie of the Edward O’Brien, for example, was charged with cruelty for beating men with belaying pins and capstan bars and for jumping on a man’s face. He was admitted to bail, of course. Even when a bucko, for some strange reason, pleaded guilty as did Second Mate Robert C. Voorhies of the Harvester in December 1893 in San Francisco, he was let off lightly. Voorhies was fined only $25 for assaulting A. P. Mackay. And all too often a case would end like that of the Rappahannock. Captain Dickinson took her out of Philadelphia in 1890 after getting a shanghaied crew aboard, complete with an escort of crimps, and locking them in the foc’s’le. A detective boarded the vessel and found men with bashed heads and one with a broken arm. The U.S. Marshal thereupon hauled the captain to Wilmington to go before the U.S. Commissioner there. The case was dismissed, the officer’s actions being considered “justifiable discipline.” The “Red Record” honored the Rappahannock also for its 1891 passage from Baltimore when a crew of twenty men was shanghaied. They had been promised berths on a pilot boat. They were beaten and two men were lost overboard at sea, but the crew refused to cause warrants to be issued, saying it was “no use to bother the courts.”

  Once in a while a sailor would have some luck in hauling a bucko into civil court. This happened in the Reuce case, already mentioned, and the “Red Record” cited another similarly successful case, that of C. G. Gabrielson who sued Captain Dougherty of the Rebecca Carmen in New York for damages, including a broken leg, suffered at his hands. The New York Superior Court in January 1891 awarded Gabrielson $1,200. However, dismissals and acquittals were the norm. Second Mate Gerdes of the hellship Reaper, Captain Sawyer, was accused of beating a sailor named Smith till he was so weak that he fell from aloft to his death. The case was dismissed by the U.S. Commissioner in Astoria, Oregon. More shocking to readers of the “Red Record” was the decision in the J. F. Chapman trial. In New York, Captain J. A. Thompson was acquitted of cruelty charges for tricing up the carpenter and quartermaster. His actions were excused by the court on grounds that tricing a man up was “not very cruel” and, further, that one of the complainants was “a drunken old swab.”

  The “Red Record” took on not only merchant marine vessels but also listed revenue cutters like the Bear and the Richard Rush, and naval ships like the Constitution and the Enterprise, and their commanding officers.

  A third installment of the “Red Record” appeared on March 7, 1894, listing the Eureka, on which a man was supposedly so brutalized by Mate McNichols that he jumped overboard, and the Frederick Billings, on which, according to twelve crewmen, the captain pushed a man out of the mizzen chains with a boat hook to his death by drowning. Commissioner Heacock did not choose to believe the Billing’s dozen, and as for their own beatings, he found no real wounds on them. So he dismissed the case, stating “Our courts do not encourage their commissioners in holding for trivial causes.” In this “Red Record” the Commodore T. H. Allen made its accustomed appearance, this time for the beating of her colored cook. Captain Merriam was freed on bail; Mate Merriam (his son) and Second, Crocker, hid. The crew was shipped out; the case vanished into thin air and was dismissed for the usual lack of evidence.

  A really brave man was Second Mate True of the Edward O’Brien, already a notorious blood boat. He offered to fight any three men in the foc’s’le. One sailor took him up on it and Second scuttled away in hasty retreat. He returned, however, with three recruits to back him up—the cook, steward and carpenter—and the four of them managed to beat up the A.B. Then they took on two more of the hands. A pair of brutes of the same ilk were the brothers Orr, first mate and bosun of Captain Hamilton’s Roanoke. In 1893 these two buckos not only beat up their crew but also stole their tobacco and sea boots. First skipped out but the bosun was caught and tried. The case was dismissed, as usual, for reasons of “justifiable discipline.” A real monster was Second Mate R. Crocker, if the “Red Record” was accurate in cataloguing his brutalities. A six-foot, three-inch 260-pounder on the Tam O’Shanter, he was accused of gross cruelty for biting pieces of flesh from one of Harry Hill’s palms, his left arm and one nostril. Crocker posted $500 bail and later won acquittal. He turned up on the Frances, too, and was arrested for some of his habits but the crew was quickly shipped or shanghaied out and the case dismissed for lack of witnesses.

  On March 14, 1894, an editorial in the Coast Seamen’s Journal said of the “Red Record”: “The Journal’s record of brutality on American ships is closed for the present. It was our intention to give a few sample cases only…. Though we approached the subject with a determination to go through with it, we must confess to a natural feeling of revulsion for the horrible details…. If it makes the public think of a remedy, it will have served its full purpose.”

  After this announcement, Mackay and his associate editor, Macarthur, ran no more “Red Record” columns for almost a year, though they did publish occasional, scattered stories of floating hells. (The Commodore T. H. Allen, for example, was “honored” for a fourth time in the Journal with the result that the first mate, Merriam, called on the editor not once but three times to protest his articles. Mackay just expressed the hope that New York would pack the pair of Merriams off to Sing Sing.)

  With Walter Macarthur definitely at the editorial helm by January 16, 1895, the first re-run of the column of horrors appeared. He repeated the earlier “Red Record’” story of the T. F. Oakes in which a court absolved master and mate of any blame for cruelty by countenancing their right to beat “unruly seamen.” Then he ran a new story on the Oakes. In New York, Captain Reid had picked up a shanghaied crew; they were beaten; one man, Frederick Owens, sick and beaten, died; J. Johnson was kicked in the eye. Reid was finally exonerated after he got some of the crew to turn on their buddies and accuse them of malingering.

  When Macarthur took up the case of the Willie Rosenfeld at Port Townsend, he cited the diary of one of the men, John Gjertren, to show that not only did the sadistic mate, Gillespie, beat the men but that he smeared filth on the men’s faces from the ship’s head, and drove John Barton to steal slop from the hogs for food! Peter Sullivan, second mate, and John Kelly, bosun, two big Micks who apparently aped First, did their best to beat up the crew, too. Bitterly and sarcastically, Macarthur explained the situation—“It is natural that Captain Reid should be a brute, because courts and judges (1893) have told him that brutality is justifiable and proper.” Macarthur felt that, “if justice, humanity and law are not lost arts.” Reid should see prison bars this time.

  According to Macarthur, Captain Soulé of the Martha Davis was a rival of Reid in brutishness, using a policeman’s billy on his men and ordering his mates to “break their heads!” There was not even an arrest in this incident.

  All ports were covered by the “Red Record.” In Portland, Oregon, Mate B. M. Stiles was reported to have attacked John Garber with a hatchet, “with terrible effect,” and then to have placed the bleedi
ng man on bread and water. (And, still, the charges were eventually dismissed.) From Honolulu came word that in 1894 Captain Davis took the Empire to sea shorthanded, with all hands in irons and the vessel leaking at a rate of three inches an hour. In Tacoma, it was the W. F. Babcock. Captain Graham was arrested for breaking the teeth of some of his men but was released for lack of evidence. All the way from Swansea, Wales, came the story of the ubiquitous Benjamin F. Packard. Her second mate assaulted a seaman, “Cockney” Falconer, but was let off for the usual lack of evidence. Macarthur compiled quite a dossier on this case. Turner apparently attacked Falconer on the fore lower-topsail yards, sent him on deck and put him in irons. While he was manacled, he was challenged to a fight by the brave captain, Allen, then assaulted again by First and the carpenter. Acting in the spirit of the occasion, the mates beat up two more A.B.s and two boys shipping as ordinary seamen. The reason? “Clumsiness.” The second mate called one quartermaster a “son of a whore” and beat him up as he stood his trick at the wheel. When the desperate men tried to escape as the Packard lay in the stream at Swansea, Turner took one man by the ears and beat his head against the fiddley to terrorize film and his pals, whom he called “Welsh bastards” and “black sons of bitches.”

  According to Walter Macarthur, the Benjamin F. Packard was the American merchant marine (“hell and hustle”) in a nutshell. “The whole case of the Packard is a repetition of the case of American shipping generally. The shanghaiing, the brutal cruelty, the endangering of life, the abuse and degrading language, the poor food and overwork, and the ‘dismissal for lack of evidence,’ are all recurrences of the events which have made the Stars and Stripes shunned not only by American boys but by American seamen.”