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

  Andrew Furuseth’s job of rebuilding was an overwhelming one. Membership had skidded down to about a thousand men, many of whom were sailing with the owners’ grade books. Morale was at the level of a minus tide. But Furuseth was not the man to lie down until the union recouped its strength. He was courageous and mulishly stubborn. The very month he was elected, he urged the union to retaliate against the owners. A bookish man himself, he respected the power of the press and he urged the union to establish a newspaper. He was on the committee which shortly brought into being the Coast Seamen’s Journal.

  Furuseth himself embarked on a speaking campaign. He made talks by the hundreds. He spoke sincerely, with an accent as Scandihoovian as that of El Brendel, and in a rather high-pitched voice. Certainly his ideas were often pitched over the heads of the rank and file, but they listened. His reputation for granite-hard honesty won him a respectful audience even from his enemies. His ideas and logic were clear and well thought through, though sometimes a bit complicated for the simple men he usually addressed. He did tend to ramble, too, and it was deucedly hard to shut Andy up once he had the floor. Furuseth was not an orator in the tradition of the gesturing, bombastic politico. He was too honest. Nor was he a rabble rouser. He might easily have played to the anti-Chinese sentiment of the workers (and, after all, he favored the exclusion of Orientals to prevent wage wrecking) but he never stooped to the demogogic devices of bigotry and race baiting.

  Like a skilled boxer, Furuseth struck and feinted at the shipowners and crimps, trying to keep them off balance. In June of that year, 1887, he requested the California Bureau of Labor Statistics to investigate the water-front labor situation. This was done. He prophesied that the Bureau’s survey would show “evidence of the most startling character, [would] show how the sailor has been kept purposely in his acknowledged degraded condition to render him a will-less commodity in the hands of unscrupulous speculators with which they could ‘bear’ and ‘bull’ the market.” While he was carrying out these outside activities, Furuseth also got union finances in order. With reviving trade and rising wages, membership again rose. As the treasury was nourished, morale returned and seamen again became proud of the union and particularly of their Coast Seamen’s Journal, the only union newspaper on the Coast.

  Furuseth put in two dedicated years of rebuilding as secretary, but then announced that he was going back to sea. Publicly, he said that he did not believe in officials running unions for long periods of time. He believed in turnover, new blood. The work he had done was astonishing. Within two years he had reduced the chaos of union records to a perfect set of organized documents. No wonder the men assembled at the union’s birthday celebration of March 6, 1888, gave him three cheers, as spontaneous as they were hearty. On the nineteenth of November he informed the union’s membership that he would not be a candidate for re-election under any circumstances. When he filed his last financial statement in 1889, it showed that the 2,000 paid-up members could count on a war chest of $22,000.

  On a day in April 1889, Andrew Furuseth hauled up his hook and bade shore duty good-by (he thought). He joined two hundred and fifty men going to Nashagak to set up a cannery. Just before reaching port, one of the sailors noticed black smoke rolling out of one of the holds. He immediately gave the alarm, “Fire!” and the sailors opened the hatches as the ship rolled in the Bering Sea chop. Digging through the cargo, they found the fire and put it out. What might have been a tragedy was averted. To Furuseth, a veteran of many voyages on vessels unseaworthy for one reason or another, it was but a minor incident in a passage he later described as “uneventful.”

  Alaska was not Furuseth’s cup of tea. He wrote, “When we arrived here, the snow was just getting off the ground and it has been keeping off ever since. This is a strange country. It would be warm if the sun would but shine, dry weather if the weather would but cease, and money to be made if the salmon would but come in, but, thus far—and the season is about over—the salmon have been scarce, at least where we are. Should other places turn out [the same], the salmon fishing must, I think, be considered a failure.”

  Although he kept shipping before the mast for several years, Furuseth began to find more and more of his time after 1889 taken up with union affairs ashore. He had joined the union because it was the thing to do. It took him a long time to realize how desperately the union was seeking leadership and, at first, he had not the foggiest notion that they could only find it in him. From about September 1889 on, the self-educated, bookish foremast hand was a sailor-turned-landsman, though he tried periodically to run away to the fisheries from the leadership thrust upon him. But in his make-up, his mentality, Furuseth for the rest of his life, whether afloat or ashore, was a windjammerman.

  Andy, both in and out of office, was opposed to Burnette Haskell and his socialist pals. He wanted to rid the Seamen’s Union of them and their influence. Not only was Furuseth basically conservative for a labor man, and distrustful of Haskell’s harebrained radical schemes, but he also did not like his manner of keeping the books. Easing Haskell out would not be easy. He and the men in his camp had practically acted as midwives for the sailors’ union. They were still active in it, and presumably dedicated to it. They would be hard to oust in any case, since the Advisory Committee for the International, by a constitutional provision, consisted only of members of the Socialist International. And wheras sailors were here today and shipped tomorrow, the socialists were landsmen all, or ex-sailors at best. They stayed on shore, minded the shop, and never missed a union meeting. Furuseth decided to let Haskell hang himself.

  Burnette G. Haskell was a fascinating character. A jack of several universities and colleges, he was master (even bachelor) of none. He did pass the California State Bar Association examination in 1879 and was then apparently employed by railroad interests to buy up state and local legislators when their votes were needed. He had no qualms about buying, selling and bribing lawmakers until 1882, when he inherited a newspaper. He then decided to go straight and he need a cause. He adopted the wild-and-woolly left of the Far West’s labor movement. First of all he set up a study group which he also called The Invisible Republic, to study socialism. Later, he organized the IWA, a secret, at first, revolutionary group along the basic lines of Karl Marx’s First International.

  Looking over Haskell’s ideas, one can see why Furuseth was loath to go along with either him or them. The socialist had worked out an elaborate secret code for his IWA and had even laid plans to seize the U.S. Mint, the Armory, the Customs House, Alcatraz Island, the newspapers, the Presidio and, finally, the government of California itself. Some claimed that he had two thousand members backing this woolly-headed revolutionary scheme, but Frank Roney, another stormy petrel of the California labor movement, ridiculed this figure. He said that Haskell was lucky to count on one hundred supporters, most of whom were in the CSU and who were merely grateful for his early help. Roney had attended meetings of the IWA and should have known of what he spoke.

  Roney and Furuseth found support in the rank and file against Haskell when the latter suggested that the seamen enter a revolutionary float in San Francisco’s first Labor Day Parade in 1886. Word of the Haymarket Riot in Chicago on May 4, 1886, had reached San Francisco and electrified the atmosphere just prior to the parade, scheduled for May 11. Both Furuseth and Roney knew that the archenemies of labor would receive thousands upon thousands of new recruits from the neutral, the uncommitted, and even from those friendly to labor, if Haskell had his way. His “way” was a CSU float displaying armed sailors attacking the Bastille. Roney was President of the Federated Trades Council. He flatly refused Haskell. Furuseth backed him up. Andy probably also now stressed Haskell’s identification with the failure of the strike of 1886. Haskell made enemies naturally and easily, too, with his penchant for slightly melodramatic political intrigue, and he alienated many single-minded union men of Furuseth’s stamp. He had also founded in 188
5 a cooperative society, the Utopian colony in the Sierra called Kaweah, with money invested by merchant sailors. When this failed, he lost their support and friendship along with their money.

  The last straw, however, was when he tried to organize an elite guard from within the CSU, a sort of Legion of Honor. Members were told they would have to choose. If they entered the Legion of Honor, they would have to leave the union. Although Furuseth was in Alaska, his policy, luckily, was followed. Haskell’s right to use the CSU Hall was suddenly terminated. The Advisory Committee’s monopoly by the IWA men was ended. Membership in the Committee was thrown open to all union members. Later, in 1889, the Committee was entirely abolished. Furuseth battled skillfully with the Marxists and he won every battle, down to the last skirmish.

  It is ironic, but Haskell was eventually pushed aside by his own cronies and he died a lonely and destitute man in 1907. A few of his old sailor pals persuaded the union to donate a plot of ground, for old time’s sake, for Haskell, and the man who helped found the Coast Seamen’s Union was saved from a pauper’s grave. Furuseth had no time to dabble in “class warfare,” as Haskell did. He had a particular job to do, the emancipation of seamen, and only one lifetime in which to do it.

  While he was making war on the socialists, he was also battling the Steamship Sailors’ Union. Furuseth, like most windjammermen, viewed these steam sailors with something midway between suspicion and scorn. But he was no fool. He was wise enough to know that the uniting of sail and steam men would make for a stronger union. He also realized that this would be no easy task. There had been jurisdictional conflicts as well as “philosophic” differences between the two groups, as steam overtook sail. Early steam vessels carried sail, too, and when a sailing ship was converted to steam, each organization hotly claimed jurisdiction over the men aboard her. The CSU demanded the right to man steam schooners with its men when it was a case of the owner being an old sailing-ship man and therefore used to dealing with the CSU.

  Andy Furuseth was not perfect. He took the wrong tack quite often. This was one of those times. He tried to destroy the Steamship Sailors’ Union. The CSU actually had their rival tossed out of the Federated Trades Council in October 1887, claiming that the union was a phony, established by the shipowners to do nothing more than divide the ranks of seamen. The CSU charged that the SSU’s secretary, Dave McDonald, was in the pay of the owners. They damned the steam union for scabbing, too, alleging that it had offered to man the Navarro for $10 a month below sailors’ union rates.

  The wrangle which ensued showed Furuseth his error. Here were two different breeds of seafaring men fighting between themselves as crimps and shipowners both cheered them on. Taking stock of the situation, he did a complete volte-face. He practically extended not a branch but the whole olive tree to the steamshipmen. (Andy never did things halfway.) His first suggestion for an exchange of books (that is, that members of both unions be allowed to work on either steam or sail vessels, as they pleased), by the line of least resistance, led to the solution. By a bold stroke of July 29, 1891, Furuseth solved the problem by signing an agreement which amalgamated the CSU and the SSU into the Seamen’s Union of the Pacific.

  Still on the hands of the hard-working, thoughtful Norse was the problem of deepwatermen, mostly Britishers, whose wages averaged $15 a month less than American union men. Here was a potentially ruinous source of competition which shipping masters and shipowners could tap, together, once the time for exploiting it was ripe. Andy hoped that the British would take care of themselves with their National Amalgamated Sailors and Fireman’s Union of Great Britain and Ireland. The Coast Seamen’s Journal reported on all of their developments. Furuseth corresponded with the British union in the years 1888 to 1890 and accepted, in May of the latter year, an invitation to attend the International Conference of Seamen in Glasgow. Furuseth was accompanied to Auld Reekie by Edward Crangle and Frank Waterhouse, the two men elected as delegates by the membership. The trio was charged with pressing the British union for all-union manning of British bottoms coming to the Pacific Coast. Once in Scotland, however, the triumvirate found themselves visitors, and nothing more, at the convention. Their proposals were ruled “out of order,” so the three Americans walked out of the conference in disgust, cursing the British union’s president, J. Havelock Wilson, as a dictator, and a blind one, too. They predicted loudly that British shipowners, when they tackled Wilson’s union, “would hammer the exclusiveness out of them or hammer them to pieces.”

  Furuseth decided he had tried to place the carreta before the caballo. So, on his way home, he decided to have a go at organizing an American national union of seamen before taking on the whole world. The three men stopped off at Atlantic, Great Lakes and Gulf ports to check the status of seamen’s organizations there. They found both a need and a willingness for unionization and, ironically, the failure of their Scottish mission paid off handsomely in the formation of the National Seamen’s Union, thanks to their courtesy calls on their way home, empty-handed, from Great Britain.

  Once again Furuseth tried to let other hands take the wheel of the union. He thought others could now steer it to victory over the vicious shanghaiers and callous owners, not to mention the bullying masters and mates in their employ. But without the Norwegian, the organization began to yaw and came perilously close to capsizing. The old Seamen’s Protective Association of San Francisco, which preceded the birth of the Coast Seamen’s Union, had died a natural death after the treasurer ran off with the funds. Similar symptoms were discovered in the SUP. Someone was rifling the treasury. Apparently not all the officers were listening when Andy provided them with a credo: “A union official to be efficient, should have nothing of his own and want nothing for himself.” Union agents and patrolmen were accused of improper use of union funds and of charging members for a chance, or berth. Despite Furuseth’s financial system of receipts, vouchers, bank deposits and weekly financial statements, it was possible for determined till-tappers to operate. W. A. Bushnell, the treasurer, could not turn over several hundred dollars to his successor. It turned out that he was “temporarily” using it. He hustled around for a week or so and was able to return it. But another blow came, appropriately, on April Fool’s Day, 1891. The union’s secretary, Henry Ark, suddenly disappeared. With him there also disappeared $2,000 in union dues. He was arrested, tried, convicted and made his last voyage on a boat as a nonpaying guest, to Point San Quentin. He died in “Q” in 1894. The Coast Seamen’s Journal said, “The story is briefly told; an unscrupulous woman, an infatuated, weak man.”

  Naturally, with the disclosure of the dishonesty of Ark and Bushnell, the rank and file began to lose confidence in the union. Its officers, to them, appeared to be as willing to fleece them as the water front’s haberdashers, pimps and crimps. Only one man on the Coast had won the complete confidence of all hands. The fate of the union was once more solely in the grasp of Andrew Furuseth. Still reluctant to run the organization, for he knew that there were many honest and capable men available, he was prevailed upon to allow his name to be entered again for secretary. In April 1891 he won by a resounding vote of confidence, two hundred and nineteen votes to sixty-two for his opponent. He soon had the house in order again, but was still not convinced that he was the essential man. He submitted his resignation on February 8, 1892. When the union took no action, he insisted his resignation be picked up. He claimed that there were too many who thought he’d “grown fast to his seat.” And anyway, he felt, himself, that “Some other work would be better for myself and for the union, both.” A replacement was found and Andy shipped out on a fishing boat. Within two months, the union was begging him to return. He sighed and agreed. This time he came back for good. But he made one condition. The union must pay him just as much as he would make fishing, no more, no less. He was to stick to this agreement obstinately when the union tried to express its appreciation by raising his salary. Although he later headed t
he International Seamen’s Union, with 100,000 dues-paying members with a treasury of at least several hundred thousands of dollars, he kept to his regular A.B.’s wage. And when his sole surviving sister, in Wisconsin, had her farm threatened by foreclosure in 1934, Andy took $1, 800 of his life’s sayings of $2,000 and sent it to her. When Furuseth had to travel, he either worked his way before the mast or, if that was not possible, he went steerage. If by rail, he sat up in a chair car.

  During that year of 1891 Samuel Gompers described this strange, austere man as “on fire with zeal to free the seamen who in that day were in double bondage, to the crimp and the sea captain.” Gompers was drawn to Furuseth as to few men. He found him a genius and a missionary-crusader, dedicated absolutely to the seamen’s cause. Arthur Ruhl, in remarking on Andy’s dedication, described him as “cold to men while on fire for man.” Furuseth used to wash his only suit, to save the cost of dry cleaning. He pressed his trousers soldier-style by leaving them under his mattress overnight. He ate lightly— usually only coffee and a roll—then chewed on his pipe. Once in a blue moon he would get a square meal at the Hofbrau or the Fly Trap.