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

  Maguire was re-elected and Furuseth returned to his lobbying duties. He was gratified when on February 18, 1895, President Grover Cleveland signed the first Maguire Bill, which prohibited allotments to crimps, abolished imprisonment for desertion, and forbade the attachment of a seaman’s clothing for debts. Soon the union used the Maguire Bill to force crimps to pay back to sailors advances bullied out of them. But there were loopholes which the crimps were quick to find; for one thing, advances were still allowed when seamen did not ship before a United States Shipping Commissioner.

  Furuseth’s victory turned to ashes in the classic Arago case. In May 1895, Robert Robertson, P. H. Olsen, Morris Hanson, and John Bradley quit the ship Arago in Portland, Oregon, after shipping on her for Washington. They thought themselves protected by the Maguire Act. But they were arrested and brought back to the ship and, eventually, to San Francisco in handcuffs. Furuseth petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus and hired H. W. Hutton to defend them. The union based its case on the 13th Amendment, which forbade involuntary servitude. On December 26, 1896, Furuseth was stunned when the United States Superior Court handed down its opinion—that the seaman’s contract was different from all others, based as it was on ancient maritime law. Appealed, the U.S. Supreme Court sustained the lower court’s decision. Justice John Harlan voiced his dissent but the decision stood. This was a major setback for the American seafarer. San Francisco papers exclaimed, “According to the highest tribunal which can pass on the matter, the difference between a deepwater sailor and a slave is $15 a month.”

  In other cases sailors fared better, with the shield of the Maguire legislation giving them some protection. The Seamen’s Journal wrote on February 26, 1896: “Taken altogether, it may be said that the Maguire Act has been a great success. It has increased the seaman’s self-respect by decreasing the power of the crimp. It has placed him on a plane of equality with other citizens by guaranteeing him the right to work or quit at will, when in port. It has increased his self-reliance by guaranteeing that the wages he earns shall be paid in full into his hands.”

  At first, Furuseth was viewed with suspicion in Washington. Shipowners and others had planted wild tales in the capital. He was painted as an anarchist. Police and detectives shadowed him. But he quickly won the respect of Congress. He worked from 5 a.m. to midnight. He had to fight both enemies and “friends.” He found the American Seamen’s Friend Society not exactly a “friend indeed.” The Journal put it bluntly: “The American Seamen’s Friend Society cannot glorify God and help seamen by prayer alone…. The seaman’s condition must be improved to the point of humanity before he can be made amenable to mental or spiritual efforts.”

  When shipowners argued that allowing sailors to quit (“desert”) ships would be absolutely unthinkable, Furuseth had a reply ready; “When a vessel is delayed it may mean 24 hours demurrage—possibly $100 or $150, but what will the owner of a glass factory lose by having its furnaces go cold? Half a million dollars. What will a cotton planter lose by not being able to pick his cotton when it is ripe? Is there any good reason why, because I am a sailor, I should have shackles put upon my hands, and made to feel that I, of all men, am the one upon whom the United States is putting the stamp of servitude?”

  When owners were quick to shout “Lies!” at his claims, Furuseth showed documentary evidence that foreign vessels had higher standards than American ships. That the scale of provisions in California prisons was higher than in American ships’ forecastles. And he made good use of San Francisco Marine Hospital statistics. These showed that three hundred and ninety-one cases of scurvy were treated there between 1872 and 1888. And, although U.S. vessels handled only 20 per cent of San Francisco’s trade, American seamen accounted for 235 of the 391 cases of scurvy. At first, Furuseth began to get compromise bills out of the House, but they were discarded by the Senate Committee on Commerce, with reactionary measures substituted. Senator Frye of Maine was a particularly hardheaded opponent. Furuseth sent telegrams and thousands of letters and marked copies of the Journal to every newspaper in Maine. He prepared a memorial to Congress claiming that the Senate had, inadvertently, restored flogging to the merchant marine.

  Frye was so annoyed by the flood of protesting communications which besieged him from all quarters of the public that he refused to call up any bill, and several friendly Senators had to persuade Furuseth to belay his campaign so that some kind of seamen’s bill would get through. He obliged them by dropping into second gear, devoting himself to the winning of support from old-line abolitionists. This group he interested in the new battle against involuntary servitude of seafaring men who might be white, black or whatever.

  The sailors’ lobbyist heaped scathing scorn on America’s treatment of the seaman, comparing this country with “more civilized nations” of the world: “Do they organize societies to protect dogs and cats and other animals and permit men who may not defend themselves short of mutiny to be beaten? They protect the animals and the seamen too!” In March 1897 he followed this up with an inspired tirade of oratory reminiscent of James King of William, San Francisco’s martyred newspaper editor of 1856: “Oh ye patriots!

  Was it for this that ye gave life and all during the War for Independence? What now has become of the inalienable right to liberty for which you fought and of which we have been so proud? Was it for this, you loyal soldiers, that your bones were left on every battlefield from Bull Run to Appomattox? Oh, Lincoln! Was it for this that your hair grew gray before its time, that your face became sad and got stamped upon it the air which denotes the burden bearer? Was it for this you died? Oh, ye Christians, was it for this that our Teacher, our Saviour, gave his bloody sweat at Gethsemane, his blood on Calvary? No, a thousand times, No!”

  When the Grand Marshal of the Fourth of July Parade of 1897 invited the sailors to participate. Furuseth responded with one of the grand gestures at which he was so skilled. Instead of using the invitation as a means of regaining public good will, as was expected, he declined. But his explanation for his declining was an absolute stroke of genius. It made dramatic news in the press. He answered the invitation to the sailors to march on the nation’s birthday with these words:

  “We, therefore, sir, being mindful of our status—that of involuntary servitude, which was in no way modified by that declaration of individual freedom—feel that it would be an imposition on our part to take advantage of your kindness and inflict our presence—the presence of bondsmen—upon the freemen who will on the Fourth of July celebrate their freedom and renew their allegiance to those principles which have made nations and men great. Hoping that we also some day may honorably, and as equals, march in such a parade, we are faithfully yours, the Sailors Union, per A. Furuseth, Secretary.”

  Andrew was disgusted with the sailor’s erstwhile allies who were quite willing to sell him down the estuary with a compromise in Congress. He was particularly annoyed with the “holy joes” and “sky pilots,” some of whom he had personally persuaded to take up cudgels in defense of merchant seamen. Another delay in legislation was caused by the “splendid little war” Uncle Sam picked with decadent Spain. But Furuseth was able to turn the conflict to good advantage by pointing out the great shortage of qualified seamen for the renascent U.S. Navy and the reasons for that shortage.

  When the White Bill passed just before Independence Day of the Year of the Spaniard, it was weakened by amendments. In this form it allowed one month’s imprisonment for desertion in foreign ports, and still permitted sailors’ allotments of no more than one month’s wages. Back in San Francisco in the summer of 1898, Furuseth found much worse news than annoying amendments. His friends, James Maguire and James H. Barry, went down in defeat in the gubernatorial and senatorial races, respectively. When he returned to Washington it was to see a withered White Bill passed into law on December 28, 1898. In 1900 and 1901 he found himself once again in a strange position. He was on the same side o
f a legislative fracas as the crimps he loathed. Like them, he sought the defeat of a measure which would have prohibited anyone from going aboard a ship without the master’s express permission. He realized that the bill had its heart in the right place and that it was aimed at the bottle-brandishing and women-promising runners who swarmed aboard newly arrived ships in port, before their hooks hit the mud. But it would also prevent his union patrolmen or organizers from going aboard, to see if everything were “all correct” and to sow the seeds of organization among the unaffiliated hands. He managed to get the bill amended into ineffectiveness. He also fought side by side with the crimps against the old laws which made it a crime for anyone to induce seamen to desert ships. He feared owners would use these laws against the union. In 1913 Hiram Johnson of California signed a bill repealing the last such state law in the United States.

  Furuseth was remarkably successful in Washington. When Samuel Gompers spoke to San Francisco’s sailormen, he praised the Norwegian’s work in the District of Columbia: “Furuseth has stood at the doors of the capital, like a panther watching, like a lion attacking. No scheme has been hatched against you that he has not exposed and, by exposing it, defeated it.”

  He had worked for a national union for sailors but was not in on the birth of that organization in 1892 in Chicago. He was on the Columbia River that April. The next year he was busy with the Coast strike and missed their convention. By 1894, when he was ready to pay them a call, the National Seamen’s Union was on the rocks. No attempt was even made to hold a convention. In July it seemed wrecked completely when its president, Charles Hazen, mysteriously disappeared. Furuseth was called upon. It took all of his efforts to hold the flimsy NSU together between 1896 and 1899. The San Franciscan was plagued by the weakness of his own colleagues. His New York agent, F. H. Burleyson, wrote that he would have to resign. His clothes were so shabby that he could no longer be seen in polite company. Or any other, for that matter. Andy sent him a small personal loan. He was repaid by having Burleyson run off with both his loan and the union funds a year later. Furuseth didn’t mind being out of pocket, but Burleyson’s defection was the fifth such incident of the year. He won Great Lakes support, luckily, by getting one of their men to head the NSU, shortly renamed the International Seamen’s Union.

  Furuseth hoped to get the crimps to work with the sailors for increased wages, since the former were now limited to an allotment of one month’s wages. The more the wage, the more the allotment. But they were a slippery bunch and they sneaked over to the shipowners, got wages lowered, and the difference paid directly to them as a bonus of blood money! The 1889 Pacific Coast sailors’ strike pretty well destroyed this combination of crimps and pillars-of-society in alliance. Wages shot up and shipping masters were forced to work with union men. Steam schooner men, who had dropped out, began to drift back into the SUP.

  In April 1901, the Employers’ Association in San Francisco was formed to oppose the trade unions and, actually, to break them, one by one. Water-front unions responded by uniting in the City Front Federation, some 15,000 workers striking under Furuseth as strike manager. With only 25,000 organized workers in the city, this came close to being a general strike. The port was closed. Business ground to a halt. But police guarded scab teamsters; ex-cons, pugs and strikebreakers were hired as “special policemen.” Furuseth’s watchwords, “Victory is certain, refrain from violence,” were ignored as sailors vowed an eye for an eye. Beatings increased. Hearst’s Examiner supported the strikers as did influential Father Peter C. Yorke, but it was more or less of a draw when Governor Henry Gage “declared peace.”

  1902 was a red-letter year. The shipowners finally gave in to Furuseth’s long campaign and signed the first written contract with the SUP. They agreed to get their men either from the union or from boardinghouses approved by the union. For his part, Furuseth considered the contract like holy writ. He respected it to the last comma and he insisted that his men do so. For this reason, he refused to involve his men in sympathy strikes. But he and the leadership of the union had to put up with some pretty hard-boiled roughnecks in the ranks. When Ed Rosenberg, temporary secretary of the SUP while Andy was in the East, resigned, he commented bitterly to Furuseth:

  “I did not want to play to the dungaree sailor element by pretending I was one of them. Their filthy language, their beastly carousing, their dirt, I despise and I shall always say so. It is evil and it should be fought against. I am no saint nor holier-than-thou person, only a ‘white shirt sailor’ and it is the white shirt sailors who have made the union what it is today. There are some demagogues among the white shirt sailors who, for lust of power or for personal gain, play to the dungaree sailor by raising a howl at someone for being stuck up.”

  Andy Furuseth was not quite so fussy over his “troops” as Ed Rosenberg, but he was frequently disappointed if not disgusted by the irresponsibility of many of his charges. “Newfound freedom is a terrible burden. Improvements and privileges paid for by the sweat and blood of others feel easy and are held cheap by those who did nothing to acquire them. Men who cannot use freedom could not have acquired it and cannot keep it, and it is bitter to contemplate that it is thrown away, nay, sold at the price of a few drinks. Of course, if they cannot be persuaded by their comrades or taught by the past, then the crimps and the shipowners will teach us all, that we are responsible for each other, that the honest worker and the sober man must suffer for the shirker and the drunk.”

  By the time of the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906, most of Furuseth’s battles for human rights for his men were won. The Dingley Act (1884), the Maguire Act (1895), the White Act (1898) and others had seen to that. The buckos and crimps would soon be as extinct as the dodo and La Brea’s saber-toothed cats. More and more the role of the SUP would become similar to that of any other labor organization—concerned with matters of wages, hours, working conditions and collective bargaining. The sailors were still poorly fed, paid and housed. And Andy was still willing to scrap for what he thought to be right. He never gave up what Hyman Weintraub, his biographer, called his “fierce protectiveness” of the sailor. He once wrote the Ruskin Club in Oakland, California: “You men see life from a parlor. I see it from the hold of a vessel.”

  He was daring enough to violate court injunctions and when Fremont Older of the Bulletin warned him of the possibility of being pitched in jail, Furuseth replied with a statement recalling his fo’c’sle days, which has become legendary. When Joe Davidson’s bust of Andy was placed, first on the Embarcadero at the Foot of Market Street, and later in front of SUP headquarters on Rincon Hill (perhaps on the very spot where Black Jim Douglass hid from the lynch mob of 1851), these words of Furuseth were carved on the base of the monument:

  “You can put me in jail, but you cannot give me narrower quarters than as a seaman I’ve always had. You cannot give me coarser food than I have always eaten. You cannot make me lonelier than I have always been.”

  Some newsmen claim that men were shanghaied out of Frisco on the Alaska Packers as late as the 1920s. This could be so. But they represent posthumous spasms of the corpse of crimping. The brutal techniques had long since been abandoned, if the end result was the same—an undesired voyage by a “recruited” seaman to Shanghai or to Kodiak. Bare-knuckle labor pooling by crimps was pretty much a dead goony by 1915 when Furuseth’s program triumphed in the Seamen’s Act. With it passed forever buckosism aboard ships and shanghaiing ashore.

  A year earlier, Furuseth could sum up the sailors’ gains thus: “Advance and allotment to ‘original creditors’ have been abolished in the coasting trade and reduced to one third in the foreign trade. The power to imprison a person for violation of his contract in the domestic trade of the United States and the right to administer corporal punishment has been abolished….” He added, however, “But, above all, the seamen must look to the future. What we have gained is as nothing compared to what must be gaine
d.”

  The culmination of Furuseth’s long years of effort in the La Follette Seamen’s Act of 1915, atop earlier legislation, created a veritable Bill of Rights for sailors. The Seamen’s Act itself grew out of a hodgepodge of petty bills—to abolish towed log rafts, to prohibit the socalled Kalashi Watch (in which skeleton watches were kept at night but almost everybody was turned out to work like a dog from dawn till dark), and others. The sailors won a real friend in Bob La Follette in 1910, but it took several years more, even with his help, to win their fight for civil rights. The shock of the Titanic disaster in 1912 helped the Seamen’s Bill along because of its safety provisions. Concern for shipboard safety now helped Furuseth, the way shock at the atrocities reported by the SUP’s “Red Record” had helped him earlier. A diluted bill was sent to President William Howard Taft on the last day of Congress, March 4, 1913, but he vetoed it because the many rights it guaranteed U.S. seamen “might cause friction with the commerce of foreign nations.”

  Robert La Follette, that year, orated: “Andrew Furuseth is a sailor.

  He is a Norwegian, Americanized, one of the most intelligent men it has been my good fortune to meet. For nineteen years he has been sitting up there in that corner of the gallery waiting to be made free.” On October 23, Furuseth thought he had finally won the battle. On that day, with only one dissenting vote, the Senate adopted the Seamen’s Bill. The Norwegian rushed from the gallery, tears streaming down his gaunt, weather-beaten face. “I am choking, I am so happy,” he cried. “This finishes the work Lincoln began!” But his joy was premature. The House remained unconvinced on the bill.

  Andy had to endure additional hearings in the House in which landlubberly politicians postured as experts, describing sailors as “mere creatures, who need no skill or experience; anybody can do a sailor’s work.” There were twenty major sections of the bill and the Congressmen went over them one by one. They covered forecastle space, certification of A.B.s, make-up of crews, safety regulations and an important section which, for once and for all, abolished imprisonment of seamen for desertion.