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HISTORY LECTURE

The mysterious Portland shanghaiing scene:

Delivered on August 7, 2012, at
the Regency Park retirement community in Portland, Ore.

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To hear an MP3 recording
of this lecture:

Downloadable audio file (MP3, 96 Kbps)

Editor’s note: This is a 45-minute talk which I prepared to present to an audience at Regency Estates Retirement Community in Portland. In it, I go over the mechanics of how shanghaiing works, what makes shanghaiing different from the (slightly) more respectable practice called “crimping,” and then share four interesting stories about crimping — one that I’m pretty sure is (mostly) true, one that I’m pretty sure is (mostly) baloney and two whose truth-to-baloney ratio is unknown to me. All are fascinating bits of early Portland folklore, though. Two are in my book, and two are not.

Enjoy! Also, just to let you know, tomorrow’s column will be the story of the mysterious disappearance of the steamer South Beach. In it, I’ll parse the evidence and try to solve the mystery of what caused the steamer to seemingly vanish into the sea with all hands, leaving just a field of flotsam and a couple drifting, empty lifeboats behind. I think I know what happened … but no one will ever know, not for sure, not really.

— f.j.d.j.

 Today I’d like to talk a bit about shanghaiing.

 Shanghaiing is one of those subjects that people find fascinating. And, as is also the case with “buried treasure stories,” most shanghai stories should be taken for what they are: Folklore.

 Note, though, that folklore is, in every case that I know about, at least partly true.

 That’s certainly the case with shanghaiing.  Shanghaiing stories may be folkloric, but everyone agrees shanghaiing as a practice was a big part of frontier seaport Portland.  It started out as what you might call a cottage industry; it grew to industrial proportions; it was practiced in broad daylight, on the open streets; it went underground; and it finally petered out for real when steam-powered freighters displaced sailing ships.

 It’s also a matter of record that from 1885 to at least 1915, the Portland waterfront was one of the worst, most dangerous places in the world for a wandering stranger to go have a drink.  In 1911, Andy Furuseth — the president of the International Seaman’s Union — went before Congress and he said:  “Mr. Chairman, I will state that there is one port on the Pacific Coast that has always been known as the greatest crimping (shanghaiing) den in America. I refer to the port of Portland.”

Let’s start by defining some terms and talking about how shanghaiing got started.  First, the terms. “Shanghaiing” is a particularly aggressive form of an art that’s as old as maritime trade, a practice called “Crimping.”

 Crimping comes from a Dutch word, Krimp, meaning a holding pen for live fish, like the lobster tank at the seafood restaurant.  You’ll understand why that’s significant in a minute.  Crimping, as it was usually practiced in seaport towns, was a sort of forced-indebtedness scam — all perfectly legal at the time.  Well, mostly perfectly legal. Here’s how it worked:

 Say you’re an aspiring crimp — or “boarding master,” as they preferred to call themselves.  To get started, you simply open a boardinghouse in some unhygienic hole in the wall in the very worst part of town and give it a seafaring name like “Mariner’s Rest” or “The Harbor Home.”  You don’t charge a dime for sailors and other lads who might come stay at your place; everything is “on credit.”  But: every night your guests stay, every meal they wolf down, you mark it down in your little book.

 Then along comes the captain of, let’s say, the barque T.F. Oakes.  Six of his able-bodied seamen — A.B.s, in the terminology of the day — have slipped over the side, because he’s a cruel and crazy skipper and never brings enough rations to feed the crew properly on a journey, and he needs to replace those men before he can leave port.  You and the captain strike a deal: You will supply six men from your boardinghouse, and the skipper will supply $50 each in what was commonly known as “blood money” for your services in supplying them.

 Oh, and the captain will gladly pick up each man’s tab for his room and board for however long you’ve had him as a guest.  That will be charged as an advance against the sailor’s pay.  How much will that be? Honor system, baby. The captain doesn’t care if he pays you now or his sailor later.  You just present the bill with your guest’s signature forged at the bottom, and he’ll pay it, no questions asked.

 Now all you’ve got to do is get your six guys and present them aboard ship.  That’s where the life of a crimp gets a bit tricky, and that’s where your great people skills come into the picture.  You approach the first man. “Jack,” you cry heartily, “it’s time for you to settle up.”

 Jack, of course, has no means with which to settle up.  He can try to skip out on your bill, but the time to try something like that was yesterday evening, before you came and cut him out of the herd.  If you’re any kind of boarding master, you’ve got tremendous skills as a bare-knuckle London Rules fighter, and have been at some pains to make sure everyone knows it.  If he tries to overpower you and run for the door, he’ll wish he had not; plus, you’ll have the police after him in a trice if he manages to get clear, and you’ll be left in possession of everything he owns, in his sea bag by his bunk.

 His only real choice is to ship out, as you ask.

 Experienced sailors would just nod, get their sea bags and follow you to the waterfront.  Younger ones, though, might protest. “Oh, I can’t go now. I’ll go on the next ship, I promise.”

 At that point, you, the experienced crimp, back right off.  “Ah, well, that’s all right then,” you say, “so long as you promise me you’ll go on the next one. Promise?”

 The promise secured, you clap the jubilant sucker-sailor on the back and say, “Come on, let’s have a drink. It’s on me.”

 At the back of the boardinghouse, you get a special bottle of high-quality whisky off the shelf.  Sailors don’t get a lot of top-shelf liquor, so they don’t know what it tastes like.  Your man feels very special as he raises a glass of Old Glenmullet or whatever to his lips, and perhaps he notes it has a different flavor from the rotgut he usually drinks, but of course expensive liquor does taste different, right?

 Ten minutes later, you and a burly assistant are hauling him down to the waterfront, wrapped in a tarp, in broad daylight, nodding a cheerful greeting to the beat cop as he passes.  It’s just another day.  On the foredeck of the T.F. Oakes, you deposit your sailor, collect your $50, plus an advance against his wages totaling $11 for a month and a half’s stay, plus 50 cents for that belt of doped-up Scotch you laid him out with.  And back you go to fetch the next man.

 That’s crimping. Are you with me so far?

 Now, shanghaiing. Shanghaiing is like crimping without the boardinghouse.  You simply find a likely-looking stranger, chat him up, buy him a drink, slip something in it and cash him in.  Or perhaps you sneak up behind him and clobber him with a blackjack or sap.  Perhaps you’re an enterprising bartender, in a good position to evaluate whether the new face in your saloon is a regular Portlander you haven’t seen before or a fresh-faced rube just off the riverboat from Eugene City, slipping standard popskull to the one and a laudanum-enhanced beverage to the other.  And, of course, there are all sorts of ways a prostitute can render a customer unconscious in the course of a business transaction, and cash him in for an extra few bucks.

 Shanghaiing has been around as long as crimping and perhaps longer.  But it really came into its own in San Francisco after the Gold Rush broke out.  You see, everybody wanted to come to San Francisco, jump ship and go work in the gold fields.  Ships started piling up in port, with no way to crew them.  And in San Francisco in 1850, there were lots of ways to make money.  The $30 a month that you’d get as a crew member on a windjammer was chicken scratch.

 So the “blood money” bonuses that captains were willing to pay — remember, we used $50 as an example, and that was a pretty common number — became enormous.  But you could only make that bonus if you had men in your boardinghouse.  So enterprising crimps soon figured out that anybody they could overpower and put aboard ship was worth three-figure cash windfalls to them.

 As you will have gathered, these were not the kind of guys who’d leave that kind of money on the table out of a sense of moral principle.

 Many of these ships were headed for the Chinese port of Shanghai, which is how that term got coined.  It was coined right here on the West Coast, on the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

 Now, Portland of course didn’t have a gold rush going on, to bait men into jumping ship.  It had something even more attractive: A booming economy and a labor shortage.  Any young able-bodied male in Portland could make a lot more than $30 a month without ever getting his feet wet.  And that was guaranteed money, not “if-you-strike-gold-and-you-probably-won’t” money.

 And there was something else, too — something you should know about sailors in the late 1800s: They were virtual slaves.  Once you signed onto a ship, you were essentially an indentured servant. It was like joining the military.  You became chattel property, like a belaying pin or a cask or the ship’s cat.  The captain and officers had blanket license to beat you, imprison you, put you in irons, or put you on bread and water.  If an overly enthusiastic beating resulted in your becoming crippled or dead, it was chalked up as an accident unless the action was really egregious.  And there was no recourse if a captain did something deliberately negligent or cruel like short the crew on rations so they’d return to port starving.

 This was not considered a problem among the rest of society at the time.  In fact, in 1897, the Supreme Court of the United States actually handed down a ruling in which it decreed that the Thirteenth Amendment — the one that prohibits slavery — did not apply to sailors.  Sailors, the court ruled, are like children, and not fit to be entrusted with the full rights of citizenship.

 And that’s not even getting started on the risk of drowning at sea.  Every sailor knew at least one fellow mariner whose number had come up.  An unpowered sailing ship in a big storm was a really dangerous place to be.

 So let’s say you’re a 20-year-old man in Portland, and it’s 1895.  Why would you sign up for all of that for a mere $30 a month, when you could — for the same or better money — join a logging crew, on which you’d eat all the pancakes you could horse down every morning and could quit whenever you wanted?

 You wouldn’t, of course. So people didn’t.  And that meant that when a ship came into port in Portland, if the crew disappeared — as some of them always would — recruiting men to replace them was virtually impossible.

 There would have been a simple way to solve this problem, of course: Simply pay the sailors more money … right?

 Yeah, right. So that wasn’t a possibility. How else, then could the ships secure crews, but through widespread and industrialized kidnappings?

 Shanghaiing stories:

 I’ve got a few stories I’d like to share with you today.  A couple of them are in my book, but a couple others are not. Two of them I’m pretty sure are true — at least mostly true. The other two, I’m not so sure.

 First on my list is the ballad of Aquilla Ernest Clark.  Clark, in 1892, was a young farm boy who’d come to Portland to see the sights. He saw ‘em, all right.  Clark told his story in a long interview with Stewart Holbrook of the Portland Morning Oregonian in the early 1930s, by which time he was an old man, living up in Camas.  Although he probably enhanced the story a bit, I’m confident that this one is largely true.

 In the North End on that day, Clark soon met up with an affable stranger, who introduced himself as Smith and urged him to come stay at a friend’s boardinghouse that night.  The place was at the corner of Second and Glisan, deep in the North End, and was run by a man named Larry Sullivan. Remember that name.

 Clark came and checked it out. Seemed OK, and the night’s stay was “on credit,” so why not?  Perhaps he anticipated that he’d just spend one night there and then run along the next day, skipping on his bill.  He doesn’t say, but he certainly wasn’t planning on staying long enough to be crimped.

 Come morning, Smith bought Clark and eight other fellows breakfast.  Over their food, Smith mentioned that Sullivan, the boardinghouse owner, was having a birthday party with a steamboat trip to Astoria and back, and would they like to come along?

 Yes, they would, and a little later they were standing on the pier waiting for the steamboat Iralda to dock.  A group of very nice-looking women was there as well, and soon they all piled aboard the boat and cast off.

 Drinks were served immediately: Four kinds of wine, various distilled spirits and a cocktail called the “Peach Blow,” which was the specialty of the bar in the Portland Hotel.  The girls then started grabbing the men by the hand and leading them out on the dance floor, with — by 1890s standards — most unusual and unladylike forwardness.

 They drank, they danced, they dined on salmon and steak and oysters and crab. Everyone agreed that Larry Sullivan sure knew how to throw a party.

 By the time they got to Astoria, everyone was pretty thoroughly soused.  Smith — whose real name was probably Joseph “Bunco” Kelly, a fellow we’ll get to know better in a bit — pulled out a piece of paper.

 “We’re going ashore,” he told the nine rubes, “and I want to make sure nobody gets left behind. Sign your names on this passenger list. Then when we’re getting ready to go, we’ll know everybody’s here.”

Everyone eagerly signed, and then ashore they went.

 When it was time to return to the Iralda, Smith innocently asked if anyone would like to check out a real, live, deepwater sailing ship before going back.  The eager suckers chorused their enthusiasm, and soon they were pulling for the side of a big windjammer named the T.F. Oakes.

 When they got aboard, someone noticed the rowboat was pulling away without them.  And then the guns came out.  It turned out the “passenger registration” the lads had signed was, in fact, the ship’s articles. They were sailors now.

 Clark and his compatriots crossed the bar in chains, to prevent them from jumping overboard and swimming for shore.  It would be seven years before Clark would get back to Portland, and when he was discharged at Le Havre in France, he found Sullivan had taken a $60 advance against his wages — that’s two months’ pay — to cover the cost of his “birthday party.”

 Bunco Kelly and the Dead Guys

 The second story is at least 75 percent baloney.  But it’s the most commonly heard story of shanghaiing in Portland, and I just have to tell it to you.

 It seems one dark and stormy night, a notorious crimp named Joseph “Bunco” Kelly was prowling the streets of Portland looking for a wholesale shipment of shanghai victims.  The skipper of a British ship, the Flying Prince, needed 22 guys before he could leave.  If anyone could fill an order like that, Bunco could.

 Bunco went around to his usual spots — North End saloons and a couple whorehouses with friendly madams — but was having no luck.  So he made his way to the south of the waterfront.  He was making for the Snug Harbor Saloon, on the corner of Second and Morrison.  But on his way there, he passed by an open cellar door, from which wafted a strange odor. Bunco stopped to investigate.

 What he found down there was a group of men — 24 of them in all, and all of them either already dead or very, very ill.  They had broken into the cellar thinking they were in the basement of the Snug Harbor Saloon, but in fact they were under the business next door — Johnson and Sons Undertaking Parlor.  And the giant keg they’d been drinking from was full of embalming fluid.

 It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Bunco that perhaps with prompt medical attention, some lives could be saved.  Rather, his mind went straight to the commercial possibilities.  He carefully closed the cellar door — it wouldn’t do to have some do-gooder stumble on his find and start trying to rescue them.  Then he set about putting together the logistical support that he’d need to get 24 dead guys to the waterfront.

 Kelly and his helpers loaded the men into hacks and hustled them down to the wharf, where the Flying Prince lay at anchor, and Bunco convinced the skipper that he’d misspoken and asked for 24 instead of 22.  The skipper told Bunco, as he paid the blood money as agreed, that he’d never seen so many guys so drunk at the same time.

 By the time the Flying Prince got to Astoria, the ruse had been discovered, and when writers for the Daily Astorian got the story on the Associated Press wire, there was a huge uproar — so the story goes.

 That’s the version Stewart Holbrook told in 1948 in an article in the American Mercury.  His source for the story was an old waterfront tough guy named Edward “Spider” Johnson, formerly a bartender at Erickson’s Saloon at Second and Burnside.   Sixteen years earlier, though, in the Portland Morning Oregonian, he had quoted Spider Johnson telling the same story, but with some key facts that were a bit different.  First, there were 40 men, not 24.  The names of the Snug Harbor Saloon, Johnson and Sons Undertaking Parlor and Flying Prince were not mentioned.  And the account ends with this quote:  “No, I don’t know for certain that that story’s true, but it’s one you’ll hear from any of the old-timers.”

So, what’s the deal? Did Holbrook ask around among the old-timers to get the rest of the details of this story?  Or did he just make them up?  Several of us pop historians have done some digging on this one, and no one has been able to find any reference to any of those outfits — Snug Harbor Saloon, Johnson and Sons, Flying Prince — in any of the usual places.  And I’ve been through the entire calendar year 1893 in the Daily Astorian, and there is no mention of anything like this.

 So what really happened?  My best guess is that Bunco collected six or eight guys together, bought them a drink and put too much dope in it — he had a proprietary formula for something he called “Kelly’s Comforters,” or so Holbrook tells us — and ended up giving them a lethal dose.  Crimps did try to give their victims enough sedative to keep ‘em  unconscious until after the ship crossed the bar.  On the other side, I’m betting, the crew found the new sailors dead, dumped ‘em overboard and the next time they were in port told a story of a bunch of dead guys having been sold to ‘em by Bunco Kelly.  It’s ever-so-slightly illegal to poison people, even sailors, so Bunco would have felt a certain need to come up with a story … maybe.

 Or maybe not. Many historians think this story is entirely made-up. I’m not so sure. But it is a wonderful piece of waterfront folklore.

  The Dynamite Kid

 Another highly satisfying shanghaiing story is that of a young man named George Banks.  I’ve only found one source for this story, and that’s a writer named Richard Dillon.  I’ve no idea where he got it from, so I can’t say whether it’s true or not, but I’d sure like to think it is.

 It seems young George Banks was working on the portage railroad up at the Cascade Rapids.  He was, apparently, an unusually confident young man, and one of those fellows whose word can be hauled by the bucketful down to the bank and exchanged on demand for solid gold.

 One day George was down in Portland picking up a bunch of freight, and apparently missed his regular steamboat going back up river.  Some helpful, friendly gentlemen there with their own steamboat — whether it was a tug, a riverboat or a simple steam launch, I don’t know — offered to help him out.  Quickly a deal was struck, and everyone got busy loading the boxes onto the steamboat.
Out into the river they went … and started downstream, going in the opposite direction to what had been agreed.  Mr. Banks was naturally a little puzzled by this, until it was explained to him that he was a sailor now, and they were taking him to his ship.

 “You ain’t going to shanghai me,” Banks replied, reaching into his pocket. “I’ll blow you to hell first.”

 And out of his pocket he pulled a handful of blasting caps.  The boxes they’d all loaded aboard were, as it turned out, dynamite.  The crimps hadn’t realized it, but the man they were trying to shanghai was better known as “The Dynamite Kid.”

 Well, that pretty much settled the matter.  The boat turned and headed upstream to Banks’ job site, where he unloaded his dynamite, paid for his passage as agreed, and went about his work.

 The Danish Boys

 I’ve got one more story for you. This one is particularly interesting to me, for two reasons.  First, all the shanghaiing stories I’ve found date back to before Portland Mayor Harry Lane came into office and cleaned up the city for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Celebration in 1905.  When that happened, suddenly it was no longer OK for crimps to be hauling unconscious guys back and forth to the waterfront in wheelbarrows.  Many scholars will tell you that crimping disappeared around that time, pushed aside by the rising popularity of steamships.  They’re right — but their timeline is out of sync. Steamships didn’t really start taking over until 1915 or so.  Until then there were thousands of old windjammers still prowling around — losing money, most of them.  And here’s why that’s important:

 The difference between the life of a crew member aboard a steamship, and one aboard a barque, was huge.  Steamships were far less work.  They were also far less dangerous: on a sailing ship, there were booms to fall off of, winches to get your finger caught in and rigging to trip over, and when storms came they presented a far bigger profile to the weather.

 So when steamers started taking over, around 1900, all the sailors who had a choice migrated over to the steamer fleet just as soon as they could.  Oh, yes, there were prejudices that had to be overcome — lots of old deepwater salts would sooner die than work on an old teakettle, as they called them — but those attitudes wore down surprisingly quickly.  And then every sailor who was any good at all walked over to the steamer and offered his services directly to the captain — no crimp required.

 So, logically working this through, about 1910 should have been the absolute worst time for shanghaiing.  The industry had always run with a tight labor supply, going through insane lengths to avoid raising sailors’ pay.  Now, half the sailors were off to crew steamers, and the other half wanted to.  Sailing was a dying art and everyone knew it, and young men didn’t want to go into a dying business.  So, where were they going to get new men to replace the ones who deserted, or fell overboard or died of syphilis, or got knifed in a bar fight at the Valhalla Saloon?

 We know they got ‘em somewhere.  And we know that in 1911, when many historians suggest there was very little shanghaiing still going on, Andrew Furuseth called Portland out as the worst place in the country for shanghaiing.  What gives?

 This story might shed a little light on that.  It’s a story I got from a colleague at Oregon State University last month. I’ll just read it to you, just like she sent it to me.

 Finn-

After visiting with my father and uncle this weekend, my uncle sent me an account of my grandfather's shanghaii experience...thought you would be interested.

Karen


I have experienced an endless number of first person accounts from Dad about his being shanghaied in as I remember was 1911 with our Uncle Peter. I believe it was at the Valhalla bar at the foot of the Burnside Street bridge on first street. Whenever we drove over that bridge he would point it out and say, I believe mostly to irritate our mother, ".....Ah!!There's my old home.....the Valhalla" and his eyes would light up and some tears could be seen and that would be followed by husky but what I would regard as a nervous laugh.

Bets related some of what happened after he and Pete had gone through the trap doors, and put into a caged in area, where they had their shoes taken from them and glass was scattered around to keep them from escaping in their bare feet. The were bound and wrapped up and sold to the ships captain. Since Dad and Uncle Pete were trained officers I assume the commanded a little more money than most. They were not the only ones that the ship's captain was forced to pay for the rest of the crew was also kidnapped and taken on board. The captain had to take the ship out of port and down the Columbia and out to sea where they were expected to recover from the drug they were given. By the way there was doctor, whose name I do not remember, who developed two different pills ---- a large one and a small one-- each to be given to men depending on their size. They had had problems with the men coming-to before they got out to sea. His name was given to a major area of the city and is there today. I might be able to find that out.

What they did not count on was that there were adverse bar conditions for the river when they arrived at Astoria and the captain had to drop anchor and wait until things improved. During this time the crew recovered, as did Dad and Uncle Pete. The crew was able to free themselves (the details of how they did this I do not know) and were able to jump over-board and swim ashore. Dad and Uncle Pete knew the Astoria Police would be looking for them. The captain made sure he did not lose his two officers, so he held a gun on them. Dad and Uncle Pete took turns sleeping until the captain fell asleep and they wrapped their clothes in oil skins and slipped over-board and swam to shore. which was quite a distance.

It was after this that they were up in the hills of Astoria and they spotted a grocery store with the name RASSMASSEN on it. They decided that this person was a Dane and that one Dane would help another Dane. They were right. He took care of them for a month. They could watch the ship from the location of the store and saw as the police rounded up the rest of the escaped crew and returned them to the ship. Eventually the ship weighed anchor and was able to leave.

It was on my 65th birthday that Betsy arranged to buy tickets to a cabaret theater that is held under the Interstate Bridge called 'Shanghaied in Astoria.' While speaking with the owner of the theater she related the above story and he asked if when we came he could seat us next someone he thought we might be interested in. Betsy's answer was yes!!

When we arrived and were seated we got into a conversation with this lady who was from Portland and had some role in this cabaret production. I related Dad's story and when I finished she leaned over to me and calmly announced ".........I belong to that RASSMASSEN family that owned that market." She said they had continued to own in until the 1950's. I just about came unglued with excitement! She went on to tell us exactly  where was still located and it's name:
Peter Pan Market, 712 Niagara Ave., Astoria, Or 97103.

 We have gone there and today you can get a good Espresso there.

 So is this what shanghaiing became in those last desperate years?  A secretive, underground thing, practiced with trapdoors in bar basements?  Could it be that some of the interconnected basement tunnels in downtown Portland were actually used for this sort of thing?  And that reference to the Portland physician suggests another thought: How deeply involved in this flesh trade were Portland’s VIPs?

 It’s probably too late now to get a definitive answer to that question.  All I can say for sure is, shanghaiing and crimping went with sailing ships like Oreos and milk.  The last case of crimping I’ve found documentary evidence of was in 1928, when a skipper named P.A. McDonald engaged the services of a crimp who called himself Shanghai White to get a crew for his barque, the Moshulu, for a voyage to Australia.  Even assuming that’s the last one, it bookends a quarter century of crimping activity about which we know almost nothing, and during which time many people will tell you shanghaiing was already a thing of the past.  Yet sailing ships in Portland were getting crews during that time.

 And I would love to learn more about how they were doing it.  So if any of you have relatives or friends who’ve told you shanghaiing stories, please don’t be a stranger! Anybody got a shanghaiing story?

 Well, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thanks very much for coming out. Any questions I can answer?

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