Human trafficking was just as prevalent in the past as it is today. However, it was commonly referred to as being shanghaied. Often men were kidnapped and put to work on ships. Women, too, were shanghaied and placed in the sex trade.
The article below was originally published in 1897 and provides some details into the men who were pressed into service.
How Men are Shanghaied
The officials of the consular bureau of the state department figure on receiving every year a certain number of complaints from shanghaied men all over the world.
In recent years, not so many are shanghaied from American ports as there used to be, but there are enough such cases to cause the state department a good deal of bother.
The best that can be done by shanghaied men, as a rule, is to authorize the consul at the port from which he sends his tale of woe to furnish him transportation back to the United States, and this can only be done in cases where the shanghaied man has not permitted himself to be bulldozed by the skipper of the ship that took him away from this country to sign ship’s articles for the cruise.
When the shanghaied man thus gets himself down in black and white, there is rarely any redress for him when he gets back to the United States. He may wait on the pier for the ship that took him away to come back again and have papers of arrest served upon the skipper for unlawful detention or kidnapping, but when the skipper gets before the United States commissioner he has only to produce the articles signed under duress by the shanghaied man to secure his release from custody.
It is only when some young man of good family falls a victim to the shanghaier that there is a moderate chance of punishment falling upon the ship captain.
Story of Angus Burrill
Such a case happened at Galveston three years ago. Angus Burrill was navigating from his club to his home early one morning after having dined long and heavily. He fell in with a rough looking citizen in a cardigan jacket and a peaked cap, and presently found himself imbibing raw red liquor in a dive beneath a sailor’s boarding house on the water front.
This was the last of his consciousness until he awoke in a bunk in the forecastle of the barkentine Santa Monica; the bad-eyed, cardigan-jacketed man was assisting him to awake by clouting him on the side of the head, and Burrill soon discovered that he was addressing his first mate.
The Santa Monica was by this time 100 miles from Galveston on her voyage to Odessa, Russia, with a cargo of lignum vitae.
Burrill went to work like a little man and did not emit a whimper. He was a sensible young fellow when his head was clear, and when he saw how he was in for it, he buckled down, sawed wood and did his work up to the handle.
He made a pretty good seaman, for he had been one of Galveston’s leading yachtsmen, and he exhibited such philosophical content over the situation that the skipper and mates spared him of the cruelties ordinarily inflicted upon shanghaied men.
When they drew up able seaman’s papers for him to sign, he signed them unmurmuringly.
Shanghaied men do not get shore liberty, but young Burrill took it when the ship cast her mud hook in Odessa harbor. He promptly jumped the ship by swimming ashore.
In Odessa, he operated the cable, got some money from Galveston and returned to the United States.
The Santa Monica turned up in New Orleans harbor six months later. Young Burrill and his people were waiting for her, and the skipper got a year in prison and a $5,000 fine, and was deprived of his captain’s papers.
The case was exceptional and the young man would unquestionably have been obliged to forego the joys of vengeance had he not had powerful backing.
No One Believes the Shanghaied Man
When, as occasionally happens, the shanghaied man stubbornly refuses to sign articles, enduring all the torture that is inflicted upon him on account of his refusal, for the purpose of establishing his case when he gets back to the United States, the skipper’s story before the United States commissioner is that the shanghaied man was a stowaway.
This story is becoming pretty threadbare, the absurdity of it becoming altogether too patent. It is only ships with a bad name among sailors that are reduced to the necessity of patching out their crews with shanghaied men, and no man with ordinary common sense would stowaway on such a ship, no matter how urgent his desire to get away from land or how prodigious his hankering for a life on the ocean wave.
San Francisco is the Worst
San Francisco is the worst city in the United States for shanghaiing, and about 65 percent of the shanghaied men who write their complaints to the state department from foreign ports report that they were seized and carried aboard the ships in that port.
The shanghaiers themselves almost always escape punishment for the reason that they rarely if ever pick a victim who is something more than three parts drunk, and a man in this condition can, of course, never identify the man who entrapped him. Moreover, it is a matter of the strictest honor among skippers, who accept shanghaied men not to reveal, even when they are punished themselves, the names of the shanghaiers who help them to get crews.
Kidnapped the Wrong Sort of Man
There was a tragedy over a case of shanghaiing in San Francisco six years ago.
A professional shanghaier got hold of a man very drunk in the resort called the Bella Union. The shanghaier made him still drunker by means of doped liquor, and got him over the side of the brig Morning Queen, bound for China and Japan ports in jig time.
When the shanghaied man came to after the ship had got outside the Gate, he was as mad as over awoke for the first time in an evil-smelling forecastle.
It happened that he was a bad man as ever came out of Arizona. He was a desperado named Luke Laflin, a close member of the clique to which the Earp brothers belonged, and he had gone to San Francisco from Tucson, his headquarters, for the announced purpose of becoming exceedingly drunk for a season.
He soon showed that he had not intended that the finish of his drunk should be in the forecastle of the big Morning Queen. He had barely rubbed his eyes and looked around before he was at the cabin door in half a dozen leaps.
The mate, a gigantic Portuguese, and the boatswain tried to impede the progress of the madman from Arizona and were both knocked flat to the deck.
Laflin then jumped into the cabin to get at the skipper, but the skipper was asleep in his alcove compartment, and while the bad man was kicking at the door the mate mustered the whole crew aft. Laflin soon had his head laid open with belaying pins, and was put into the glory hole in double irons.
The Portuguese mate made it a practice to appear at the top of the glory hole every half hour or so when he was off watch to taunt the shanghaied man. Laflin contented himself with muttering that he would “get hunk with the damned Greaser.”
The skipper offered to release Laflin after four days, provided he would consent to go to work. Laflin told him for his pains that he would see the Morning Queen blazing first.
Escape and Revenge
There was no doing anything with this sort of shanghaied man, and Laflin was kept in double irons until the ship reached Nagasaki, Japan.
In that port a friendly member of the crew sawed his irons, and he swam ashore. He stowed away on a tramp steamer bound for San Francisco.
There he waited for the appearance of the Morning Queen and the Portuguese mate, the only man of the crew that he had it in for.
He waited three months and met the Portuguese mate suddenly on Clay street at noon one day. The Portuguese recognized the bad man, and made a movement for a gun or a knife – both weapons were found upon him after his death.
Laflin shot him seven times, each time through the heart. He was acquitted three hours later by a coroner’s jury, the verdict being that he acted in self-defense, as he unquestionably did, although he was waiting for his man.
New Occupation
A young man named Philip Bronston, belonging to an excellent family of Charleston, SC, was shanghaied from that port on a South American lumber schooner ten years ago. He was studying medicine at the time, but got over the side of his first ship as the result of a spree.
He wrote to his people from Pernambuco, Brazil, that he was all right. His people were all ready to have heavy punishment meted out upon the skipper of the shanghaied youth’s ship when the ship returned to Charleston.
The young man was aboard her, very brown and as strong as an ox when she came into port. Besides being brown and strong, he was thoroughly contented, and shocked his family by announcing that he liked a seafaring life so well that he proposed sticking to it.
He got a first mate’s and then a skipper’s papers, and is now the master of as fine a ship as ever slid down the ways of a Bath shipyard.
Stranded in Honolulu
A man who was shanghaied from San Francisco on a trading schooner about 18 months ago, took his chances with the sharks in Honolulu harbor and swam ashore. He appealed to the American consul for a ride back to San Francisco, but his appeal was in vain.
He was unable to get any sort of a job to work his way back on the regular steamers that ply between San Francisco and Honolulu, and he was equally unsuccessful in his attempts to stow away on these steamers.
But he did not propose degenerating into a Honolulu beach comber. He got into talks with some sailors ashore from the United States cruiser Baltimore, then in Honolulu harbor on her way to San Francisco from China.
When the Baltimore hoisted her anchor and sailed away for San Francisco, the shanghaied man wore the uniform of a bluejacket aboard her, although he was not shipped as a member of her crew. He took his place at quarters, standing in the rear rank, and got through the drills – there were few of them at sea – the best he knew how.
The officers never knew the difference, for there were nearly 500 men in the crew. He took his place at quarters, probably the first man who was ever stowed away on an American man-of-war, and the fact did not leak out aft in the ward room until after he had got safely ashore, so ingeniously had the thing been contrived by the good-hearted blue jackets.
Source: The Houston daily post. (Houston, Tex.), 24 Oct. 1897.
