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

Author:Richard Dillon [Dillon, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781618090584
Publisher: The Write Thought
Published: 2012-05-29T06:00:00+00:00

This writer’s mother, Mrs. Alice M. Dillon, had a girl friend in 1900, named Alice McDevitt. Miss McDevitt’s father ran a saloon on the Embarcadero near Clay Street, from which men were said to be shanghaied. Another saloon and sailors’ boardinghouse, run by William Paupitz at Jackson and Front Streets in the ‘90’s, had a similar reputation. Arthur Oliver, who came to San Francisco around the Horn as an apprentice on the Crompton, remembers yet another shanghaiing saloon, complete with trap door, at Broadway and Battery.

At the head of Napier Lane, where it dead-ends against the bulk of Telegraph Hill, was a house used for “cold storage” of seamen being readied for a berth on some outbound windship. Bill Coffman was kept prisoner in such a place. Another “inmate” was a young Swede by the name of Olson. He was a friend of Captain Otto Lembke. He told the captain how he, too, had been put on ice for a time in such a place. Only sixteen or seventeen years old at the time, and of a good family—his sea chest had his family’s coat of arms and crest on it!—he had come to San Francisco on his first voyage from Sweden. His vessel was boarded in the bay by a number of runners including a confidence man who called himself The Parson. These rogues climbed up the forechains from their Whitehalls, passed whiskey around freely and made all sorts of alluring promises. Although the captain withheld their pay to discourage them from deserting, young Olson and some others of the crew yielded to the frock-coated con man’s blandishments. Once ashore, he would not let them go uptown at all. Instead, he marched them, under the heavy guard of an escort of toughs, to a house at the foot of Telegraph Hill near the ballast quarry, perhaps the very Napier Lane building of ill repute. It was a boardinghouse but it was built like a jail and had a stout board fence all around it.

Olson and his comrades were fed well there but confined to their quarters by bullies armed with clubs. When one of the sailors pleaded to be allowed to go uptown, promising to return, one of the guard mount hauled off and hit him so hard he knocked him off a bench and onto the floor, out cold. Olson and one other man managed to escape from this crimp’s dungeon by piling barrels and other junk against the wall, climbing on top of it and jumping down outside. They then ran as fast as they could toward the Embarcadero. Several of the shanghaiers pursued them and were gaining on them when they reached the Ferry Building. His friend was caught, but Olson jumped on board an Oakland ferryboat and hid out in Alameda for a time, working for a man for nothing just to have a safe place to stay. He had to leave his hideout when he got dirt in the barrels of his benefactor’s shotgun on a hunting trip, blew it up and ruined it.

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