Portland Examines Grim Chapter of Its Past Along the Waterfront

It would start with a thirsty working stiff on the town with his back pay, swaggering into the half-bars/half-bordellos called boardinghouses and hard on the heels of whiskey, women and song.

But soon the ceiling would start to spin, his legs wouldn’t obey, and oblivion moved in like a fog. He would awaken on a ship at sea.

He had been shanghaied--addled with a drugged drink, hustled into an alley or dropped through a trapdoor to an underground tunnel leading to the harbor, bundled in a blanket and sold for a few dollars to a captain in need of a crew.

The practice flourished on Portland’s rough-and-tumble Skid Road waterfront from the 1860s until it began to wane around World War I. The laws, such as they were, weren’t enforced. Sailors of the day weren’t considered worth the effort.

Some tunnels are still there, and they have provided a lifetime of fascination for Michael Jones, who is trying to restore them to their original condition and open them for guided tours, something he already has begun on a limited basis.

Portland was known as the worst port on the West Coast for shanghaiing, putting even wicked San Francisco in the shade. Many of the boardinghouses were owned by the shanghaiers, or “crimps,” as they were called.

“Portland was vice-ridden and corrupt,” Jones said. “It catered to people who played as hard as they worked, and those are the people who were shanghaied.”

Jones does not romanticize the shanghai days. “There is nothing romantic about it,” he said. “It was human abuse at its worst. It’s a piece of our history that’s not very nice.”

Jones, 49, who has relied heavily on decades of oral histories and the little that has been written for his information, says he hopes enough time has gone by so that Portland can confront this aspect of its past.

Even now, he says, when he meets people whose forebears had firsthand knowledge, they say something like, “The family talked about it in whispers.”

Some of the men who were shanghaied would be gone for years before they could work their way back. Some were fatally drugged, Jones said.

“The knockout drops were powerful,” Jones said. “They had to last from 13 to 16 hours, until the ship was at sea, because if they didn’t, the man might jump overboard and try to swim to land.

“The first thing they did was take away their boots,” he said. “They sprinkled broken glass on the floor so that if someone got free, he wouldn’t get very far very fast.”

Jones plans a museum in one of the subterranean rooms for the things he has found there.

“What was found in the underground will stay in the underground,” he said, ducking through the low brick archways that connect rooms to the tunnels.

Jones says he thinks the tunnels were built for shanghaiing, but others are skeptical.

Chet Orloff, the former head of the Oregon Historical Society, said the tunnels had a number of purposes in a city full of mud-and-cobblestone streets, where it was easier to use an iron-wheeled hand truck underground than above.

“[The tunnels] did serve secondary purposes. Chinese lived in some of them. Were they shanghai tunnels? I suppose one could say yes, they would have occasionally been used for that because they were there, they were under the bars in that part of town and they could get them a few blocks down to the waterfront.”

“I have heard older Portlanders talk about how when they were kids growing up they were warned by their parents not to go to Old Town, to the tough Skid Road areas, because they would be dragged through tunnels to a ship,” he said.

Tunnels or not, there wasn’t much that a crafty crimp wouldn’t do to get his man.

In 1891, Billy Smith was 21 and just off the farm when he was invited by a nice man he met to join a party on a riverboat. There were women, liquor, food, even a three-piece band. The riverboat stopped at Astoria, on the Oregon coast, and Billy and others were asked to sign a “passenger list” for the return trip.

After that, wouldn’t they like a tour of the square-rigger T. F. Oaks moored there? When they boarded, they were clapped in irons and found themselves en route around the tip of South America to Europe. The “passenger list” turned out to be legal ship’s articles.

Shanghaiing flourished until passage of the LaFollette Seaman’s Act of 1915 and the gradual change to steam power, which required more skilled seamen than the “iron men and wooden ships” era of sail did. Unions helped.

Nobody knows how many men were shanghaied out of Portland, but the numbers probably ran to the thousands.

The crimps weren’t fussy. Cowboys, farmhands, inexperienced sailors (old salts knew better), loggers, anyone would do. Crimps usually got $30 to $50 per man, a tidy sum at the time.

Crimp Joseph “Bunco” Kelly gained a measure of fame by selling a captain 20-odd men wrapped in blankets at $52 each. Once at sea, the captain tried to revive them and found they were dead.

They had broken into the basement of an undertaker, mistaking it for that of the saloon next door. The barrel they tapped wasn’t whiskey; it was formaldehyde. Bunco found out in time to whisk away the bodies.

Bunco got his name, though, by stealing a cigar-store Indian, wrapping it in a blanket and selling it to a captain who didn’t realize he’d been had until he reached Astoria.

Most shanghaied sailors found themselves bound for foreign ports, often Shanghai, hence the name. Portland was the jumping-off point for the Orient because of lumber and grain shipments, and the crop of susceptible men was bountiful.

A British consul in Portland during the shanghai days decried “the well-known disposition of the sailor, on arrival in port, after months of repression and discomfort, to run into excesses, a much-to-be-deplored but by no means unnatural propensity.”