In the 1850s a man could take a free beer in a San Francisco tavern and wake up at sea, bound for China. Shanghaiing, named for a frequent destination of these ships, grew from the Gold Rush, when whole crews abandoned their ships in San Francisco Bay to chase gold, leaving captains desperate for bodies. A 1790 federal law made leaving a ship before the voyage ended a crime punishable by imprisonment, and thin profit margins kept captains from paying competitive wages. Into that gap stepped the crimps, or boardinghouse masters, who were paid blood money for every man delivered aboard. Some drugged victims with laudanum or opium or clubbed them, then forged their signatures on the shipping articles. Others trapped sailors with inflated boardinghouse bills paid straight out of their wage advances, sometimes pocketing three or four months’ pay.

Some crimps earned as much as $9,500 a year, and Portland, Oregon eventually overtook San Francisco as the capital of the trade. Political bosses such as Christopher Blind Boss Buckley protected them in exchange for boardinghouse votes, while police looked away and judges threw out cases. Reform took about 50 years: New York regulated boarding houses in 1868, the Shipping Commissioners Act of 1872 required signing before a federal commissioner, and the Dingley Act of 1884 banned wage advances before a loophole in 1886 revived the scam. The Seamen’s Act of 1915, championed by labor leader Andrew Furuseth and Senator Robert M. La Follette, made crimping a federal crime and ended imprisonment for desertion, as steamships cut demand for unskilled crews.

• San Francisco’s crimps included James Shanghai Kelly and Johnny Shanghai Chicken Devine, while Portland had Joseph Bunco Kelly.
• Billy Gohl, a sailors’ union official at Grays Harbor, Washington, killed sailors for their pay and, by legend, dropped bodies through a trap door into the Wishkah River.
• He logged his victims as having shipped out for South America to explain their disappearance.
• New York’s inspections cut its sailors’ boarding houses from 169 to 90.
• A square rigged sailing ship might need 40 or 50 men aloft, while a steamship needed a small skilled engine crew.