In the late 1800s, the law in American maritime history was absolute. Sailors were legally classified as property. If you signed a shipping contract and walked off the vessel, federal marshals hunted you down. Quitting meant a prison cell.
Andrew Furuseth arrived in San Francisco in 1880. He was a tall, gaunt man with a face weathered by saltwater. He knew the docks. He understood the grim economics of the waterfront. San Francisco was a booming port, but the sailors who powered it were treated like livestock.
A system of boardinghouse masters, known as crimps, controlled the labor supply. They operated out of dim taverns and squalid lodging houses along the Barbary Coast. They offered arriving sailors a cheap bed, a hot meal, and a stiff drink. Then they drugged them, forged their signatures on outgoing shipping contracts, and sold them to ship captains for a fee called blood money. The captains paid the fee and charged it against the sailor's future wages.
Once a man was dragged aboard, the captain owned him. The wages were held until the very end of the voyage. A captain could flog a man for dropping a rope. The mate system encouraged officers to beat sailors into submission. If a sailor complained about rotten food or twelve-hour shifts in freezing rain, the captain simply charged him for his rations.
At the end of a six-month voyage, a sailor often owed the ship money. He was tossed back onto the dock, penniless, right back into the hands of the crimps.
It was a closed, unbreakable loop. The ship owners had the politicians. The politicians wrote the maritime laws. If a sailor tried to organize or protest, his name went into a master ledger. He was blacklisted across the entire Pacific coast. Furuseth watched men break under the weight of it. He watched them accept the brutality because the alternative was starvation.
