Shanghaied: Crimps and Kidnapped Sailors on the Barbary Coast

San Francisco gave the English language the verb “to shanghai.” From the Gold Rush into the early 1900s, men who drank in the wrong waterfront saloon could wake up at sea, signed onto a ship’s crew they never agreed to join, often bound across the Pacific. The practice was called crimping, the men who ran it were called crimps, and the neighborhood that made it an industry was the Barbary Coast, centered on Pacific Avenue between the waterfront and Chinatown.

Why It Happened Here

The economics were simple. During the Gold Rush, crews abandoned their ships in San Francisco Bay by the hundreds to head for the mines, and captains needed bodies to sail out. Federal law at the time also allowed a sailor’s first wages to be paid as “blood money” to whoever delivered him aboard. A crimp who delivered an unconscious man to a shorthanded captain collected the fee, and sometimes the man’s advance wages too.

Crimps ran sailors’ boardinghouses along the waterfront, and the saloons attached to them did the harvesting. The standard tools, documented in court records and newspaper accounts of the era: drinks laced with opium or chloral hydrate, trapdoors over basement holding rooms, and small boats that ferried the cargo to ships anchored in the bay at night. The word itself came from the destination; Shanghai stood in for any long, unwanted Pacific voyage.

Shanghai Kelly

The most notorious crimp was James Kelly, a red-bearded Irishman who ran a three-story boardinghouse and saloon at 33 Pacific Street. Contemporaries called him Shanghai Kelly, and his bar was known for whiskey a man should not have accepted.

The famous Kelly story is the birthday cruise. As the tale goes, faced with three shorthanded ships in the early 1870s, Kelly chartered a paddle steamer, announced a free birthday party with open bar, and filled the boat with guests from the waterfront. Once outside the Gate, the drugged passengers were handed off to the waiting ships. The version popularized by Herbert Asbury’s 1933 book “The Barbary Coast” adds a perfect ending: Kelly came across a wreck on the way back, rescued the survivors, and returned with a full boat so nobody missed his guests. Historians treat the details as legend built on a real practice; the documented record of crimping in San Francisco is grim enough without embellishment.

The End of It

Reform came slowly. The Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, led by Andrew Furuseth, spent two decades fighting the boardinghouse system. A 1906 federal act first made shanghaiing a federal crime, and the Seamen’s Act of 1915, pushed through Congress by Senator Robert La Follette, ended the economics of crimping by abolishing wage advances and gave sailors the right to quit a ship in port. Between the new laws, steam power shrinking crew demands, and the 1906 fire leveling much of the old waterfront district, the Barbary Coast faded; a 1917 police crackdown closed what was left of its dance halls.

Where to Drink the History

A few rooms from that era are still pouring. The Old Ship Saloon in Jackson Square sits on a Barbary Coast site dating to the 1850s, when a grounded ship’s hull served as the first bar. Comstock Saloon on Columbus is a restored 1907 saloon with a pre-Prohibition cocktail list. The Saloon on Grant Avenue has operated since 1861 and survived the 1906 fire. The brick blocks of Jackson Square, between the Financial District and North Beach, are the largest surviving piece of the pre-1906 city, and Pacific Avenue through them was the Barbary Coast’s main artery.