The anti-crimps part 1

That is from Judith Fingard's Jack in Port (page 187). As you can see from the large text in bold italic, the act the handbill was making sailors aware of was called the Act for the Protection of Seamen from Crimps. However, when I read the smaller text above (click on the image to see it larger or read below) I begin to think that it wasn't protecting seamen at all:

IN consequence of the inconvenience to which Ship Owners are subjected by the Desertion of Seaman at Quebec, and the extortionate Wages demanded for the return to the United Kingdom; the Legislative Assembly of Canada have passed an act...

Ah yes, I love it when the government decides to protect me from receiving "extortionate" wages. That's really putting sailors' interests first. And it's worse than that for the act puts extra responsibilities on seamen and informs them that, should they fail to follow these provisions, they will be subject to "imprisonment and hard labour".

Who do you think the legislature was more likely to listen to: wealthy ship owners or poor sailors?

I'm not saying crimps like my ancestors were gentle and sweet men who never hurt anyone's feelings never mind used deceit, violence or extortion to get what they wanted. There is clear evidence that they did. But it is also clear that corrupt and unjust labour practices, a speciality of the 19th century, created an atmosphere in which they could thrive.

Wages on this side of the ocean were three to five times what they were in Britain. I would think that would give sailors a powerful economic incentive to desert. On top of which, they seem to have had very little recourse other than desertion when sailing masters, who had absolute authority at sea, abused them or failed to look out for their security or were just plain incompetent. It's not unreasonable to suspect that magistrates were biased favour of the ship owners and their captains. Finally, ships sailing between Canada and Britain were carrying mostly lumber and I've read that that task was reserved for ships at the end of their career. As a consequence, these boats were often run down and in poor repair; a sailor might well want to desert for fear of his life.

My suspicion is that those factors combined with rising standards of living in the 19th century made it increasingly difficult to find and retain sailors. The shipowners blind, as we all are, to the the ways in which their interests and the general moral truth diverged appealed to the British government which dutifully stepped in to "protect" sailors from crimps by protecting ship owners' interests. The colonial government in Canada, in turn, immediately stepped up and adopted the relevant provisions as their own.

Crimping had always been part of port life. The British government had long engaged in crimping itself through press gangs. Their crimping practices had been one of the prime causes of the War of 1812 (and, while they and many Canadians continue to insist that they won what was, in fact, an inconclusive war, the British gave up crimping after that war). What was changing in the 19th century was that wealth was increasing at a tremendous rate and the British and Canadian governments were doing everything they could to make sure that wealth did not trickle down to the poor. Not from lack of caring mind you; as we will see as we further explore the subject, wealthy ship owners and other concerned rich people were willing to do all sorts of charity for the poor. What they weren't willing to do was allow them to earn their way up because "down", as in firmly stuck in a lower class, was what they wanted to maintain for the poor.

As I keep repeating, crimps weren't nice guys and what they did was not only criminal but also often unfair, unkind and even evil. But the prohibitionist and class-maintenance  approach governments took to the problem actually created a sort of golden age of crimping in the last half of the 19th century.

I leave you with two thoughts:

1. Virtually everything we think we know about crimps comes from people who were opposed to them. Crimps themselves, being engaged in an illegal business, were hardly likely to document their business practices.
2. Suppose you were a dirt-poor Irishman who'd had to come across from Ireland, where your family and friends were dying like flies because of British law, in the hold of one of those leaky, old lumber ships. How much respect are you going to have for British law?

The ship owners were not the only people opposed to crimps. There were also the Protestant reformers. I'll discuss them next week.

Rough trade

James Costigan had three sons. Two of them—Denis and Daniel—helped him in his business dealings while the third, Michael, went to sea. The following article from the Saint John Daily Sun of April 16, 1879 gives a good idea of the business practices of the Costigan family.

I think we can take that as the smoking gun proving the Costigans were crimps. (There is a Wikipedia page on crimping, it focuses on the practice found on the west coast of the USA, which was a particularly extreme form of crimping, but it is useful for background.)

This sort of rough stuff was apparently not the usual for the crimps at Saint John—being more the sort of thing they did in Quebec City and San Francisco—but neither was it completely unheard of and the Costigans were apparently willing and able to use force when they deemed it necessary. While we can hardly approve of what was done, we must allow that Daniel Costigan must have been one serious badass. He did this alone! I love the line claiming that Cotter had made Costigan prisoner but "let him go before the captain's arrival". Yeah, that sounds like what must have happened.

Two days later the steward from Queen of the North, one Charles Scott, assaulted Cotter, opening up a gash from the centre of his forehead to the tip of his nose. It's quite possible the two events were related.

I am, as I have cheerfully admitted, quite prepared to romanticize these people but it's a lot easier to do that more than a century later than it would have been at the time. The Costigans were a rough and tough lot and you wouldn't want to mess with them. On the same day that Charles Scott, mentioned above, was sentenced, Daniel's older brother (and my great-grandfather) Denis Costigan failed to appear in court to testify against one Henry Ballaty who he had accused of stealing a coat from him. Instead of waiting for the police, Costigan had retrieved the coat by force several days earlier and, no doubt, "administered" such justice as he felt appropriate directly.

Oh yeah, you might be wondering how it was that Daniel Costigan escaped legal prosecution given that he clearly committed serious, go-to-jail crimes and there does not seem to have been much doubt about his identity. The answer to that is long and complex and I plan to get to it in subsequent posts. A shorter version might go like this: 1) This all took place in a no-longer-existent part of Saint John called "Sailortown" and 2) Forget about it Jake, it's Sailortown.

James Costigan

Today is the 129 anniversary of the death of James Costigan, the first of my Irish ancestors to come to Canada. He seems to have arrived in 1850. He worked first as a labourer, then as a saloon keeper at 4 North Street. This was right on the waterfront. It was at a very rough 19th century commercial waterfront with all that entails. He later converted that business to a sailors' boarding house. Most of his income, however, derived from crimping, which was the illegal practice of inducing seaman to desert the ships they arrived on in order to serve on departing ships.

This is his tombstone.

If you try to remove the moss and lichens on the surface, the rock tends to come with it. It says he died on August 24, 1886. It also says he was a native of Bantry, Ireland.

There has always been a whiff of scandal associated with the man but I don't think many in the family knew that he was a crimp or what a crimp was. As a result, they tended to project their worst fears onto him. Most assumed the scandal was related to his dealings in liquor. I do have at least one (female) relative who is terrified I am going to end up proving he was running a whorehouse. I doubt that very much but it tells you something about how the Irish mind works.

What's more, I suspect that while crimping cannot be explained away, it is less of a scandal than we might imagine if properly understood. Like piracy, crimping can only exist when aided and abetted by governments that either 1) pass stupid laws that inadvertently make it more prosperous than it otherwise would have been or 2) corruptly look the other way because they think they benefit from the existence of the trade. I think Saint John did both in the 19th century.

There is also an Irish tendency to make history into "the past". What I mean is that there is a tendency in Irish families like mine to make every tale serve a moral purpose. The crimping trade served the family well until the age of steam came and made it unnecessary. Family fortunes declined after that. There was also a terrible decade of death between 1900 and 1910 that, as near as I can figure out killed off the entire family save for a few women. My suspicion is that they started telling a tale of the family's decline that put it to moral failures of James and his eldest son Denis rather than new technology.

By the time I came along, the family had successfully climbed it's way into the upper middle class and they no longer wanted to talk about the man or of the moral failures they used to attribute to him. That, I think, is why I and my siblings and cousins only picked up a whiff of scandal. The people who knew (my grandparents' generation) didn't want to open that door and the people who didn't (my parents' generation) were left to imagine what the scandal might be and they projected their worst fears into the vacuum.

I don't want to justify the way James and Denis made their living but I think it has a certain romance about it and I am not immune to romance.

Lobster roll #1: purism versus modernism

I'm on vacation and that's a lobster roll. I made that one myself. It's a sort of benchmark for the rest of the vacation.

That's almost a classic lobster roll. Nowadays, most places will serve you a hot dog bun with a lobster salad made with Hellman's mayonnaise and, you hope, little else. And those are yummy. The original lobster roll was made with lobster meat, butter and nothing else. Except a roll.

That's a ciabatta in the picture. It wasn't chosen for any highfalutin reasons. Hot dog rolls were only available eight at a time. The end result was really good.

The key, if you want to make one of these yourself, is to clarify the butter. Then you brush a little on both sides of the bread and grill it. You sauté the lobster meat, cut into little chunks, in the rest of the butter and then assemble. You'll need napkins.

The purist versus modernist distinction comes from Lynn Hoffman's book Short Course in Rum. It's a useful distinction. The purist might insist on the Hellman's version or the hot butter version but always with a hot dog bun. Hot butter with ciabatta is just messing up categories. Sure was good though.

We're here on vacation but I'm doing some research while I'm at it. I hope to have the smoking gun that proves my ancestors were crimps before I leave. More to come ...

PS This is the view from where I'm blogging:

National Rum Day

According to Tommy Bahama, and who could doubt such a source?, today is National Rum Day.

The drink in the foreground is a rum old-fashioned made with Skipper Rum. Normally, I like to make my rum old-fashioneds with a mixture of Demerara rum and Jamaican rum, specifically Smith and Cross, but the bottle of Smith and Cross in this picture is empty as of last night.

I'm not a rum expert; I just drink the stuff. I drink it because I like it, because it has cultural associations that I like and because you can buy premium rums for a lot less you can buy premium whiskey or brandy. (The only premium rum in that photo is the (albeit empty) Smith and Cross—the other two are both good.)

Today's old-fashioned is 100 percent Skipper Rum. I bought this bottle because of the name. Yes, I would judge a book by its cover. I like Skipper Rum. It's a real dark rum and you can really taste the molasses in it. To my palate, it's not a sipping rum like the Smith and Cross but it makes a fine old-fashioned. It also makes a good rum punch. And it's got a fun name and a great label. What more do you need in a rum?

Why is there Kahlua in this picture? That's a subject for a future post when I discuss spiced rum. Yes, I drink that stuff too. I'm neither a rum expert nor a rum snob.

Elijah

This bit from last the lectionary for last Sunday (19th Sunday of Ordinary Time, year B), seemed particularly appropriate for this blog:

Elijah went a day's journey into the wilderness,
and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree.
He asked that he might die:
"It is enough; O Lord, take away my life,
for I am no better than my ancestors."

Why do people make up lies that aggrandize their ancestors? My family certainly did. And does.

The Costigans lived at 4 North Street in Saint John's Sailortown during the last half of the 19th century. North street ran down to the waterfront and the numbering system started at the harbour. Number four was the second house in up from the waterfront on the north side of North Street. My great, great grandfather James Costigan first shows up in historical documents as a retail liquor dealer at that location and he stays in that business until sometime in the 1870s when he becomes the proprietor of a sailor boarding home at the same location.

What did retail liquor dealer mean? Did he sell bottles of booze to seamen fresh off the ships? Or did he have a bar? Perhaps he did both. Given what we all tend to assume we know about 19th century port life, it seems like it must have been a pretty rough world. And I cannot think of any reason to think otherwise. Even had he not gone into the illegal trade of crimping ( and I think I'm very close to finding the smoking gun that proves he did) he must have lived in a world full of rough characters and rough ways. And he must have been a pretty tough guy.

He was also a Catholic. Roman Catholic. What was the nature of his religious belief and how did he square that with his day trade of selling liquor to sailors? What did he make of the prostitutes whom he must have seen on the streets not far from his business?

(One of the reasons some members of my family are so nervous about my research into his life is a fear that I will come up with proof that there was prostitution taking place under his roof. I think it very unlikely I will find such evidence for reasons I will discuss sometime in the future but it's telling that they worry about it. They sense there is something scandalous here and they have latched onto the only scandalous way of earning money they can think of.)

But what of his religion? Where did he go to church and how often? How did his parish priest see him? As just another Irishman? Or as a lamentable example dragging down the reputation of his countrymen? I have no idea about any of these questions. It will be fun trying to answer them.

What is a crimp and were my ancestors involved in crimping?

I'm still figuring this one out.

"Crimping" and "crimp" are words that cover a wide range of activity and a lot of different kinds of people doing these activities. In the broadest possible definition, a crimp was someone who enabled or convinced sailors to desert the ship they had entered port with in order to work on another ship leaving port. In return, the crimp got a portion of the advance pay of every seaman he delivered to a ship needing crew members. If the market was really tight, the sailing master of a ship particularly desperate for crew members might even offer an additional payment over and above that. In the 19th century, this was illegal. It was also very lucrative.

It was also widely assumed that crimps exploited seamen to the detriment of said seamen. Nobody thought that crimps were honest dealers. Some people who were clearly breaking the laws against crimping seem to have convinced themselves that there were in fact proving a fair deal and some convinced themselves that they weren't really crimps because they were acting, in their view, honestly or that crimping was long-established tradition that governments had no right to prevent. Finally, there were people whose income was largely derived from crimping but because they were involved at arm's length they weren't actually crimps.

In any case, the illegal trade involved persuasion. Any time we uses words like "persuade" or "convince" we are describing activities that entail a certain amount of manipulation. If two people sit down and discuss something, they both come to the table willing to listen to what the other is willing to say. If, however, I sit down to "discuss" my car with my friend while intending to  "convince" him to buy said car something important has changed. I'm not really as open when I have an objective in mind. That manipulation exists in human relationships is not a bad thing. If a man or woman wants sex, they might try to convince their spouse to join them. Convincing can be done fairly or unfairly.

Because crimping was illegal, it didn't really matter from a legal point of view whether the person attempting to convince seamen to desert one ship to serve another was being honest and straightforward in their dealings with their clients. As a result, crimps tended to get lumped together no matter what their methods and the range of methods involved ran from illegal but cooperative to despicable.

Because crimping was illegal, the people who did it tended to keep it a secret. Someone running a sailors' boarding house in 19th century Saint John was almost certainly directly or indirectly involved in crimping but that "almost certainly" matters. In some cases, where a person is caught re-handed and convicted in a court of law, for example, we might comfortably conclude this person was a crimp. But there were very few of these in Sailortown. All we can say for certain is that there was a lot of crimping going on and that most crimps got away with it. We can never say for certain whether certain people did or didn't do it.

Finally, there is the question of methods. A crimp could persuade his clients in an honest and straightforward fashion. He might also misrepresent the facts. He could sweeten the deal or cloud a seaman's judgment by making alcohol or sex available to him. Because a crimp could only collect payment for seamen he actually delivered to a ship, some crimps would go so far as to lock seamen up so they couldn't seek other alternatives. In the most extreme cases, a crimp might 'convince" sailors to desert a ship by simply kidnapping them*.

And then there are the enablers profiting at arm's length. A boarding house keeper might never engage in crimping directly but be well aware that it goes on and that some deals were worked through his or her establishment.  Going a little further into the water, a boarding house keeper could work out a deal whereby crimps paid them a kickback for every "client" they housed. Going right into the deep end, a a keeper might, in fact, make much more money from these deals than they could make simply by running an honest boarding house. Finally, we could have an arrangement where the boarding house owner doesn't think of himself as a crimp but the crimps whose clients stay with him are effectively working for the boarding house owner. In the deeper water, the boarding house owner might convince himself that he isn't himself a crimp even though crimping is the source of most of his income.

At this point, I suspect that my great-great grandfather James Costigan (born Bantry, Ireland 1822, died Saint John, New Brunswick 1886) was a crimp. I'm a little less certain that his son, also named Dennis Costigan (sometimes spelled "Denis", born 1854, Ireland, died 1901 Saint John, New Brunswick ) was also a crimp. As of today, I can't entirely discount the possibility that both men were innocent. It may be impossible to prove it either way. What I can be certain of is that they saw a lot of the rough side of life living and working in Sailortown. I can also be certain that the two men did rather well in life, far too well to be easily explained by honest employment. Finally, I can say for certain that when the age of sail came to an end and crimping became much less profitable, my great-grandfather Costigan's fortunes declined precipitously and he went from being a playboy to severe poverty dying penniless in the Turnbull Home for Incurables.


* The most notorious practitioners of this were British naval officers. They got away with it because the government passed Impressment  laws not only exempted them from punishment but actually authorized them to do this. Besides government hypocrisy, this tells us something of the history of crimping. It was one of those activities—examples run from slavery to sexual harassment—that was once common and only slowly came to be recognized as immoral and deserving to be punished by law. Impressment by the British navy stopped in 1814. Attitudes that crimping was justified might have lingered well into the 19th century.

An act of stunning disloyalty

Since contemporaries seem to have applied the term crimp to anyone who became involved in manipulating the sailor labour market, most nineteenth-century boarding-house-keepers qualified as crimps. Of all the boarding-house-keepers in Saint John late in the century, only one was regarded by sailors’s home reformers to be a respectable, law-abiding citizen rather than a disreputable crimp. (Jack in Port by Judith Fingard p197)

Our story begins in a cemetery in Upham, New Brunswick. Amy and I had gone there with my mother and father because my mother very much wanted to show it to us. The cemetery was not maintained terribly well and could easily have been mistaken for a hayfield. I remember finding a lot of blueberries growing along the perimeter where the hayfield disappeared into forest. I called my mother’s attention to this because it was the sort of thing she had taught me to delight in when we were children. That day, she didn’t.

My mother was dying. I can’t remember whether she’d actually told us yet but she knew and there were enough hints that we had figured it out long before she told us. She’d had a successful fight with the cancer some twenty years previously but it had come out of remission and this time it would kill her. And she was determined, in her final days, to pass on to us the most valuable lessons she felt she had to give. And she did: she faced a long and difficult death with inspiring courage and patience. But the incredible joy she had taught me as a boy when she showed me how to pick berries was no longer part of the lesson. The people buried in the cemetery in Upham were.

"I never knew I was related to people like this,” is what she said. She was proud to have discovered this connection. Later, I got to thinking about approaching that statement from the other end of the telescope. If these were people she was proud of being descended from and she had never know about them, what sort of people had she previously known she was descended from and why wasn’t she so proud of them?

Well, I've done some digging and I know that we are descended from famine Irish who most likely came to Saint John from County Cork in the empty hold of a lumber ship making a return trip from the British Isles. Of their early days in Saint John we know nothing and probably never will.  They first show up in historical documents as keeping a boarding house in Saint John New Brunswick’s Sailortown. As the quote above, from Judith Fingard’s Jack in Port: sailortowns of eastern Canada indicates, the odds against their being entirely respectable are pretty high. Even in the unlikely event that they did keep the only respectable boarding house in Sailortown, my ancestors lived in one very rough part of town and they were surrounded by thieves, pimps, prostitutes, rough bars and, sailors ashore. This is a fascinating world and learning as much as I can about it and exactly what part my Costigan ancestors played in it is irresistible to me. Well, it might be if I was even remotely inclined to try resisting but I’m not. My attitude towards all this is roughly that of Lloyd Osborne:

One stormy, rain-lashed afternoon, Stevenson came upon his twelve-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, drawing a fanciful map of a make-believe island to pass the hours. Stevenson scribbled some place-names and wrote “Treasure Island” in an upper corner. The map seemed to call for more elaboration, so he set about composing a story to go with it, reading it aloud in the evenings over the following two weeks. The dull parts were edited out by Lloyd, who, like any sensible twelve-year-old, was interested only in untimely deaths, the discovery of duplicity, or both. (And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails by Wayne Curtis)

My interests are a bit wider than young Lloyd’s, although I do share his enthusiasm for discovery of duplicity mixed with untimely death. There was plenty of both in Sailortown and I plan to find as much of them as I can. I do intend to stick by his strict rationing of dull stuff, except to the extent that some dull stuff might give context such that the exciting stuff is even more exciting. Unlike Lloyd and his Uncle Robert Louis Stevenson, I do not intend to write fiction, not on purpose anyway.

Whatever I uncover, there can be no doubt that my mother would have preferred that this aspect of family history be left alone. She is far from unusual in this. The Irish in North America generally would rather not know just how rough their forebears were. I'm sure I could give all sorts of reasons for pursuing this research anyway but they all boil down to one thing: I'm doing this because I want to.