Crimped by the Prince of Shanghai
Sailors looking for work in the 19th century risked getting crimped – or shanghaied – and caught in a whirlpool of exploitation and corruption.
In March 1882 James H. Williams arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, then the world capital of the whaling industry, in the hope of signing on aboard a merchant vessel. Like many sailors he relied on a crimp, an intermediary responsible for recruiting crews on behalf of captains and shipowners. Nicknamed the ‘Prince of Shanghai’, the man he approached bore a sobriquet that reflected his controversial practices: in 19th-century maritime slang, to ‘shanghai’ referred to fraudulent enlistment, based on deception or even coercion.
Decades later, Williams recalled this experience with evident bitterness in an autobiographical article in New York’s The Independent on 2 April 1921:
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