Living on a boat for many months wasn’t easy for English and American sailors during the mid-nineteenth century. Wages were often paid months after they were originally hired; they had to eat terrible food and endure boredom at sea for three to six months at a time. Whenever a ship finally docked in a port, most of the crew members escaped to find better jobs as fishermen, lumberjacks, or hunters. For this reason, ruthless captains resorted to hiring crimps so they wouldn’t have to ship out of port without a full crew.
Crimps or shanghaiers were shady figures who used every kind of coercive and cruel technique to kidnap people and force them into service. Sailors were drugged, beaten, intimidated, or tricked by cunning prostitutes while in a drunken state. Crimps and their bloody deals flourished in every major English and American port city, from London to Bristol, from Portland to San Francisco. Crimps’ activity was in fact both lucrative and perfectly legal, as boarding masters were paid “by the body” (i.e., for the actual number of seamen enlisted regardless of their physical condition), and they always had a way to forge a sailor’s signature before paying shanghaiers their “blood money” quota.
Joseph “Bunko” Kelly was one of these crooks of questionable reputation. According to the legend, Portland’s “king of the crimps” allegedly captured up to 2,000 men during his (dis)honorable career, although many of the details of his exploits came from the man himself. In 1895 he was arrested for the murder of the opium smuggler G. W. Sayres (although he always claimed it was just a setup planned by his former colleague Larry Sullivan), and while doing time in prison he wrote his pseudobiographical book Thirteen Years in the Oregon Penitentiary (1908). Among other stories of doubtful veracity, Kelly tells us about his early life at sea, when he ended up shipwrecked on the coast of Madagascar. He and his crewmates were captured by cannibals who started eating them one by one, but when a ship full of pirates came to save his gang during a typhoon, they managed to lock them into the ship’s galley before docking at an Indian port.
When Bunko started his career in 1879, Portland was the perfect place for crimpers to perform their activities. By the end of the nineteenth century, this Oregon port town was a maze of passages and tunnels that connected the basements of various hotels and saloons to the waterfront, used to haul goods from the ships without clogging the city streets. The so-called “shanghai tunnels” were used to lure unsuspecting men into traps, or hold kidnapped sailors inside cellars. Bunko was one of the best crimpers around, famous for setting a record of crimping when he managed to kidnap fifty men in just three hours (including two women dressed as men).
Kelly earned his nickname of “Bunko” in October 1885, when he proved he was not just a ruthless shanghaier, but also a true artist of skullduggery in a witty show of devious slickness. Because there were absolutely no men around left to crimp, he found a six-foot-tall wooden statue of an Indian outside a cigar store. After wrapping it in tarpaulin, he hauled the statue onto the ship’s bunk, posing it as a sleeping man. It was only two days later, after the ship’s sailors threw the statue overboard, that a group of Astorian fishermen found the statue stuck in their nets.
Probably Bunko’s most famous adventure happened in 1893, when he was hired by the Flying Prince’s captain to crimp twenty-two men at a rate of thirty dollars apiece. Spotting an open cellar in a sidewalk, Bunko found twenty-four men lying on the ground groaning in pain. The group believed they were inside some barroom’s cellar, and had mistakenly drunk all the liquid from the barrels. Much to their dismay, they were inside a mortuary’s cellar, and they had spent the night drinking embalming fluid. Bunko managed to sell all the dead and dying men to the captain all the same, making a small fortune from that deal. It was one of the cleverest stunts ever performed by one of American history’s legendary villains.
Claudio Butticè
See also Boles, Charles E. “Black Bart”; Legends; Sea Shanties
Further Reading
Blalock, Barney. 2014. The Oregon Shanghaiers: Columbia River Crimping from Astoria to Portland. Charleston, SC: History Press
Dillon, Richard H. 1961. Shanghaiing Days. New York: Coward-McCann.
Holbrook, Stewart. 1992. “Bunco Kelly, King of the Crimps.” Wildmen, Wobblies and Whistle Punks, edited by Brian Booth. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press.
Kelley, Joseph. 1902. Thirteen Years in the Oregon Penitentiary. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lopatto, Elizabeth. 2014. “The Legend of Bunko Kelly, the Kidnapping King of Portland.” The Awl website. July 22. http://www.theawl.com/2014/07/the-legend-of-the-legend-of-bunko-kelly-the-kidnapping-king-of-portland. Accessed November 4, 2015.