Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (34 page)

All the buildings on this continuation of Pearl Street sport Hanover Square addresses. Farther north, their lobbies and numbers are located on the side streets, such as Pine or Liberty—a sure sign that Pearl Street has become a less-than-prestigious address. Slowly it dawns on me that there is not going to be a 119 Pearl Street. I am well into the 200s before I come upon the next Pearl Street address. How can I lay the ghost of Captain Kidd to rest, in the middle of dour Wall Street? Oh, William, you would still find New York a land of hazardous fortune, where it helps to have friends in high places, but their loyalty cannot always be trusted. (Consider the fates of Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, pirates of the modern school.) At the foot of Centre Street I double back and sniff around like an alley cat for oyster shells and the bones of pirates and widows.

POSTSCRIPT:
I now have it on good authority, the historian Edwin G. Burrows (coauthor of
Gotham
), that William Kidd's home faced Hanover Square on Pearl Street. Burrows also writes that the city's privateering phase lasted longer than I thought: “In fact, more privateers would operate out of New York during the eighteenth century than out of any other Atlantic port, and they returned home with prizes worth something like two million pounds sterling—an immense accession of wealth and the basis of more than one family fortune.”

16 EXCURSUS SAILORS AND MERCHANT SEAMEN IN NEW YORK

Arm in arm they careened up Pearl Street under the drenching rain. Bars yawned bright to them at the corners of rainseething streets…. Laplander Matty stood with his arms round two girls'necks, yanked his shirt open to show a naked man and a naked woman tattooed in red and green on his chest, hugging, stiffly coiled in a seaserpent….

—JOHN DOS PASSOS,
Manhattan Transfer

T
HE SAILOR IS A LIMINAL FIGURE
.
HE PASSES BETWEEN SEA AND LAND WITHOUT EVER FULLY COMMITTING TO EITHER
.
WHEN IN PORT, HE OFTEN REQUIRES ANOTHER liquid (alcohol) to console him for the loss of his mother element. A risk to others, he is even more a danger to himself; and those who do not fear his approach—tavernkeepers, streetwalkers, shipping agents—systematically take advantage of him.

The working waterfront is at once a site of cleansing and defilement. In most religions, water purifies, renews, and washes away sins. (Followers of Shinto, Yoruba-influenced Baptists, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Native Americans all perform rites today around New York City's rivers.) On the other hand, only the truly amphibious may pass without harm from one medium to the other. “Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable,” writes the anthropologist Mary Douglas. Waterfront districts have been traditionally associated with sin and peril. A port, no less an authority on the transgressive than Michel Foucault informs us, in
Discipline and Punish,
“is—with its circulation of goods, men signed up willingly or by force, sailors embarking and disembarking, diseases and epidemics—a place of desertion, smuggling, contagion: it is a crossroads for dangerous mixtures, a meeting place for forbidden circulations.”

The experience of sailors and seamen in New York Harbor is an essential part of the waterfront's history. Though the terms “sailor” and “seamen” often get used interchangeably, and mariners have frequently exchanged one role for the other, we might say for purposes of definition that the merchant seaman signs on with a commercial enterprise, while the naval sailor enlists in a military organization.

Of course, sailors did not always enlist. When New York was still a colony, the British navy would send armed press-gangs to enter houses and taverns and seize local men, whether they had seafaring experience or not, to fill its manpower needs—a practice known as impressment. The British navy had been losing recruits steadily to privateering, a more lucrative affair, especially during the French and Indian War. But impressment was so hated that those targeted for it would often run for their lives, or put up a struggle, and little boys would bombard the press-gangs with stones. Historian Jesse Lemisch has argued that these violations of sailors' civil
liberties, and the sometimes violent resistance they provoked, laid the groundwork for the American Revolution. In his book
Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York's Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution,
Lemisch demonstrates that during the Stamp Act riots, the mobs in New York were led by seamen discontented with lack of employment and the British gov-ernment's high-handed practices. Admitting that the colonial American sailor (personified as “Jack Tar”) often brawled, shed blood, and committed petty thefts, Lemisch nevertheless construes him as a member of a revolutionary proletarian vanguard:

The picture of Jack Tar which emerges from a close consideration is complex and at least double-faceted. On the one hand he is simply the American at sea. He is young and optimistic, and rightfully optimistic, for his prospects are good…. But the other Jack Tar is quite different. Histemper is Ishmael's. He is a dissenter from the American mood. His goals differ from his fellows' ashore; he is the non-conformist, the rebel, the extreme individualist, the man without family ties. He has no steady employment but rather a series of separate jobs. When he is ashore he is unemployed; released from the discipline of shipboard life he is apt to be explosive and irresponsible rather than cautious and sober…. He is, exceptfor his personal possessions, propertyless, his income is unstable, and he does not build up any significant savings: he is a sea-going proletarian.

Even after the Revolution, the sailor could expect long hours of constant labor in stormy seas, and unremitting busywork in calm weather. His diet consisted of salt meat, biscuit, an occasional mess of hot “scouse” (pounded biscuit, chopped salt beef, and a few potatoes, peppered and boiled together), and rations of grog. Ships on the high seas were autoc-racies—only pirate crews operated with a smidgen of democracy—and the captain's word was unchallengeable and reinforced by floggings. A memorable scene in Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s classic 1840 personal account,
Two Years Before the Mast,
captures the cruelty of the system:

“Can't a man ask a question without being flogged?”

“No,” shouted the captain; “nobody shall open his mouth aboard this vessel, but myself”; and began laying the blows upon his back, swinging
half round between each blow, to give it full effect. As he went on, his passion increased, and he danced about the deck, calling out as he swung the rope—“If you want to know what I flog you for, I'll tell you. It's because I like to do it!—because I like to do it!—It suits me! That's what I do it for!”

It was certainly a harsh, dangerous life—sailors had the highest mortality rate of any occupation in nineteenth-century America—and there were only a few weeks' port leave to rest up during the year. Land was not such a safe place, either. No sooner had a mariner docked in New York than he risked being set upon by a team operating in concert: “touters,” who hung around the docks and steered sailors to certain boardinghouses; “crimps,” who worked as agents for shipping companies and saw to it that a full crew signed on, even if it meant drugging a sailor with spiked liquor and shanghaiing him; prostitutes, who sometimes robbed their clients; and innkeepers and boardinghouse proprietors, who found ways to fleece the seaman of his wages by padding the bill or charging extortionate interest rates. In the late 1860s, investigators reported that 15,000 sailors were robbed annually of over $2 million.

Jesse Lemisch tries to put a sympathetic, pro-labor spin on the tie between sailor and tavernkeeper: “For the seaman in New York the only welfare agency which really functioned was the ‘public house’—the bar. In these houses the seaman was free of the authoritarian atmosphere of the ship and the alien ways of the landman. Here, among his fellows, the unemployed or unpaid seaman could drink his frustrations away, sure that his credit was good. Here were women, cards, and dice. Here too was information about jobs, and advice on such technical problems as making out a will. Between proprietor and seaman there was sometimes enmity but always mutual need….” Still, the system worked to impoverish the seamen, who had to fork over his first month's pay to the crimps as an employment fee, and who were overcharged for purchases such as clothing and tobacco from the ship's store, generally operated by the captain.

The Christian evangelical movement became interested in the New York seaman's plight and established floating churches, in and around the waterfront taverns and brothels, and in competition with them, as it were. Some of these waterfront preachers were so popular with genteel New York that the floating chapels had to set aside a block of seats for the
mariners they were originally intended to serve. However, when it became clear to the religious societies that the vast majority of sailors remained lukewarm about their souls' salvation, they shifted the focus of these operations to minister to the men's social welfare, for which there was never a shortage of need.

Herman Melville's lively autobiographical novel
Redburn,
which offers an incomparable account of life in the nineteenth-century merchant service, comments on these efforts “of ameliorating the condition of sailors.”
Redburn
lists ironically the remedies employed so far, such as distributing “clever religious tracts in the nautical dialect,” or providing “evangelical boarding-houses,” or “the really sincere and pious efforts of Temperance Societies, to take away from seamen their old rations of grog while at sea:—notwithstanding all these things, and many more, the relative condition of the great bulk of sailors to the rest of mankind, seems to remain pretty much where it was, a century ago.” He concludes that the only way to improve the sailors' lot is “by ameliorating the moral organization of all civilization.”

Melville was being unduly pessimistic: the conditions for seamen, at sea and ashore, did improve, thanks in part to technological advances in shipbuilding, which made vessels safer and crewmen's quarters less cramped, and in part to the ongoing pressure of reformers and the creation of sea-men's unions. In 1850 flogging was outlawed; and in succeeding decades legislation was passed to regulate the hiring and paying of seamen, to set standards for licensing steamboat engineers and pilots, to eliminate imprisonment for desertion and all corporal punishment, and to establish maximum hours of work and minimum requirements for living spaces on board.

Meanwhile, New York philanthropists and charitable institutions endeavored to improve the seamen's life in port. Robert Randall, who had inherited a fortune from his father's privateering operations, left his entire estate for the establishment of what became Sailors Snug Harbor, in Staten Island, “for the purpose of maintaining and supporting aged, decrepit and worn-out sailors.” In 1900 it housed almost 1,000 retired seamen. A hospital known as the Seamen's Retreat opened on thirty-five acres of Clifton, in Staten Island. The Seamen's Exchange opened its building on Water Street, with a savings bank, reading room, clothing and outfitting store, bowling alley, lecture and meeting hall, and shipping
offices with listings of ships in need of crews. Waterfront boardinghouses began to be licensed and inspected. In truth, seamen had always enjoyed more sober options in New York than the lurid “sun-and-shadow” guidebooks of the nineteenth century would have had us believe. While the waterfront certainly had its share of vice dens, many sailors found decent boardinghouses in other parts of town, or boarded with their parents, or stayed with other sailors' families, or started families of their own.

Still, the Port of New York's reputation for debauching seamen lingered, as something perhaps too colorful to relinquish. The legend was given delicious representation in Josef von Sternberg's 1929
The Docks of New York.
This masterpiece of the silent cinema begins with documentary-like shots of the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge from a passing ship, the only footage actually shot on location in New York. Von Sternberg always preferred to re-create his stylized worlds on a studio set, where the lighting on faces and fishnets could be better controlled. The New York docks were given a soupy, fluid, moody atmosphere, along the lines of the title: “Night and fog met the stokers coming ashore.” A big galoot of a stoker,
Bill Roberts (played by George Bancroft), with only one night ashore, and looking for fun, sees a woman throw herself in the river. He takes another drag on his cigarette—the matter-of-fact pause is priceless—and tosses the butt, then dives in to rescue her. She, a chippy named Sadie (played by the touching Betty Compson), is alternately grateful and annoyed at her rescue. Faced with her despairing insistence that he should have let her die, he tells her to lighten up: “You left all that slush in the river, baby. All you need is a good time.” Her sage reply is, “I've had too many good times.” They repair to the waterfront saloon downstairs, the Sandbar, where seamen are fighting, getting tossed by bouncers, or dancing with prostitutes, while a player piano performs by itself, as mechanical as the pleasures available to the stuporous clientele. Bill impulsively decides to “marry” Sadie on the spot, sans license, and a mock ceremony occurs before the leering, cheering patrons. He assures the parson he'll take care of the license in the morning, though he has no intention of doing so. The next morning he leaves for his ship, or, as the film says, “gives her the air.” Sternberg's sympathies surround these fallen angels without moralistic judgment: they've been through it and they know the score. In the end, the reluctant gallant, Bill, has his moment of redemption, jumping overboard and swimming back to her. The film ends in night court, a fitting venue for any mariner passing through the treacherous New York port.