The Gamblers Who Took the Wrong Ship
Two Seattle card sharps tried to fleece an English sea captain. He had them shanghaied instead.
The sporting fraternity of this city are deserving of heartfelt sympathy in their recent sad loss of their proudest and most promising card sharps, who are now on a voyage with the laudable intention of skinning a treacherous English sea captain and are, much against their will, enjoying the voyage to California and Peru before the mast. It must be a painful thought to the friends of the absent ones that the old dog very probably spends his leisure moments in giving his guests the rope's end, or, changing the programme, puts them through the skinning process with the cat-o'-nine-tails.
A story is related of a green farmer's boy who visited the city for the first time and was shanghaied and kept for two years at sea. When he got back to land his education on board ship had been of such a nature that he was one of the cleverest confidence workers in the country.
But what is worrying the Seattle sports just now is what will be the effect of the voyage on their two absent brothers. The suggestion that, unlike the farmer's boy, they will come back honest men and able-bodied seamen is a too utterly terrible fate for them to peacefully contemplate.
“The suggestion that, unlike the farmer's boy, they will come back honest men and able-bodied seamen is a too utterly terrible fate for them to peacefully contemplate.”
Shanghaiing was not a harmless tall tale: waterfront labor agents and crimps routinely drugged or coerced men onto ships. The humor here is aimed at two con men who met a bigger con, but it also records how casually Seattle's vice economy could turn into forced labor.
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