The Shanghai and the Deserter
A soldier stationed at Fort Lawton claims a booze-fueled night in San Francisco ended in a forced voyage to Australia.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Thomas Hughes, of the Twenty-fifth Battery, Field Artillery, U.S.A., now in the guard house at Fort Lawton, hopes to escape punishment for desertion with a hard luck story that would make raw material for a first-class novel. He claims that he was on the sick list in the Presidio hospital at San Francisco last year, causing his pay to accumulate. As soon as he was able to get into the street and draw his pay, he started to disburse the money on the Barbary Coast. He says he was so successful that when he recovered from the effects of his celebration he found himself on board an English 'windjammer' bound for Sydney, Australia. He realized the situation at once, and knowing something of the methods of shanghai artists, decided that the best thing for him to do was to submit gracefully. After the ship's return to the American coast, he was landed at Aberdeen. Mr. Hughes hied him to Seattle and surrendered to the United States recruiting officer. He will be taken under guard to Vancouver Barracks to relate his story, accompanied by Eddie Fredericks, a deserter from Company L, Seventeenth Infantry, who was arrested by Deputy Sheriff Davis at Tacoma.
“knowing something of the methods of shanghai artists, decided that the best thing for him to do was to submit gracefully.”
The 'Shanghai' culture of West Coast ports was a brutal reality of maritime labor in the early 20th century. While deserters were often treated harshly, Hughes's plea highlights the vulnerability of soldiers and sailors to kidnapping in the lawless atmosphere of the era's port cities.
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