Drugged on the Waterfront, Shipped to Australia—and Back
J. W. Ellsworth vanished from Everett last September. His family gave him up for dead. His explanation: a shanghaied voyage aboard a lumber schooner.
Everett — J. W. Ellsworth, who disappeared from Everett last September and who had been given up for dead by his family, has returned home with the report that he was drugged on the Everett waterfront, shanghaied on board the lumber schooner Morande and forced to make the trip to Australia. He worked his way back to San Francisco.
“He was drugged on the Everett waterfront, shanghaied on board the lumber schooner Morande and forced to make the trip to Australia.”
Shanghaiing—kidnapping men to work aboard ships—was a notorious labor abuse on Pacific coast waterfronts, and Ellsworth's story shows how thin the line could be between a missing person and a forced laborer. Modern conversations about trafficking and labor exploitation still hinge on the same question: who gets to control a worker's mobility? Everett's waterfront is now a place of marinas and industry, but the old fear of disappearing through it still resonates.
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