Sold to the Highest Captain: Seattle’s Sailor Boarding-House Scandal

The story told in yesterday’s Post-Intelligencer of the outrages inflicted upon merchant seamen is hardly credible. Yet there is undoubtedly enough truth in it to call for immediate investigation and prompt action. We do not put much faith in the stories of sailors’ boarding-house keepers, and it is not well to trust too implicitly to their narratives. But if it be true that men are beaten as described, our courts should be prompt to protect them. It will be time enough to inquire afterward into the merits of the controversy.

Unfortunately the whole subject is surrounded by difficulty. The men engaged in the business of shipping seamen in Seattle may be respectable enough fellows, but the stories brought from other places have created a prejudice against their calling. Men have no doubt been lured into their houses, coaxed into running up bills, more or less extortionate, and then been sold practically to captains for the amount of their board. Without money, unable to follow any other calling, it frequently happens that the sailor is only too glad to submit to the outrage and go aboard the first ship which offers him employment.

This is, it appears from the narrative, sometimes followed by brutal treatment at the hands of those whose ostensible object is to promote trade unionism, but whose methods would disgrace any organization. An organizer has the right to persuade men to do what he wants them to do; and they must determine for themselves whether they will be persuaded or not, but he must be given to understand that persuasion is his only weapon. When he makes threats or uses violence, he is no longer exercising his own rights, but is interfering with the rights of others; and then he is a law-breaker.

Sailor Jack! None more than the sailor need the moral support of organization to save him from imposition and oppression, but if he won’t have that protection it is his right royal American privilege to refuse it.

Brutal violence is no less reprehensible because it is exercised by self-constituted representatives, and it is an offense to be as severely reprobated whether it be the act of a czar on a slave or that of an autocrat of the forecastle on another American who happens to differ with him.