The Shanghai Tunnels

In the waterfront saloons of nineteenth-century Portland, Oregon, a sailor who drank too much might wake up at sea.

That was the fear, anyway. The practice was called “shanghaiing,” after the Chinese port where many of these unwilling voyages supposedly ended. A man would be drinking in a bar near the docks. Someone would slip something into his whiskey. Or he’d step on a trapdoor in the floor and drop into a dark basement below. When he woke up, groggy and bruised, he’d find himself in the hold of a ship already sailing down the Columbia River toward the Pacific, signed on as a crew member for a voyage that might last years.

Portland, in its rough early years, was said to be one of the worst places on the West Coast for it.

And beneath the old neighborhood near the waterfront, now called Old Town Chinatown, there is a warren of brick-lined basements and passages that, according to legend, made it all possible.

The Crimps

In the second half of the nineteenth century, sailing ships came to Portland from all over the world to load grain, lumber and other goods. Sailors were in short supply. Life at sea was brutal, the pay was terrible, and many sailors jumped ship as soon as they reached port.

Ship captains needed crews, and they were willing to pay for them. Into that gap stepped men known as crimps: boardinghouse keepers, saloon owners and labor brokers who supplied sailors to ships for a fee, called “blood money.” Some crimps simply recruited sailors who wanted work. But others, according to the stories, would get men drunk, drug them, rob them, knock them out, and deliver them to ships against their will — sailors, loggers, farmhands, anyone who happened to be in the wrong place.

Portland’s most notorious crimps became legends. Jim Turk ran a sailors’ boardinghouse and was said to have even shanghaied his own son. Larry Sullivan, a former boxer, ran one of the toughest boardinghouses in town.

And then there was Joseph “Bunco” Kelly.

Bunco Kelly

Bunco Kelly was famous for the story he supposedly told about himself, and for the most famous shanghaiing tale in Portland history.

According to the legend, one night in 1893, Kelly was asked by a ship’s captain to supply about two dozen men for a voyage. Searching for bodies, he stumbled on a group of men in the basement of a mortuary, who had broken in thinking they had found a cellar full of liquor. What they had actually been drinking was embalming fluid. Many of them were dead or dying. Kelly, the story goes, loaded them all onto the ship anyway, telling the captain they were simply drunk. By the time the captain realized what had happened, the ship was at sea.

It’s a grimly funny story, and like many legends, no one has ever been able to prove it.

Kelly himself was later convicted of murder in an unrelated case and spent years in prison. While there, he wrote a memoir.

The Tunnels

Here’s where the story gets complicated.

Underneath Old Town Portland, there are real passages and basements. Many of the old buildings near the waterfront had basements connected to each other, or to the river, through openings and passageways. Some of these were used to move goods from the docks to warehouses and businesses — a practical way to avoid the muddy, crowded streets above.

According to the legend that has grown up around them since the 1970s, these basements and tunnels were the secret highways of the shanghaiing trade. Drugged men, the story goes, were dropped through trapdoors in saloon floors into the basements below, held in small cells, and then carried through the tunnels to the riverfront, where they were loaded onto waiting boats.

Tour guides show visitors small brick rooms said to have been holding cells, old shoes said to belong to shanghaied men, and trapdoors in the ceilings.

But many historians are deeply skeptical. They point out that there is little documentary evidence of a vast network of tunnels being used for shanghaiing. Most of the basement connections, they say, were for freight. Some of the so-called holding cells may have been storage rooms. Crimping was real, they agree — but it mostly happened in plain sight, in boardinghouses and saloons and through legal contracts, not in underground dungeons. The “Shanghai Tunnels,” they argue, are largely a modern legend, popularized by tour operators.

Defenders of the tunnel stories say that, by its nature, an illegal trade like this wouldn’t leave many records, and that oral histories passed down from old Portlanders support the legends.

Nina

As with so many places full of hidden history, the tunnels have their ghosts.

The most famous is a young woman named Nina. According to the story told on tours, she was a prostitute in Old Town around the turn of the twentieth century, working in a building known as the Merchant Hotel. She secretly began giving information to missionaries who were trying to shut down the brothels and the shanghaiing trade. When the crimps found out, the legend says, she was thrown down an elevator shaft to her death.

Visitors to the tunnels and the buildings above report the smell of perfume, a woman’s figure in a long dress, and the sound of footsteps. Some say they’ve been touched.

Other visitors report hearing men groaning and voices in the dark, the clink of chains, and the feeling of being watched. Some describe seeing shadowy figures moving through the passages, or a man in old-fashioned clothes who vanishes around a corner.

The End of Shanghaiing

Whatever the truth about the tunnels, the practice of shanghaiing faded in the early twentieth century, as steamships replaced sailing vessels and needed smaller, more skilled crews. The Seamen’s Act of 1915 gave sailors new legal protections and made it much harder to force anyone into service.

The old waterfront neighborhood declined. Many of the old buildings were torn down. The basements were sealed, filled in or forgotten, until tour operators and history enthusiasts began rediscovering them decades later.

Where Legend Meets History

I’ve included the Shanghai Tunnels in this book because they’re a good example of something that happens all the time with dark history: a real practice — and crimping and shanghaiing were very real, and very cruel — becomes wrapped in an irresistible legend. The legend is more dramatic than the truth: secret trapdoors, underground dungeons, drugged men carried through tunnels in the dark.

Maybe some of it happened exactly as the tour guides say. Maybe most of it didn’t. But the fear behind it was real. Men really did go to sea against their will, and some of them never came home. And if you go down into those cold brick basements beneath Old Town Portland, it’s not hard to imagine them there.