How 'the crimps' took over Saint John's sailing labour force

Out to make a buck, the crimps would try to lure sailors to boarding houses

The seafaring life has always been a major part of Saint John and throughout history has proven to reveal some unsavory characters.

This includes the crimps, a group of men who would seek to recruit sailors in the port city during the 19th century, one way or another.

“Sailors were relentlessly pursued by [the crimps] whose tidy profits depended on the sailors spending their wages and advances and joining the vessels chosen,” wrote historian Judith Fingard in her book Jack in Port: Sailortowns of Eastern Canada.

“When the sailor tried to protest or escape… he was flouting a deeply entrenched structure of authority, which enjoyed what amounted to the force of law in the local community.”

At the most basic level, crimping was the act of recruiting merchant sailors to work on ships.

But there’s a whole lot of nuance behind that definition.

When sailors signed up to a voyage they signed “articles,” essentially a contract to stay working with that ship until the journey is complete.

A crimp essentially tried to get that sailor to break that contract and desert.

James Upham, a historian, said crimps would try to lure sailors into boarding houses with the promise of good food, drink and better wages.

“For the sailor who is looking at the prospect of working for another month… you'd almost be crazy to say no,” said Upham.

Then, without a crew to man their ships, desperate captains would be approached by the crimps and ultimately extorted to hire the crew back at higher prices, he said.

But maritime historian Faye Kert said crimps were not sailors' friends.

“They might act friendly in the saloon or in the bar… but in the end, I mean the sailor loses every time and either the boarding house or the crimp himself makes the money,” said Kert.

It also wasn't uncommon for crimps to resort to intimidation tactics to find sailors.

“When enticement or force was deemed necessary, the crimps of Saint John operated through gangs and protected themselves by employing runners to do the dirty work,” wrote Fingard.

“In 1859 the Reliance was boarded by some fifteen to twenty crimps who attempted to remove the seamen by force.”

While crimping was a common occurrence in port cities, it appeared to be especially common in Saint John.

In fact, the crimpers went so far as to organize.

“They actually formed an association called the Boarding House Owners Association and they got politically active and they actually got quite wealthy,” said Upham

An 1846 Times of London article outlined the story of Henry Serjeant, a ships master who had firsthand knowledge of the Saint John crimping system.

Serjeant said that as soon as a ship would dock in port, crimps would descend on the crew, convince them to leave, and send them “up the country.”

The captain would then have to testify in front of the Custom House authorities that “he had, to the best of his power, endeavoured to recover his crew.”

Warrants against the crewmembers would be written up, but as the constables were “in league with the Crimps” nothing would happen.

Then the crimps would return, finding a captain desperate and anxious to get on his way, and offer the crew up for “£4 5s. to £4 10s. per month.”

In modern Canadian dollars this works out to $880 a month, the going rate for ordinary seamen was $342.

The crew isn’t sent to the ship until the ship has already been towed out of the harbour.

The captain has no chance to talk with the crimp or see the crew beforehand, which did not work out well in this case.

“As soon as the voyage commences, the master finds he has been completely taken in,” said the Times article.

“It turns out that his crew, for the most part, consists of men who have only had one voyage even, or are mere emigrants dressed up in sailors’ clothes.”

Crimping common in many N.B. ports

It wasn’t just Saint John where crimping was a major issue.

The ports in Newcastle and Chatham, now Miramichi, also had their own run-ins with the crimps.

“A great deal of inconvenience is caused to the shipping and lumbering interests by the operations of the crimps,” said a 1883 Times and Transcript article.

“[Saint John] and Chatham criminals of this class seem to be in league… Many ships that arrive in the Miramichi lose every man they have before the mast, and all lose part of their crews.”

Halifax also wasn’t immune to the lure of the crimps, there was even a street seemingly dedicated to the practice.

“It was called Knock-em-down Row. It was all grog shops and bordellos,” said Kert.

“That's where your crimps would work. They'd see who was pretty impaired leaving that bar and get hold of them between that bar and the next.”

While the boarding house keepers and crimps did enjoy a level of political influence in Saint John, they weren’t universally beloved.

Of course, the captains and ship owners were not fans, but moral reformers of the age were also critics of the crimps.

“The fact that a man who makes the contract stands by that contract is a very strong one in the 19th century,” said Valerie Burton, a maritime historian and retired chair of the Maritime Studies Research Unit at Memorial University.

“Crimps… are the people who are creating the incentives for guys to break their contract."

Moral reformers led to the creation of sailors' homes in the city as early as the 1850s, run with an eye towards temperance and Christian morality. This was not popular among the sailors.

“The sailor was likely to feel totally alienated from the reformer and his sailors' home,” wrote Fingard.

“Admittedly, the sailors' 'friends'… were not likely to assault or cheat [the sailor,] but their primary interest was to turn him into something he was not: a sober, serious, well-behaved man.”

In the end it wasn’t the sailors' homes that ended the crimps, it was the advent of steam ships.

“Seamen working on steamers… were only briefly in port and needed far fewer facilities than they had done as sailors,” wrote Fingard.

The modern view of crimping, and those who partook in it, is complex according to Burton.

She said some people have compared crimps to a proto-labour broker or shop steward.

But in the end, these crimps were looking to profit off the sailors and would seek to get them before they’d been paid, which could be viewed as a form of entrapment.

“You can play it both ways; a prototype labour broker who is actually raising wages and getting better deals with seafarers, or an interloper on the market who is taking a large slice of the seafarers wages,” said Burton.

Jordan Gill is a reporter based in Fredericton, New Brunswick.