Travel: Portland—City of Kidnappers

A 1908 Portland headline reports the promise of a crackdown.

I followed my guide through a cluster of interconnected basements beneath the yuppie-friendly precincts of downtown Portland, Oregon, while he spun yarns of kidnapping rings that would snatch men out of saloons and bordellos, drug them, and sell them to ship captains. At first I was skeptical.

Michael Jones, my affable guide, freely admits that there’s still a lot we don’t know about the history of shanghaiing in Portland. “I’m always probing, always searching. Nothing is nailed down for me.” He also admits that the tours are meant as entertainment. But when I bullied him about his sources, I discovered I had underestimated how much of the tour is based on fact.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines shanghai as “to drug or otherwise render insensible, and ship on board a vessel wanting hands” and cites an 1871 New York Tribune article for the first published use. I found documented cases of shanghaiing on the West Coast, including Jack Black’s 1926 memoir, You Can’t Win, and a printed sermon from 1855 in which the minister warned, “Hence to get ‘crews’ for Shanghae . . . [captains] depended, almost exclusively, on drugging the men.”

Apparently the practice was not uncommon in rough West Coast port cities like San Francisco and Portland. In 1858, when Hong Kong was ceded to the British and free trade across the Pacific commenced, there was a constant demand for crews as well as a steady supply of able-bodied men on shore leave crowding bars, gambling hideouts, opium dens, and whorehouses. Drunken men would be dropped into the basement of one of these places through a trapdoor, scooped up by a waiting shanghaier, and kept in cages until they were dragged through tunnels that connected the buildings and led to the wharves.

It is hard to pin down how extensive this practice was. Based on a study by a private religious group in the 1880s, Jones estimates that 1,500 men a year were kidnapped by the end of World War I. He has uncovered the remnants of trapdoors as well as buzzers that the saloon owners pressed to warn the shanghaiers that bodies were coming down. The kidnappers would administer knock-out drops to keep the men unconscious until they were out at sea. Jones recently uncovered unlabeled bottles of liquid in the underground, and officers from the Portland Police lab have volunteered to analyze the contents.

Jones, who grew up in Portland, is a talented storyteller but also a zealous and tenacious researcher. The tours start at Hobo’s Restaurant, a comfortable neighborhood bar in Old Town known for its generous steaks. Jones gathers his audience in the courtyard and tells how he first got interested in the underground. As a child he often visited a semi-itinerant uncle who lived hopscotching from hotel to hotel, and he wandered the lobbies of the hotels listening to the old-timers’ stories. One grizzled old sea captain told him, “If you want to know the real story of Portland you have to go underground,” and sent Jones down a tunnel at a construction site with a set of matches. “A whole new world opened up—a world of beautiful brick and stone work but also of darkness.”

The underground was ostensibly built to make it easier to unload cargo from the wharves and bring it to local businesses. But it quickly gained another purpose—the movement of illicit goods, including drugs, alcohol, and human beings.

For Jones, unearthing and restoring the underground has been a labor of love. He wanted to document “the architecture, history, folklore, mythology, and artifacts.” He adds, “If you ignore the folklore you miss the boat.” In 1979 he founded Cascade Geographic Society, an educational and preservation organization. As word spread that he was exploring the spaces under the city, people started asking to see what was down there. Local businesses, he said, were surprisingly cooperative, allowing him to poke around in their basements. As interest grew he decided to start tours. On them people would approach him claiming to have an ancestor who had been shanghaied. He was even able to interview several men who had themselves been kidnapped.

Crouched almost double, bobbing between low-hanging water pipes and aided by a dim flashlight, I saw bars set into the masonry of a foundation wall. Peering through the bars I could make out the walls of a cramped holding cell. Next to me was a pile of cork-bottomed shoes Jones and his team had uncovered. After the men were kidnapped, their shoes were removed and glass was spread around on the floor to make escape even more difficult.

What the underground lacks in artifacts, Jones makes up for with his rich storytelling. For instance there’s the one about a couple of sailors on shore leave who noticed an open trapdoor near the Snug Harbor Saloon. At the bottom of the ladder were barrels of whiskey, and they drank the night away, inviting passersby down for a drink. Eventually the revelers passed out. Joseph “Bunko” Kelly, one of Portland’s most successful shanghaiers, spotted the men and noticed that they weren’t breathing. They celebrants had mistaken embalming fluid from a nearby morgue for whiskey. Kelly, never one to pass up a buck, sold the corpses.

That one sounds like pure folklore, but it is fact that thousands of people were seized and sold to ship captains. “This was human abuse at its worst,” Jones tells the audience on his tours. “Many people believe that the underground is haunted, and I do too—but I believe it is haunted by its past.” He says he has dedicated himself to exorcizing the underground of some of its demons.

Tours cost $12 and primarily take place on Fridays and Saturdays. For more information contact the Cascade Geographic Society at (503) 622-4798 or visit http://www.shanghaitunnels.info.

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.