Slavery at Sea

On the afternoon of June 11, 1895, the four-masted barkentine Arago was approaching the bar at the mouth of the Columbia River. Sailors reefed the ship’s foresails while others secured a hawser that had been cast across from the tugboat that was idling nearby. Once the heavy line was aboard, the tugboat crew engaged their vessel’s propeller, and, with black coal smoke boiling from the tug’s stubby stack, towed the 176-foot barkentine upriver to the waterfront mill in Knappton, Washington. Captain Frank Perry and his crew intended to spend the rest of June in Knappton, stacking freshly sawn lumber in Arago’s holds. The freight was headed for Valparaiso, Chile, 7,000 miles south. These voyages demanded sturdy vessels and happy crews to battle the ferocious winds, savage weather, and a reef-studded shore that ate ships. Arago’s crew was far from happy.

That dissatisfaction would precipitate a constitutional crisis and force Americans to reconsider maritime laws that limited a seaman’s rights. Although the states had ratified the 13th Amendment, ending slavery, sailors still were laboring under U.S. laws adopted from ancient British precedent that shackled seamen to their ships. When four sailors from Arago tried to desert, they were arrested, jailed, and ultimately returned to their ship, whereupon they were charged with desertion and mutiny. The case, which went t0 the U.S. Supreme Court, showed that not all workers in the United States had escaped the bonds of indentured servitude. Legislators, responding to public outrage and effective pressure from union leader Andrew Furuseth, crafted new laws to address this inequity, freeing sailors from their legal chains.

 the Simpson Lumber Mill in Knappton, five miles across the river from Astoria, Oregon. Night arrived. As an ebb tide chuckled through the mill