It
also had other minor provisions for the benefit of the sailors. In
Parliament that night, it was thought that Plimsoll's wild conduct
had destroyed his reputation as a sane man and had ruined the
chances of ever passing his bill, but outside of Parliament the
effect was just the reverse. The public was aroused to a full
understanding of the essential merits of his bill and the
government was forced to put it on the calendar and carry it
through that session in its substantial features, and the
following year (1876) a more complete and perfected act covering
the same points was passed.
In the United States, a most interesting character, Andrew
Furuseth, a Norwegian, himself a sailor, and without much
education but a man of wonderful force, has succeeded, largely by
the aid of labor unions, in forcing through Congress bills by
which no American seaman can any longer be forced against his will
into this servitude nor any foreign seaman on domestic voyages.
Another evil tending to degrade and enslave the sailor was the
allowance made by law of three months' advance wages on beginning
a voyage. This apparently harmless and, to the credulous and
inexperienced legislator, beneficial provision gave a chance to
the sailors' boarding-house keeper and runner, or ``crimp,'' as he
or she is called, to ``shanghai'' seamen and put them aboard drunk
or drugged, with little or no clothing but what they had on their
backs and rob them of this advance money.
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