I was reading on Wikipedia about shanghaiing (mostly to figure out the spelling) and came across this sentence in the section "Ending the practice":
"The sinking of the RMS Titanic, followed by onset of World War I (which made the high seas a much more dangerous place due to the threat of submarine attack) provided the final impetus to stamp out the practice. "
I understand the WW1 part, that use of steam boats changed the labour needs and that some laws were changed/created. But how did the sinking of Titanic play a role?
It's not like it's the first ship to sink in the history of shanghaiing. Was it "just" the sheer scale of the catastrophe? Did shanghiied and possibly unqualified crew play a role in the accident?
I wrote about shanghaiing in an earlier response that may be of some interest, and which can be read here.
This incorporated a brief discussion of the final days of the practice. The main driver of change was in fact the unionisation of seamen, which for the first time created groups with sufficient interest in individual sailors, and sufficient financial resources, to press for changes to the laws, and more effective implementation of existing laws.
I can just about imagine that the Titanic might be associated with all this because her loss, too, led to a tightening up of maritime regulations. But there was no direct link whatsoever, and it's ridiculous to suggest that there was any immediate relationship between the ship's encounter with an iceberg and the ending of shanghaiing, or that the dangers of World War I had any actual impact on the practice either:
Shanghaiing continued to flourish until the very early 20th century, in part because, as Davidson points out, "as members of a migratory class unable to vote for protective legislation, sailors formed a classic lost community in a democracy." It took organisation and unionisation to force the legislative changes that outlawed crimping and made shanghaiing a thing of the past. The Dingley Act (1884), a Federal law that prohibited payment of advance wages by masters to crimps, was one significant blow to the shanghaiing system, as was the formation of the Seaman's Union in 1885 and the agitation that led to the Maguire Act (1885) and the outlawing of the crimps' other major stand-by, the attachment of sailors' clothing. This was followed by the White Act (1898), which limited the amount a sailor could be required to pay to any "original creditor".
Between them, these three acts – and the end of the sailing ship era, which had required a large number of semi-skilled crewmen used largely as muscle – pretty much finished off the crimps of San Francisco – [though] that does not mean that sailors did not continue to risk shanghaiing elsewhere in the world for many years to come."
I should add that "attachment," as referred to above, was a way of getting around laws that prevented the payment of advances on sailors' wages to third parties. The crimp would supply the man he was procuring with extra items of clothing, uniform or equipment that were supposedly required to secure the berth, so he could claim the payment he received from the master was for those, rather than for the man himself. Of course, the quality of the equipment supplied was almost always low, and the payment received for them invariably incredibly high.