Sagafilm

Shanghaiing Days

The extraordinary documentary tells us, for the very first time, the stories of the men who woke up with a bad hang-over on a fishing boat miles away from home, and had signed their life away for another drink.

You know you've been shanghaiied when you awake in your suit with a bad hang-over on a fishing boat miles away from home. Trying to piece together fragments from the night before you remember something about signing your life away for another drink, thinking it a good idea at the time. 
Although this form of kidnapping was outlawed and punished in most ports at the beginning of the 20th century, Shangaiing was still happening in Iceland until the 1970's. In this extraordinary documentary we hear, for the first time, the stories of the men who woke up in these circumstances.  The stories of those who deceived them and the officials who helped make it happen.

Category: Documentary. In Pre-Production
Format: DV
Duration: 52 min.
Production Date: January 2006
Co-Producer: SVT Sweden
Director: Magnús Viðar Sigurðsson
Scriptwriter: Margrét Jónasdóttir
Produced by: Margrét Jónasdóttir/Magnús Viðar Sigurðsson 

Synopsis 
"I was married with two children and had a farm in Iceland. One day I went to Reykjavik to buy some things for the farm. I came home twenty years later.
I met some guys and went to a bar. I woke up aboard a fishing vessel. When I came ashore two months later, the first thing I did was to go to the bar again. I was shanghaiied again. I was on another trip for three months. There was no turning back."

Shanghaiing was outlawed in 1904 in the USA when authorities passed laws against it, putting an end to a game that had been going on for centuries. From then on gentlemen of fortune could drink, gamble, and play with prostitutes all they pleased without the risk of being made to serve on sloppy ships under devious mates and masters.

But in Iceland, no one had heard about such a law in the 1960s.
In close co-operation with the local police and the trawler owners, man-hunting took place after dark in Reykjavik. A few drinks at a bar could end up aboard a fishing trawler steaming for the coast of Greenland, on a trip that lasted three months. Some of the crew- members were still in their suits and tie when they woke up with a hammering headache, a gutting knife thrust up their noses and told to get the hell to work.  

There was no way out. This was slavery and ahead was a long shift.

"We had no other means of keeping the ships running" said a skipper who was renowned for his head-hunting skills. "I never slept when we came ashore- it was a damn headache trying to put the crew together, so this was what we did. A few hours before the ship was to depart, about 25 men showed up. I needed 30." The remaining five could come from anywhere. A phone call to the local police station was easiest. All the information the skipper needed was who had been taken the night before for being drunk and disorderly in public.  When the police-station opened, the mate was there with a bottle in his hand. 
Street bums and drunkards with a shaking hand needed their drink and went along.

If the police could not fill the empty spaces, the mate raided houses that were known party places. There, anyone would do.  Passed out on a couch or  someone half-drunk in need of more alcohol. The mate did not ask for names or occupation. He took what he could get. 

No one was safe.  Drunkards or decent citizens. The documentary Shanghaiing days is the logbook of these men and a memory of days that are not so long gone.

Nothing has ever been documented about the Shanghaiing days of Reykjavik before. For some drunkards it opened up the opportunity to straighten themselves out. Very few took it. They jumped ship as soon as they could, went back to the gutter and were shanghaiied again. As for the respectable citizens, no one ever pressed charges against skippers or trawler owners.
Why? The shame and the city gossip were enough and this had been a lesson to learn.

This does not happen anymore. It is a thing of the past and that is why some of these men have decided to break the silence and tell us their stories. 

Visuals 
The documentary will be carried forward by a narrator and interviews with men who were shanghaiied, with skippers who shanghaiied them, local police officers that acted as agents between the two.
The main archive footage will be old footage from the trawling days, supported by new footage, shot at sea, to recreate, in black and white, some of the scenes from the Shanghaiing days.