What is a crimp and were my ancestors involved in crimping?

I'm still figuring this one out.

"Crimping" and "crimp" are words that cover a wide range of activity and a lot of different kinds of people doing these activities. In the broadest possible definition, a crimp was someone who enabled or convinced sailors to desert the ship they had entered port with in order to work on another ship leaving port. In return, the crimp got a portion of the advance pay of every seaman he delivered to a ship needing crew members. If the market was really tight, the sailing master of a ship particularly desperate for crew members might even offer an additional payment over and above that. In the 19th century, this was illegal. It was also very lucrative.

It was also widely assumed that crimps exploited seamen to the detriment of said seamen. Nobody thought that crimps were honest dealers. Some people who were clearly breaking the laws against crimping seem to have convinced themselves that there were in fact proving a fair deal and some convinced themselves that they weren't really crimps because they were acting, in their view, honestly or that crimping was long-established tradition that governments had no right to prevent. Finally, there were people whose income was largely derived from crimping but because they were involved at arm's length they weren't actually crimps.

In any case, the illegal trade involved persuasion. Any time we uses words like "persuade" or "convince" we are describing activities that entail a certain amount of manipulation. If two people sit down and discuss something, they both come to the table willing to listen to what the other is willing to say. If, however, I sit down to "discuss" my car with my friend while intending to  "convince" him to buy said car something important has changed. I'm not really as open when I have an objective in mind. That manipulation exists in human relationships is not a bad thing. If a man or woman wants sex, they might try to convince their spouse to join them. Convincing can be done fairly or unfairly.

Because crimping was illegal, it didn't really matter from a legal point of view whether the person attempting to convince seamen to desert one ship to serve another was being honest and straightforward in their dealings with their clients. As a result, crimps tended to get lumped together no matter what their methods and the range of methods involved ran from illegal but cooperative to despicable.

Because crimping was illegal, the people who did it tended to keep it a secret. Someone running a sailors' boarding house in 19th century Saint John was almost certainly directly or indirectly involved in crimping but that "almost certainly" matters. In some cases, where a person is caught re-handed and convicted in a court of law, for example, we might comfortably conclude this person was a crimp. But there were very few of these in Sailortown. All we can say for certain is that there was a lot of crimping going on and that most crimps got away with it. We can never say for certain whether certain people did or didn't do it.

Finally, there is the question of methods. A crimp could persuade his clients in an honest and straightforward fashion. He might also misrepresent the facts. He could sweeten the deal or cloud a seaman's judgment by making alcohol or sex available to him. Because a crimp could only collect payment for seamen he actually delivered to a ship, some crimps would go so far as to lock seamen up so they couldn't seek other alternatives. In the most extreme cases, a crimp might 'convince" sailors to desert a ship by simply kidnapping them*.

And then there are the enablers profiting at arm's length. A boarding house keeper might never engage in crimping directly but be well aware that it goes on and that some deals were worked through his or her establishment.  Going a little further into the water, a boarding house keeper could work out a deal whereby crimps paid them a kickback for every "client" they housed. Going right into the deep end, a a keeper might, in fact, make much more money from these deals than they could make simply by running an honest boarding house. Finally, we could have an arrangement where the boarding house owner doesn't think of himself as a crimp but the crimps whose clients stay with him are effectively working for the boarding house owner. In the deeper water, the boarding house owner might convince himself that he isn't himself a crimp even though crimping is the source of most of his income.

At this point, I suspect that my great-great grandfather James Costigan (born Bantry, Ireland 1822, died Saint John, New Brunswick 1886) was a crimp. I'm a little less certain that his son, also named Dennis Costigan (sometimes spelled "Denis", born 1854, Ireland, died 1901 Saint John, New Brunswick ) was also a crimp. As of today, I can't entirely discount the possibility that both men were innocent. It may be impossible to prove it either way. What I can be certain of is that they saw a lot of the rough side of life living and working in Sailortown. I can also be certain that the two men did rather well in life, far too well to be easily explained by honest employment. Finally, I can say for certain that when the age of sail came to an end and crimping became much less profitable, my great-grandfather Costigan's fortunes declined precipitously and he went from being a playboy to severe poverty dying penniless in the Turnbull Home for Incurables.


* The most notorious practitioners of this were British naval officers. They got away with it because the government passed Impressment  laws not only exempted them from punishment but actually authorized them to do this. Besides government hypocrisy, this tells us something of the history of crimping. It was one of those activities—examples run from slavery to sexual harassment—that was once common and only slowly came to be recognized as immoral and deserving to be punished by law. Impressment by the British navy stopped in 1814. Attitudes that crimping was justified might have lingered well into the 19th century.