Work aboard merchant, whaling and naval ships was so incredibly harsh that the ranks of all these saw heavy desertion and the ranks of naval sailors were often filled through the abduction of men and boys by press gangs. However, for a penniless slave to a drunken father’s debts, the brutal conditions of the life at sea in the Age of Sail offered freedom of a sort. Even as men seeking self-definition like William’s contemporary Herman Melville, or striking out forlornly from a failed farm or business, or adventurous youth, like James Cooke, disaffected by the confinement of apprenticeships, young men and even boys often sought to find themselves, and forge themselves into a character to be reckoned with by the rough company of sailors and their usually brutal masters. Life at sea was tyranny afloat and many were the sailor, having fled slavery of one kind or another, who found the dehumanizing brutality of the life under a petty tyrant unbearable and jumped ship. Like Melville, William Garrison would ship on merchants, whalers and naval ships in a bid to find a life beyond the circumscribed and inauthentic life of a menial man in an industrializing world. Entire books have been written describing Melville’s Moby Dick as a critical metaphor for the evils of civilization, reflected in microcosm by the very escape hatch both Melville and Garrison sought—the ships of the whaling and military fleets.

In 1840, the very year that Melville first shipped out from New England, Garrison, age 16, shipped as a hand on a coastal schooner out of New Jersey or Philadelphia. It is not known how many years he spent on whaling vessels, but at least two and most likely four is a fair bet.

It appears that Garrison enlisted in the U.S. Navy at the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846. Most likely in 1847, while serving on a frigate blockading Mexican ports on the California Coast, a lieutenant, who was the son of a Commodore, struck a savage blow with his sword [probably using it as a scabbarded “club” or with the back spine of the blade] to one of Garrison’s fellow sailors. Garrison then struck the officer on the back of the neck, knocking him out. None of the crew would rat Garrison out. However, he was suspected of having done it and denied shore leave. Then, at San Francisco, soon after the city fell to U.S. forces, William Garrison “jumped ship,” for which the penalty was death by hanging.

From 1848 through [perhaps] 1857, William Garrison served aboard merchant ships and possibly as a vigilante protecting free-trappers, traders and mountain men from the desperados that murdered and robbed in the California hills and mountains and would become a plague on prospectors and immigrants in the years to come. Garrison would change his name to avoid capture and execution by the Navy. So it is unlikely that he immediately shipped out on a merchant man, and would have certainly waited for the close of military operations against Mexican forces and the retirement of naval units from the area, before shipping out on a merchant vessel, as the captains of naval vessels customarily inspected merchant vessels for deserters and would routinely pull alongside of merchant vessels and “impress” merchant sailors into service whenever shorthanded.

In any event, after a decade of tramping around California and shipping on merchant vessels under an alias from age 23 to 33, William Garrison, now known for a decade as John Johnston, would make his way over the Sierra Nevada Mountains and along the Rocky Mountains, to the Montana Goldfields where he would carve a bloody name for himself and eventually become known by the moniker “Liver-Eating” Johnston.