Investigations by the Office of Naval Intelligence revealed that Captain Worley was born Johan Frederick Wichmann in Sandstedt, Hanover, Germany in 1862 (the official Navy Register lists his date of birth as 11 December 1865), and that he had entered America by jumping ship in San Francisco in 1878. By 1898, he had changed his name to Worley (after a seaman friend), and owned and operated a saloon in San Francisco's Barbary Coast. He also got help from brothers, whom he had convinced to emigrate. During this time, he had qualified for the position of ship's master, and had commanded several civilian merchant ships, picking up and delivering cargo (both legal and illegal; some accounts say opium) from the Far East to San Francisco. Unfortunately, the crews of these ships reported that Worley suffered from a personality allegedly akin to that sometimes ascribed to 's captain William Bligh, with the crew often being brutalized by Worley for trivial things. Worley was commissioned as a lieutenant commander in the Naval Auxiliary Reserve on 21 February 1917.