Issuing rum to sailors became a standard practice and it was pretty strong stuff doled out at a half-pint per man, not to be watered down to “grog” in a three to one mix until 1740, when it was becoming obvious that drunkenness was reducing the effectiveness of the military. Rum was part of the trade going to Louisbourg and it found its way to the Acadians in various parts of the province. Halifax, however, became the city that floateda on rum. New Englanders who were in the liquor importing business found it a very receptive and thirsty port. To lure settlers, the English were offering an allowance of nearly four gallons per person per year. As if that wasn’t enough, the sale of rum became big business in the growing city. A man named George Hick gave up blacksmithing to sell it by the quart. He boasted, “I sell rum by the quart and smaller quantities. I buy it at 3s. [shillings] a gallon, and lays out two guineas a week in it, by which I get fast money.” Mr. Hick would be followed by a legion of liquor vendors, legal and otherwise, who would profit from rum in Nova Scotia. '
It was Joshua Mauger, the “Agent Victualler” for the navy, who made the biggest killing, founding his own Halifax distillery in 1751. Some believe he became so wealthy and powerful that the first legislative council here was made up of men he hand-picked. Despite his government contract, he brewed with smuggled molasses, trading with French and Dutch islands alike.
Since Halifax became a warehouse for supplies during the American Revolution, rum again allowed some entrepreneurs from this tipsy city to profit heartily from the trade. During the years of immigration that followed, rum was a part of everyday commerce and seen as a reward for hard work. Licensed merchants and tavern keepers sold it in pints or quarts in black glass bottles or in the economy-size three-gallon stone jug. Five- or ten-gallon kegs could be had at a favourable discount. In a nineteenth-century Halifax tavern you could still buy a cheap “gill” (quarter pint!) from the keg on the bar or have your rum in a punch, a flip (a hot drink) or “folded” into a spruce beer. Gin and brandy were available but much more expensive. Beer just wasn’t as popular as rum and there was still that problem of it freezing on inhospitable Victorian winter nights.
A working day for many labourers involved a rum break at eleven a.m. and one at four p.m. It was sometimes a factor in labour negotiations. Joseph Salter, for example, was willing to give his men a shorter work day if they promised to stay sober on the job of building his wharf. For others, it was considered to be of great value to the maintenance of one’s health.
Despite the so-called therapeutic effects, drinking rum produced plenty of family abuse, brawls and even street riots brought on by drunkenness or arguments over the quality of rum. The backlash to all this Nova Scotian alcohol gave birth to the temperance movement, with societies popping up all over the region by the middle of the nineteenth century. “The demon rum” was now given a very bad reputation by well-meaning religious men and a growing force of women who wanted an all-out prohibition. Battle lines were drawn between the “wet” and the “dry.” Tales were told of the destruction – including spontaneous self-combustion – of those who drank too much. For those who converted, oaths like the following could be heard in the jail cells:
If ever I gain my liberty
that enemy will I shun
Street walking and bad company,
and likewise drinking rum.
Booze Wars and Big Money
Temperance societies proved to be a valuable springboard for all manner of social reform and helped women to gain some political power. Prohibition-type legislation came and went, including a province-wide act after the aFirst World War that could not successfully curtail the great tradition, but stayed on the books all the way until 1929.
During those dark (or enlightened, if you wish) days of prohibition, liquor was supposedly available “for medical purposes” only. People bearing alochol were occasionally arrested, but the law did little to interfere with the most profitable of the bootleggers and the smugglers.
The big profits, however, were to be had from engaging in the smuggling of liquor into the U.S. In 1920, the Americans saw the passage of the Volstead Act calling for total prohibition. As another rum historian, D.A. Walker, asserts, “An era of unprecedented organized crime began and millions of usually law-abiding citizens became criminals.” New supply avenues would open up to accommodate the illegal cargo and one of the main sources would be the French island of St. Pierre. Nova Scotians would be among the primary players in this smuggling racket, initially hauling booze in fishing schooners from England and Europe to the U.S. and later opening up the supply route from St. Pierre to various East Coast destinations.
Along the South Shore, fish prices had been dropping. The same quintal of cod that brought $13.62 in 1918 was fetching only $6.25 by 1927. The number of vessels actively fishing dropped in ports like Lunenburg as it became less profitable to fish and harder to even make a meagre living. The rum-running business came at a good time for South Shore fishermen who were being squeezed out of a livelihood by the slump in the fish market.
The schooners which started up the rum-running trade proved too slow eventually for the U.S. Coast Guard as it geared up for an all-out war using former naval destroyers to track and nab Bluenose smugglers. The new American ships proved to be a challenge for Nova Scotian rum-runners, but the local boat builders were ready to meet the test. The first U.S. destroyer to get involved in the war on booze, the Henley, went into service in 1924 and a fleet of twenty-four more would be commissioned, including former sub-chasers. The first of the new boats designed as rum-runners capable of evading these naval monsters saw action in 1926.
Nova Scotian boat builders were probably never in a happier disposition. Twenty-five craft were made exclusively for this new purpose in Meteghan, Shelburne, Mahone Bay, Lunenburg, Liverpool, Dayspring and elsewhere. A true rum-runner was long and low (when loaded) and probably painted grey – for obvious reasons. It was a wooden boat with a low deckhouse and slightly more formidable wheelhouse. An average runner might be 31.5 metres in length, 6.5 metres wide at the centre. It was built to haul maximum cargo but with a profile as low to the water as possible. Although these boats often had substantial Fairbanks-Morse engines, they were not particularly fast. Cruising speeds would only run at about ten knots. They were also sulim, making them somewhat shaky in rough seas. Close to American shores, they met up with faster forty-knot boats that would scoot the goods ashore before the Coast Guard could show up.
Lacking speed, the Nova Scotian runners used whatever means they could to avoid getting caught if detected, including the environmentally unfriendly method of spewing out a smoke screen from a smoke generator or stuffing oily rags into the engine exhaust.
“Once a Scrapper…”
The story of the Bluenose rum-runners is one of fact, fancy and legend. Lives were lost, great fortunes were made and there was a general sense of high-spirited daring and adventure. For the most part, it was an amoral business entered into by fishermen who saw their traditional livelihood dwindling because of economic factors at work outside the boundaries of Nova Scotia. It may have been a way of fighting back, of making a fortune or asserting the defiant and independent spirit that has always been kin to these men of the sea. Perhaps no one embodies this spirit more than rum-runner par excellence Jack Randell.
In his lively book Bluenose Justice, Dean Jobb captures the story of Jack Randell of Lunenburg, whose motto was “once a scrapper, always a scrapper.” Randell didn’t have one of the fancy new specially designed rum-running vessels. Instead, his boss, Big Jamie Clark, had purchased the 38-metre schooner I’m Alone for $18,000. It was rigged with a pair of no-nonsense hundred-horsepower diesel engines, just in case the winds weren’t favourable or if she needed to run for her life from the U.S. Coast Guard. Randell was a seasoned skipper and couldn’t turn down the $500 per month that Clark would pay him to haul rum far away to the warmer parts of the States.
Randell was happy to get the work rather than sit idle
all winter and so, in November of 1928, he sailed the I’m Alone to St. Pierre, loaded up 1,500 cases of good liquor and turned her south. Of course, his job was not to actually run the goods ashore but to meet up with his contacts twenty kilometres off the Louisiana coast. Once in the warm Gulf waters, he unloaded his first shipment and then set about finding new suppliers of freight (alcoholic, of course) from British Honduras, rather than lugging the goods all the way from northerly St. Pierre.
The Coast Guard, however, was catching on to his activities and he had to use his best nautical skills to outsmart them on several occasions. Then on March 20 of 1929, Randell brought his ship to a stop at a rendezvous point which he reckoned to be about twenty-four kilometres off the American coast. On board was more than $60,000 worth of assorted refreshments for the parched American shore dwellers. Much to his chagrin, he saw the Coast Guard vessel Wolcottapproach, prompting Randell to weigh anchor and prepare to outrun his adversary. The Wolcott closed in and hailed Captain Randell. Randell did not respond and so the Wolcott fired over her bow and issued an order to stop. Randell would have none of it and yelled back over a megaphone that he was in international waters and could not legally be stopped.
Three hours of further pursuit and Randell finally agreed to let the skipper of the rWolcott, Frank Paul, board to discuss the matter. Unarmed and in his slippers, Paul boarded the I’m Alone and told Randell he had been within the twelve-mile limit of the United States. The Coast Guard, he argued, had a legal right of pursuit to chase and seize the vessel. Randell couldn’t be persuaded by the cool logic of the Coast Guard captain and he allowed Paul to return to his ship. Both boats kept heading south until Paul grew frustrated and signalled that he was going to fire if Randell didn’t stop. True to his word, the Wolcott began firing shells at the schooner and the Coast Guard sailors opened fire with rifles as well.
Jack Randell was struck in the leg by a wax bullet and his ship’s sails and rigging had already sustained some damage, but he couldn’t quite be convinced that he should admit defeat to this pestering American. The *Wolcott’s big deck gun had jammed by then and she gave up the pursuit on March 22 and turned the chase over to Captain Powell of the Dexter. The Dexter unloaded shells, machine-gun bullets and rifle ammunition into the Lunenburg schooner until it had nowhere to go but down. One of Randell’s men drowned as they abandoned ship, but the rest were picked up by the Coast Guard.
Despite the fact that Randell had obviously been carrying liquor destined to come ashore in Louisiana, he swore innocence and even demanded retribution for what he declared as this “cowardly attack.” Charged with conspiracy, Randell fumed in his New Orleans cell. Word eventually reached Canada about what had happened and the good skipper became a celebrity. One paper called him “an international hero for upholding British naval tradition on the high seas.” Well, that might have been stretching it a bit, but Ottawa politicians jumped on the cause, calling the sinking “piracy” and even “an act of war.” After all, the I’m Alone was a humble sailing vessel from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Was Ottawa really ready to go to war with the U.S. to protect a smuggler’s rights?
Not quite. But protest shouts from Canada were heard as far away as Washington for this grave infringement of the international law of the sea. The case of conspiracy was dropped, and in 1935 the American government apologized with words and money – $25,000 worth – for sinking the I’m Alone. Randell had returned to Canada but continued to work as a skipper, this time of a steamship on the Great Lakes.
Chapter 36
Chapter 36
“A Triumph of Americanism”
The official lifespan of the sailing ship Bluenose ran from March 6, 1921, to January 28, 1946. It was built to race in a high-profile sailing competition for the North Atlantic Fishermen’s International Trophy, which was a pretty big deal for all who lived along this coast, Americans and Canadians alike. But she was never just an elite racing schooner; the Bluenose was also built to be a true fishing vessel and she worked the Grand Banks, bringing tons of fish back to her home port, Lunenburg.
Sailing in races had generally been the game of big men with big money. Fishermen sailing daily for a living might have envied the sailors on the flashy racing vessels but secretly many harboured the thought that “real sailors” were a tougher breed, undoubtedly more seaworthy, more sea-knowledgeable and more resilient than anybody else scudding the North Atlantic waves. Around 1920 news arrived north about a race off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, that had been postponed because of so-called strong winds, a mere twenty-three-knot gale. Sailors on fishing vessels in New England, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia thought this show of cowardice absurd and ached for a chance to compete.
William Dennis, owner of the Halifax Herald and Evening Mail, convinced some of his friends to put up some money to create a competition for fishing schooners that would far outshine the elitist America’s Cup. The first two races were held off Halifax and the third near Gloucester, Massachusetts. The rules stated that ships must be genuine working vessels.
In the first elimination race in Canada, Thomas Himmelman in the Delawana beat out Angus Walters in his Gilbert B. Walters, when Walters lost a mast. In October of that year, the Delawana took on the American Esperanto, captained by Marty Welch, a “whitewashed Yankee” originally from Digby. The races in a best-of-three series were set off Halifax. The Esperanto won. In the second race, Welch took a chance by taking to the shoals off Devil’s Island to win the race. The Esperanto had been constructed for short hauls and quick trips to sea, nothing like the high-capacity Lunenburg schooners designed for longer trips and bigger catches. The Esperanto returned to Gloucester to a hero’s welcome and a hail from vice-president Calvin Coolidge, who boasted that “the victory was a triumph of Americanism.”
Nova Scotians, particularly the fishermen who worked the Banks and the landlubbers who had wagered on the races, were angry and wanted an honest revenge. It was a matter of both money and pride. Revenge, however, came from the Atlantic itself and there would never be a chance to beat the Esperanto in a race. She sank with 140,000 pounds of salt cod, while fishing off Sable Island in 1921. The ship struck the wreck of the SS Virginia and the crew abandoned her and were picked up by another fishing vessel, the Elsie. Three attempts were made to bring the Esperanto back up out of the ten fathoms of sea water, but it turned out that it would be the Elsie herself that would be the American vessel to defend the title when October of that year rolled around.
A Conflict of Interests
Meanwhile, Nova Scotians were preparing a new faster ship to meet whatever American vessel would take up the challenge for the next race. At a cost of $35,000, the Bluenose was built by Captain Angus Walters and four Halifax investors. Walters turned down the offer to actually captain the vessel, since he was making good money as a working captain of his Gilbert B. Walters, which had paid for itself twice over in its first season at sea. The man knew how to make money at fishing like no one else, and he was reluctant to give up until he had garnered for himself a controlling share of the Bluenose. Then a deal was struck. He would have final say about nearly everything concerning the building and running of the schooner.
A naval architect named Bill Roue (who also ran a family ginger-ale business in Halifax) was commissioned to design the schooner that would be built at the Smith and Rhuland Shipyards in Lunenburg. Roue’s innovative ideas concerning the design met some flak from the shipbuilders but they eventually settled on an agreeable shape and, in December of 1920, the keel-laying ceremony was underway. The Duke of Devonshire had come to Lunenburg to take part by driving a gold spike with a silver mallet. The Duke had perhaps over-socialized a bit the night before and missed the gold spike a few times, leaving someone else to finish the job. After that, the shipbuilding moved full speed ahead. By March of 1921, the Bluenose was complete and ready to launch on the twenty-sixth.
Marty Welch was back in the 1921 race, this time with the Elsie. The event was of passionate interest to peo
ple near and far. Perhaps the most intense audience, however, was the one gathered on Sackville Street in Halifax, where wires were stretched between two buildings and models of the Bluenose and the Elsie were run along to show the respective positions at sea in the actual races. The jam-packed crowd cheered as they watched this bizarre little display that was updated by wireless reports coming in from the coast. P
The Bluenose won and took home the cup and the $5,000. Her owners moved on to another battle, this one with the taxman over whether the winnings were taxable. When it came to money, it seemed the Bluenose owners were quite anxious to hang onto what they won and miserly in doling it out. Even Bill Roue had to put up a fight to get paid for designing the wondrous ship. (Later in his career, however, he would make really big money designing the less glamorous sectional barge, which was widely used in World War II.)
In 1922, the Henry Ford was up against the Bluenose. Named for the famous car manufacturer, it hadn’t completed the full fishing season by race time but was allowed to race anyway. The first race was thrown out, the Ford won the second, but the Bluenose went on to win the third and necessary fourth race. More bitter squabbling attended this series of races, though, as a great deal of money was riding in bets. Angus Walters’s nephew Bert (Boodle) Demone made the mistake of going ashore to celebrate and he was later found dead, drowned in the harbour. The Bluenose sailed home with her flag at half mast.
Nova Scotia Page 28
