Chapter Twelve
Shabby Old Queen of Rum Row and the Halcyon Years, Ensenada (1928–33)
If you have a power boat and wish to visit Rum Row, steer for a point about twenty miles down the coast from Ensenada, and five miles south-southwest of Point Santo Tomas. You will find many vessels there, and they will supply you with whatever liquor your heart desires, so long as you agree formally not to take it into the United States. On one of the vessels there is a quantity of Mercier champagne, 1919, American brut, in pints and very cheap. Moreover, this champagne has been aging at sea for five years! If you prefer a dry Roederer 1921, a Chateau Margaux 1923, or anything else, from Liebfraumilch to vodka, or from Chinese wine to Bernkasteler Doktor, it will be delivered to you nicely packed in burlap bags. And if your requirements are for whiskey, the cheaper bourbons and ryes will be delivered on to your boat at from $12 to $20 a case …
The men of Rum Row are principally tugboat men and fishermen who formerly worked in the inland waters about Vancouver. They come south for a year or more at a time, some of them work on the base ships anchored off the coast, and others to handle the fast ex-submarine chasers that carry the liquor to points off the United States where small speedboats come out and unload them. Most of these jobs are entirely within the law—in fact, all of them are except those on the few boats which “run in”—that is, go into American waters to unload. This is very dangerous, for the speedboat operators ashore resent having their lucrative jobs taken away. They revenge themselves by helping the revenue men capture such boats.
After his misunderstandings with the US Coast Guard regarding the mother ship L’Aquila were finally sorted out, Captain Stuart S. Stone returned to Vancouver in late November 1928, where he experienced a short break ashore from active sea duty. As Jim Stone noted in his biography of his father, no one was surprised when, in March 1929, Consolidated Exporters offered his dad the most important position in their fleet: command of Malahat, owned by Archie MacGillis’s Canadian-Mexican Shipping Company. Stone took charge of the long-serving mother ship and was to remain responsible for her until 1933.
Built as a lumber schooner, Malahat was launched from a Victoria shipyard as a deep-water lumber schooner in the midst of World War I. Ten days after Britain and Germany went to war in 1914, export markets were cut off and all British shipping along the coast from Prince Rupert to Panama was paralyzed. For the coastal sawmills that had come to depend on the offshore trade, the world crisis was disastrous. And as the war progressed, the shortage of shipping was exacerbated by the government needs for vessels to transport troops and munitions. These requirements, along with losses to German submarines, drove freight rates to all-time highs. Lumber was stacked up in mill yards and the big export mills shut down, creating unemployment in BC, while just across the border in Puget Sound, mills were working steadily to fill orders for both local and California markets. The key to their success was that over the previous seventy-five years they had built up an unusual fleet of lumber schooners for both the coastwise trade and trans-Pacific markets. American mill owners were able to rely on over some three hundred schooners registered to Pacific coast shipowners. Shipyards in Puget Sound had been building vessels for years for small as well as the big operators like Pope & Talbot and the Port Blakely Mill, which co-owned and operated fleets of the schooners.
James Oscar Cameron and Donald Officer Cameron were expatriate Americans who were part owners of an export sawmill at Genoa Bay on southern Vancouver Island. The Cameron brothers were lawyers from New Mexico and Texas respectively, who had no prior experience in shipbuilding, let alone lumbering, when they arrived in British Columbia in 1907. However, they were at the forefront of a group of lumbermen who realized that if they were to survive, then the BC lumber industry needed its own fleet of carriers. They believed that it was possible to build these vessels in BC by drawing on the wealth of talent and expertise from just over the border. A December 1915 article in a Vancouver trade magazine by master mariner Captain H. W. Copp advocated the building of such boats. This sparked a meeting of the Manufacturer’s Association of BC in which Captain Copp suggested that it would be entirely possible to construct suitable vessels locally from BC fir at a cost of sixty thousand dollars per vessel and the provincial government provided financial support for the building of a fleet of five-masted schooners to take advantage of the trans-Pacific trade in lumber, particularly to Australia.
Malahat was one of six wood auxiliary schooners constructed in 1917 by the Cameron brothers’ Cameron-Genoa Mills Shipbuilders Limited, which, realizing the potential, established their shipyard in Victoria’s Upper Harbour in 1916. These deep-water motor sailers were named after the first of the class to be launched on Canada’s west coast, the Mabel Brown from Wallace Shipyards over in North Vancouver. The Mabel Brown class schooners were designed by J. H. Price, the former manager of St. Helens Shipbuilding Company in St. Helens, Oregon, who was appointed president of Cameron-Genoa Mills later that same year.
According to Victoria’s Daily Times, “They are five-masted auxiliary schooners, with length along the keel of 225 feet, length over all, 260 feet, beam 44 feet, and depth of hold 19 feet. They will be equipped with auxiliary power, using oil fuel Bolinder type of engines, which will develop 220 horsepower, giving the vessels a speed, under normal conditions, of seven knots under engine power alone. Each ship will require a crew of fifteen men.” Between 1917 and 1921, twenty-four of the five-masters were built at four BC shipyards: Wallace Shipyards of North Vancouver, William Lyall Shipbuilding of North Vancouver, Cholberg Shipyard in Victoria and Cameron-Genoa Mills Shipbuilders. One of these schooners was the Malahat, which would later move on from lumber freighting to gain notoriety as a rum runner.
The Mabel Brown five-masters were “bald-headed” schooners—that is, they had no topsails. The main sails were hoisted from the deck with steam winches, which reduced the need for experienced seamen. With war raging in Europe, good sailors were hard to come by. Besides their fore, main, mizzen, jigger and spanker sails, the vessels were also rigged with a fore staysail and inner, outer and flying jibs. The wooden schooners were all fastened with hardwood trunnels (literally “treenails”: hardwood nails used to secure timber, planks and so on) and constructed with hanging knees (curved, natural crooks in trees, sawn and used most often to strengthen the hull-deck joint) from the forests of Vancouver Island. The vessels were all rated at 1,500 gross tons with a carrying capacity of around 1,500,000 board feet of lumber. Their two four-cylinder semi-diesel auxiliary engines were made by J. & C. G. Bolinders Mekaniska Verkstad in Stockholm, Sweden, and rated at 192 net horsepower each. Each cylinder of these “crude oil” semi-diesel engines had a diameter of 16.5 inches and strokes of 20 inches. Hugh Garling, who sailed on Malahat after she became a mother ship to the rum running fleet, considered the Bolinders “primitive,” as did the engine room crew who had to deal with them. He noted that a blowtorch was welded to each cylinder head to enable them to be started when cold and the two exhausts ran up the spanker mast nearly to the masthead.
Hugh Garling, who signed on Malahat at the age of nineteen on January 20, 1930, recalled his first impressions once he stepped aboard. “I was struck by the wide expanse of her deck. The unbroken length from fo’c’sle to the poop deck must have been not much under 200 feet. Under sail, in a seaway, you could look down the length of her deck and see an enormous flexing, showing the tensions in her hull. You could also see the normal hogging and sagging stresses clearly, as well as the twisting, especially in a quartering sea. In the fo’c’sle, or below, all about you was the dissonance of sounds her timbers made as they worked and resisted the flexing. Her masts too, would exert other strains as the ship rolled or pitched.”
Overall though, this unusual fleet of twenty-four five-masted auxiliary schooners was somewhat of a commercial failure in the trade they were built for. When the Great War came to an end, returning ships flooded the market, freight rates dropped and large sailing vessels quickly became obsolete since they were unable to compete with the modern lumber-carrying steamer or motor ship. Their carrying capacity was too low and with their unreliable, underpowered engines most ended up getting into trouble in foul weather. While these West Coast–built wood motor sailers had short and rather disappointing careers overall, the most famous of the group, Malahat, proved to be the exception. She pursued an active career in the deep-water cargo trade and made seven Pacific voyages from her launching in August 11, 1917, through to July 1922. In early 1923 she was lying idle in Seattle, but not for long. She was about to embark on another, more lucrative line of employment once Archie MacGillis returned the vessel to Canadian waters.
On May 1923, Captain R. G. Lawson gathered up a crew and headed down to Seattle to bring Malahat home to Vancouver. According to the ship’s official Agreement or Articles and Account of Crew, dated May 7, MacGillis was listed as supercargo for the short voyage. Lawson was apparently already working with MacGillis at the time, since the document notes that the last ship he served in was Trucilla, which was also owned by MacGillis.
On June 30, Malahat, this time with George Murray in command, was loaded and ready to depart on its first voyage deep-water rum running. She remained actively engaged in the trade right up until Prohibition was brought to an end ten years later. After the halibut boat Chief Skugaid, which was involved rum running for eleven years, Malahat was the longest serving and, in all probability, the most productive vessel on the west coast throughout the US Prohibition years.
The prominent role the five-masted schooner played in the liquor traffic was highlighted in a detailed article that ran in the 1931 annual of the Canadian Merchant Service Guild. As journalist L. V. Kelly explained, “Vancouver’s rum-running fleet is modest but effective, and the flagship of this active flotilla, modestly and decidedly shy, has a one hundred percent batting average. This distinguished craft is the Vancouver schooner Malahat … The Malahat is the veteran, she has seen them all come and go, and she still lies far off at sea, under observation of the Coast Guard cutters, frankly or surreptitiously, as occasion warrants or opportunity arises, supplying the requirements from the tenders from shore.”
In the early days of rum running, Malahat was reported to have made two or three voyages a year down the coast from BC as a mother ship, but this was later reduced to one or two as moonshine liquor became more readily available throughout the United States. The retired lumber schooner was well suited for her new line of work, since she was capable of taking on sixty thousand cases of liquor. When she left Burrard Inlet and put to sea, her hatches were plugged full and decks packed with case upon case of the choicest brands of Scotch, rye and brandy. Fraser Miles, who joined the rum running fraternity as a teenager in 1931, claimed that when they loaded his boat, Ryou II, from Malahat the summer of 1933, she was carrying eighty-four thousand cases in the hold with another sixteen thousand cases stacked on deck. (Ryou II’s job was to deliver the liquor from the mother ship or from either of the bonded warehouses in Victoria and Vancouver to shore boats, like the Kagome, which would load orders destined for American customers and run them into a quiet beach. Ryou II was another example of what was known as a distributor boat.) By this time she was sitting out on her anchor and being used strictly as a floating warehouse that was resupplied from other vessels sailing from the trans-shipment port of Tahiti. In all likelihood, she wouldn’t have attempted to sail down the coast with that much heavy cargo aboard.
The Malahat steams through First Narrows in Burrard Inlet, propelled by her two semi-diesel auxiliary engines. When many of these Mabel Brown–class schooners found themselves undergoing difficulties in foul weather, it was quickly discovered that the ships were underpowered and the engines unreliable. Vancouver Maritime Museum, LM2007.1000.4707.
On May 21, 1924, Malahat’s master, George Murray, and crew once again signed the official Agreement or Articles and Account of Crew for another voyage, ostensibly from Vancouver to Mexico and return. (Articles were the contract that the crew signed whereby they “agreed to conduct themselves in an orderly, faithful, honest, and sober manner, and all times diligent in their respective Duties, and to be obedient to the lawful commands of the said Master … in consideration the said Master hereby agrees to pay to the said Crew as wages the sums against their names respectively expressed.”) After the ship was back in Vancouver in mid-October, a new agreement was signed on November 15 for another voyage from Vancouver to Mexico and return. Malahat returned to Vancouver on August 19, 1925, and, as Captain Charles Hudson mused, whether she ever did sail as far south as Mexico for those three voyages is entirely doubtful.
The Geraldine Wolvin was another five-masted auxiliary schooner built in British Columbia during World War I. Here she sails past Point Grey on her maiden voyage bound for the open Pacific, her holds filled and decks stacked high with West Coast lumber. Vancouver Public Library historical photographs collection, 20272, photo by Dominion Photo Co.
As one of a small fleet of mother ships, Malahat sailed south to Rum Row wherever the fleet was sitting at the time. In the early years, it was situated well out in international waters off the Columbia River bar or Farallon Islands, just outside San Francisco’s Golden Gate. But once it got too hot off the US west coast in the mid-1920s, the whole operation moved to Mexican waters to sit about twenty miles down the coast from Ensenada and about eight miles sou’sou’west of Punta Santo Tomas. Here, a sandy shoal eight miles off the beach in a fifteen- to twenty-fathom patch of water served as an ideal anchoring spot for heavily laden vessels. (Mexico continued to observe the universal three–nautical mile limit for territorial waters, while the United States had arranged a treaty with Great Britain with respect to liquor where the limit imposed was extended to twelve nautical miles or one hour’s steaming from shore.) Hugh Garling said, “On our windlass, it would show 60 fathoms of chain out, giving that long scope for secure anchorage. It was sandy bottom providing excellent holding ground and ideal for transferring cargos from one ship to another, or as a semi-permanent anchorage for a mother ship such as the Malahat.”
While the sensational captures and the subsequent trials of the owners and crews of sister mother ships Quadra, Pescawha and Coal Harbour dominated the headlines between 1924 and 1926, Malahat seldom made the news and her years in the trade remained remarkably uneventful and free of high-seas drama. Still, one small incident did garner some attention in the news. On January 4, 1925, a headline on the Marine and Transportation page of The Daily Colonist reported, “Malahat Thought To Be Lost When Caught by Storm.” Captain George W. Murray of Victoria was in command at the time, with twenty-three Victoria and Vancouver men as crew, when they were caught in a bad storm off the California coast. “The last that was heard of the Malahat’s activities was a report from Santa Barbara that county authorities have seized 100 cases of liquor believed to have been landed from the Malahat a short time before she sank. Two San Francisco men, Adams and Alexander, were arrested as alleged custodians of the whiskey consignment. An armoured car and truck were seized by deputy sheriffs.” The following day, the Colonist reported that it had received a statement from officials of the ship’s owner, Canadian-Mexican Shipping Company, declaring that stories circulating from the south about the mother ship’s loss were entirely erroneous.
Captain John Vosper took charge of Malahat in 1926 and the Agreement signed on July 17 that year notes that this time it was for a voyage from Vancouver to Central America and return. Vosper, who remained in command for three voyages, noted, “the Malahat was a lucky ship,” and that “she was best under sail, her engines being too small.” As it was, he knew the vessel well since he’d served as first mate on a lumber voyage to Australia under the command of George Murray back in the summer of 1920, though probably on another schooner, not the Malahat.
In his short biography of Captain John Vosper, Hugh Garling described him as a “rum runner and a sailorman par excellence. Someone said that if a naval officer was always a gentleman and sometimes a sailor, then an officer of the rum fleet was always a sailor and sometimes a gentleman. Captain Vosper was a sailor and a gentleman … Although an ex–Royal Navy man, he was quite casual in dress, and he did not in the least have a taste for ‘spit and polish.’ He avoided dressing in uniform, even to the hat, and invariably wore a felt fedora in northern climes, and when southward going, would break out a straw hat and, as like as not, would pad around in bare feet.” In an article on Malahat that ran in The Vancouver Province in March 1955, L. V. Kelly said that “her appearance was not impressive, nor was her speed, yet she plodded along her earnest way, never faltered … never blundered. This was probably due to the acumen of her skipper, a small, dark man who did more thinking than talking.”
Vosper was born in a village in Cornwall in 1891 and arrived as a two-year-old in the port city of Vancouver where, growing up, he became fascinated with the sea and shipping. At fifteen years of age, he signed on his first ship, Empress of Canada, a Canadian Pacific Railway passenger liner in the Vancouver to Orient service, as an ordinary seaman. During World War I he served as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy and, when that conflict came to an end, returned home to join the rum running fleet, where he made a few voyages in the steam-powered rum running mother ship, Kuyakuzmt. Vosper’s next berth was the steamer Prince Albert, but he also commanded other rum ships: the three-masted schooner Fanny Dutard, the two-masted schooner Lira de Agua and the steel motorship Lillehorn. Still, Malahat was his favourite ship.
Recalling his years as master of Malahat, Vosper described in Ruth Greene’s book Personality Ships of British Columbia how it all worked: “We changed position on the California coast regularly. If a cutter came out and began to trail us, we would just head out to sea and run her out of fuel, we being under sail. When they dropped us, we would come about and wire for a position to meet the buyer’s boats. It was customary to keep a good lookout from the cross-trees. The lookout would identify every vessel sailing our way, whether it was a fellow rum runner or a Coast Guard cutter. Technically the Coast Guard had no jurisdiction over us on the high seas.”
He also explained how cargo transfers were carried out. “While lying off the coast of California, if we were loading a small boat, and had partially loaded her when a cutter hove in sight, we would put the liquor back on the ship. We always loaded on the offside so that the mother ship would intervene between the small boat and the Coast Guard cutter. This would give a chance for the small boat to put some distance between herself and the cutter before she was discovered. When discovered, there would be a mad chase. If it was a fast boat being loaded, she could easily zip off and escape the cutter.”
In regard to those who served under his command on Malahat, “the deceptively soft-spoken” captain said, “We had a very good crew when she was a rum runner, with few drunkards. I remember having to lock up one of them up until there was a boat returning home to Vancouver, and we put him aboard.”
Malahat’s first rum voyage under the command of Vosper ended in December 1926 with their next voyage from Vancouver to Tahiti on February 22, 1927. Papeete was to remain a port of call right up until Prohibition came to an end in 1933. Following the passage of the restrictive act that required that a vessel actually arrive at the destination as stated on its papers, the Bronfman family interests combined with Consolidated Exporters and the Reifel family in order to operate this new liquor shipping arrangement of delivering up and loading well out in the Pacific at Tahiti, but as Peter Newman noted in his book Bronfman Dynasty, the triumvirate didn’t get around to setting up a formal sales agency to operate out of Tahiti until April 1933. He also said that the stocks listed in the agreement included a full range of Canadian and Scotch whiskies, gins, American bourbons, European champagnes and liquors worth $1,230,396.45 at distillery prices.
As Fraser Miles meticulously documented in his book, Slow Boat on Rum Row, once the load in Vancouver, unload at sea, return to Vancouver system was abandoned because of the restrictive act, rum runners were actually able to enjoy their best years ever between 1929 and 1933. Miles recorded a threefold increase in rum runner ships at sea, from eight to twenty-five, and more than a fourfold increase in months out at sea by the ships in the fleet, from forty-seven months for a total of eight ships in 1929 to one hundred ninety months for twenty-five ships in 1932. One of the biggest problems encountered while mother ships were still sitting off the American coast for weeks at a time was that they were required to restock their stores of food, water and fuel. Since these supplies were often brought out from shore aboard American boats, they often found themselves running short if a US Coast Guard cutter was out there on station keeping a close eye on all their activities.
Captain Vosper completed three rum voyages with Malahat. Her second one, from Vancouver to Tahiti, was completed on the ship’s return to Vancouver on July 8, 1927. Then on September 26 that same year, Malahat departed Burrard Inlet on a voyage from Vancouver to Malden Island and returned to Vancouver in mid-June 1928. (Malden Island lies in the middle of the Pacific just south of the equator.)
In February of 1929, Consolidated Exporters took over ownership of Malahat from Archie MacGillis’s Canadian-Mexican Shipping Company and the US Coast Guard’s old nemesis, Captain Stuart S. Stone, stepped aboard as master of the infamous mother ship. As his son, Jim, pointed out, no one was surprised when Consolidated offered his father command, for which he was to receive six hundred dollars a month. Of course, he accepted, but under the condition that he also be the ship’s wireless operator, since he suspected that Federalship’s never-ending problems with the US Coast Guard were not entirely due to bad luck. On March 29, Malahat departed Burrard Inlet “on a Voyage from Vancouver BC to Ensenada, Mexico, for a period not exceeding twelve months,” as it was declared on the ship’s articles. As noted, after the seizure of Federalship in 1927, a major policy change by Consolidated Exporters had Rum Row shifted away from the American coast south to sit anchored off the Mexican coast.
Hugh Garling recalled that it was hard finding a berth in a deep-water ship during the hungry Depression years of the early 1930s. When he walked aboard the steamer Arwyco down at Vancouver’s Burrard Dry Dock in December 1930, where she was in for an overhaul, he spoke with a crewman who directed him to an address on Hamilton Street. There he was to go into an office and speak with a “Captain Hutton.” Of course, this was none other than Captain Charles Hudson who, after Garling introduced himself, said, yes, they were in need of another crewman and told Garling to be down at Menchions’s Wharf in Coal Harbour at eighty-thirty the next morning and to look for the fast freighter Taiheiyo. Here he was to report to Captain Butler and sail down the coast to sign on Malahat sitting off the coast of Mexico. It was a special day for Garling. “My world had turned bright! I had a berth, I would be serving in sail, getting in my sea time and receiving pay above the scale for deep-sea sailors … No doubt the Malahat would be calling at exotic foreign ports with many adventures awaiting me! I let my imagination run wild.”
Apparently the trip south to Mexico was uneventful and when Taiheiyo arrived at Rum Row, the “smuggler’s headquarters,” Garling had his first glimpse of Malahat, sighting her five tall masts before her hull came into view. “She lay at anchor pitching gently as her bows plunged into the troughs of successive seas. I took in her fine sheer, her clipper bow and the shark’s tail [a real one] fastened to the end of her long bowsprit … She looked the part too, oozing with romance and adventure since more booze had run in her scuppers than any other, and she had endured a record ten years on Rum Row without being apprehended by the United States Coast Guard.” At 1,543 registered tons, Malahat was also the largest of the mother ships until the latter months of Prohibition when the steamer Mogul, listed at 1,828 registered tons, arrived in at Rum Row to relieve her in June 1933. Still, he was curious to see what sort of swashbuckling shipmates he was about to become entangled with. Instead, he was happy to discover that they were all much like deep-water sailors anywhere: agile, bronzed and well muscled.
Modified from map courtesy of Fraser Miles collection.
When young Garling climbed aboard Malahat on January 20, 1931, she was on her second voyage under the command of Captain Stuart Stone. Her voyage from Vancouver to Ensenada was to last from July 1930 to August 1931. He described Ensenada as a great haven and escape for rum runners. (He was probably referring mostly to the crews of Canadian shore boats and American fireboats that got to go ashore when they were required to lay over for eight or ten days during a full-moon phase when normal operations couldn’t be carried out along the California coast.) Rum runners were always welcome in Ensenada, as they were free spenders. Still, “when you signed two-year articles on a rum runner’s mother ship, it was much the same as a voluntary two-year sentence of penal servitude. You agreed to obey the lawful command of the master which left you with little freedom of choice until the end of the voyage … there was the endless day-after-day and week-after-week of waiting, drifting into month-after-month, for the day you would be homeward bound. On one voyage, I was at sea for an entire year without shore leave.”
As Garling noted, life aboard a mother ship wasn’t always filled with romance and adventure on the high seas. It entailed a lot of hard labour; in particular, dealing with all the cargo aboard required hours upon hours of hands-on work. Once all the cases were broken open and the bottles repackaged, the sacks were passed up or thrown along from one crewman to another in a line and spaced about ten feet apart. As Garling explained, “It was the fastest way of handling cargo and rarely did someone miss his catch. It was hard work and kept you in good shape.” Then there was the problem of the long Pacific swells that prevented a large ship arriving with liquor in bond to run alongside a mother ship. In this case, the ship’s boats would be used for the transfer. They could only carry around one hundred cases a load. The ship’s boats were all rowed with long sweeps, but if a wind blew up, there was a small motorized launch to take them in tow. Then once alongside, there was the matter of getting the cargo up to the deck of the mother ship with a sea running down her length.
When this happened, the ship’s boats would pick up the guest warp (a line for small boats to make fast to) hanging along the side of the hull and then load up a cargo net to be lifted aboard. Hugh Garling did mention that they’d all end up black and blue with bruises working in the ship’s boats, as every sea running underneath would pick up the slack and then drop them down into the trough of the following sea, often knocking them off their feet. Then there was the hazard of the big, heavy steel hook used for lifting the cargo net aboard tossing around in the bottom of the boat and then a minute later high above their heads. Sometimes they’d end up with it dropping on top of their heads.
In 1932, Robert Dean Frisbie wrote an account of a voyage he made crewing on the so-called Mariposa under the command of a Captain McKlintock, from an unnamed French island somewhere in the South Sea to Rum Row off Mexico. The two-masted schooner was carrying a cargo of six thousand cases of bourbon, rye and Scotch whisky and “such unforgettable brands as Green River, Log Cabin, Old Crow, Black and White and Haig’s Gold Label. It was all the Mariposa could carry. We had left our spare sails ashore so we could fill the lazaret with bagged quarts of Hill and Hill; our provisions had been piled on No. 2 hatch to make room in the pantry and the supercargo’s cabin for cases of McCallum’s Perfection; and even the main cabin. Had it filled to within a few feet of the deck carlings … We felt that we were martyrs to a good cause.”
In his tale, “Rum Row: Western,” which appeared in the May 1932 issue of American Mercury magazine, Frisbie played it safe and assigned fictitious names to all the rum running vessels and those aboard, even though Prohibition was drawing to a close. Mariposa was likely the two-masted schooner Aratapu, a well-known ship that made regular supply runs from Tahiti to Rum Row. Frisbie noted that even though their voyage across the Pacific was pleasant enough, since it was summer with fresh trade winds, their imaginations often got the better of them. They were troubled by the ever-present fear of being set upon by hijackers, or the possibility that Mexican gunboats or US Revenue cutters might happen upon them and open fire. But when they finally arrived off the Mexican coast and made their way among the rum boats and US Coast Guard cutters, all anchored out in the same thirty-fathom patch, they were to discover otherwise.
They join a fleet of over a dozen ships, including “a five-masted schooner, a steamer, two beautifully equipped vessels that we took for rum-runners and a few smaller craft.” Their liquor is consigned to the five-masted schooner, and in the morning Frisbee goes aboard her to meet “Captain Rockwell—a man responsible for running more than 1,000,000 cases of liquor into the States. He is probably the cleverest of the Pacific Coast rum smugglers, is wanted on numerous indictments, and is gall and wormwood to the Coast Guard. A few years on the right side of fifty, very alert and businesslike, he is anything but the type of man one should expect to find in such an undertaking. He assured me that he seldom touched alcohol, and that only one drink a day was allowed the crew.” It would seem that the five-master was none other than Malahat and Captain Rockwell, of course, Captain Stuart S. Stone, the persistent “gall and wormwood” to the US Coast Guard throughout the Prohibition years. (Stone would have been around forty-three years of age at the time.)
Captain Rockwell requests that the crew of Mariposa not give liquor to his crew. “I can’t take a chance. This vessel is worse than a dump of dynamite, God!” Frisbie watches as Rockwell’s eyebrows knit. “I have 60,000 cases of assorted liquor aboard—one hundred and sixty-three brands. Think what would happen if my crew once got started on it!” Still, while Rockwell points out that his vessel was nothing but a wholesale liquor warehouse and that you might read about “wild boozing voyages among the rum-runners: sawed-off shotguns, poker, fighting and drunkenness; but now-a-days this business is quite different. We are at sea for a year at a time, and that job is one long monotonous job of trans-shipping liquor. Of course, on the smaller boats [that run the booze into shore] it’s different; they are cutterized now and then; every few months they put into a Mexican port for a big time, and sometimes they hit it up aboard their boats, too.” Frisbie commented that overall, the rum running business was carried on smoothly and quietly while the Prohibition agents were out-manoeuvred. He also noted that the US Coast Guard’s “fleet of pretty little cutters” ended up more of a benefit than injury to the rum running fleet. Since they set out to maintain constant vigilance over the fleet, they succeeded in keeping the riff-raff, the pirates and outright gangster element, at bay.
Continuing with his tale, Frisbie describes the next day, when a subchaser, the Return Quickly, comes alongside Mariposa to take on two thousand cases of Hill & Hill. At the same time, a Coast Guard steams over, stands off a few yards and holds her position until all the liquor is loaded. Once the transfer is underway, the captain of the cutter steps onto his bridge with a counting machine to tally the number of cases loaded. Meanwhile, aboard Mariposa, Frisbie and her captain start their own tally, and during the lulls in the work, turn to yarn with the cutter’s skipper. Rockwell remarks to Frisbee that when a fire broke out on the rum runner Toshiwara, the Coast Guard was on hand and rushed to the rescue. Consequently, he calls over to the man on the bridge, “Thanks, Cap for helping us out.” “That’s all right,” the enemy officer replies with a laugh. “That’s what’s we’re here for; to help you fellows out and protect you from hi-jackers!”
The rum runner Toshiwara was most likely the two-masted Hakadata, which set it itself afire when it realized seizure was imminent after being spotted off Punto Santo Tomas by the cutter Vaughan in April 1927. (Hakadata was the old sealer owned by MacGillis’s Arctic Fur Traders.) According to Frisbie, that night three Coast Guard men came aboard Mariposa to make one of their rare seizures: three bottles of King George IV Gold Label. “They drank it straight, out of the bottles, without chasers.” The next day, after the remaining cargo was discharged aboard the five-master, and they’d taken on water, fuel and provisions, Mariposa set sail for Tahiti.
Malahat departed Burrard Inlet on her third run under the command of Captain Stone on December 12, 1931, on another voyage south where she was to lay for seven months as an anchored mother ship out on the Punta Santo Tomas grounds. During his third run to Mexican waters, Captain Stuart Stone brought along his new bride, Emmie May, née Binns.
Hazel, Stuart Stone’s sister, had met Emmie May at the British Columbia Telephone exchange where they both worked. Hazel brought her home to bunk with her in the Stone family’s attic. Unbeknownst to Hazel, Stuart had already met Emmie at a party a year earlier. (Born in New York in 1909, Emmie and her family arrived on the West Coast in 1914, where her father, C. C. Binns, was already running a trading post in a small bay not far from Ucluelet. Captain Binns—who sailed around Cape Horn with shipmate Captain William L. “Whiskers” Thompson—had arrived on Vancouver Island in 1895.)
Following soon after Malahat’s return from her second voyage to Ensenada, Stone obtained a divorce from his first wife, who he had three children with. The divorce was finalized in October and Stone married Emmie May the following month aboard Malahat and then left for a short weekend honeymoon in Victoria. He then had to request permission from the directors of Consolidated Exporters to take his bride to sea with him. Now, with his brother Chet signed on as chief engineer, Malahat’s honeymoon voyage to Ensenada had three Stone family members aboard.
The ever-popular and highly respected Captain Stuart Stone with his new wife, Emmie May. Emmie May Beal collection.
Malahat crewmembers and some of the ship’s cargo. Hugh Garling collection.
Emmie May told Dorothy Wrotnowski in a Daily Colonist story in March 1971 that when they finally put to sea loaded down with fifty thousand cases in her holds and five thousand tied down on deck and sailed past Brockton Point where hundreds of cars were gathered, they all dimmed their lights as they called out, “Malahat … Farewell!” Soon the wireless network was abuzz with the news that the ever-popular Captain Stone was on his way to Mexican waters with his new bride. When they finally arrived at Rum Row, Punta Santo Tomas, they were delighted to see that all the men aboard the vessels on the Row at the time had shaved and were decked out in clean clothes in honour of the bride and groom. Emmie May also fondly recalled to John Lund in a 1994 article in The Daily Colonist how that first night she was bedazzled upon stepping out on deck to look out over a floating city of rum ships with all their anchor and cabin lights burning brightly against the dark shore. Stuart identified most of them: first there were the other mother ships, Lillehorn, Nederiede (Norwegian flag) and Limey (British); the smaller coast runners Hickey, Hurry Home, Taiheiyo and Algie; and two “strangers,” a Tahitian schooner and another two-master from Panama.
This bird’s-eye view of the deck from up in Malahat’s rigging shows just how loaded down the mother ships were sitting out on Rum Row. Emmie May Beal collection.
Despite their wonderful reception, Emmie May said that the rum runner crews resented her presence at first. (Having a woman aboard ship was still considered bad luck that brought on bad weather and rough seas by many a sailor.) But after she took it upon herself to scale the schooner’s rigging and tall masts in a rolling sea, without bothering to ask for permission from her husband, the ship master’s and crew’s attitude quickly changed to one of respect. Emmie May also recalled that crews “from all over the world” were soon stepping aboard to meet “Mrs. Capt.” all dressed in their white shirts. Still, as Hugh Garling recalled in a personal interview in the late 1990s, the experience of having an attractive young lady aboard was somewhat trying for the crew, who were so far away from wives and girlfriends for months at a time. Often, while they were aloft working sails and rigging, they couldn’t restrain themselves from looking down to sneak a peek at Emmie lying on the quarterdeck sunning herself.
First Mate James Donohue didn’t speak directly to her for six months and would only communicate with her through other crewmen. As Jim Stone learned many years later, what probably annoyed Donohue was that his wife, Hazel, was an experienced wireless operator, and his request to have her come aboard Malahat had been turned down. (Donohue had married Hazel, Stuart’s sister, in September that year with her brother as best man.) Donohue finally softened up once he saw that Emmie was fully capable of handling life at sea. She was so keen to fit in to shipboard life that she had a new hardwood floor put in the galley; helped paint the ship’s tender, Dixie; and varnished Patricia S, the 22-foot speedboat that Stuart had bought for her and which they used for visiting neighbouring ships and going ashore. Donohue, who was overseeing renovation of the ship, even approved of Emmie’s suggested colour scheme for Malahat: Irish green hull, red waterline, orange masts and white crossbars and top masts.
Malahat left Burrard Inlet on her final voyage south on December 9, 1932, only a month after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president of the United States. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in the summer of 1932, the party adopted an election plank calling for the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, and when Roosevelt made his nomination acceptance speech he announced that from that day forward the Volstead Act was doomed. On February 17, 1933, just before Roosevelt’s inauguration, the Senate passed a resolution to submit an amendment for repeal to state conventions. Meanwhile, out on Rum Row, Nederiede’s holds were empty so she pulled up anchor and left for Norway while Malahat, with thirty thousand cases aboard, Lillehorn and Limey were to remain on station until their holds were emptied.
The original plan was for Malahat to lay out on Rum Row until the summer of 1933 and then the steamer Mogul (originally launched as the collier Caesar in 1896), with Henry McKee Kennedy as her master, was to relieve her. (Hugh Garling, who signed on Mogul May 9, 1933, said the crew referred to Captain Kennedy as “His Majesty” after checking to make sure no officers were standing close by.) Captain Kennedy was to assume command of the Malahat and return her home while Captain Stone was to take charge of Mogul as the only mother ship left out on Rum Row. Although Mogul was in “god-awful condition” and her bottom pretty well shot with corrosion, Captain Hudson had recently bought her for Consolidated Exporters. She had been laying over at Ladysmith on Vancouver Island and she measured 310 feet in length and 1,828 registered tons. She was said to be the largest ship in service on the BC coast at the time. It was a timely purchase, since the two mother ships currently on station, Malahat and the steamer L’Aquila (previously Federalship), weren’t large enough to take on the cargo if one or the other was to head home to Vancouver.
With the need for another large mother ship, Captain Hudson convinced Consolidated Exporters to buy the old worn out steamer Mogul, which was launched as the Caesar in 1896. But ore-induced corrosion from carrying ore from Anyox, BC, to a smelter in Tacoma, Washington, had left her frames in very bad condition. So knowing she would never pass inspection, Mogul was put to sea where she was scheduled to stay for 12 months and then allowed to sink if it came to that. S.S. Mogul Jan. 29, 1932, Walter E. Frost photo. City of Vancouver Archives AM1506-S3-2: 447-2426.1
Mogul left Vancouver on May 30, 1933, to arrive in Rum Row later that June. No sooner there, Malahat’s crew quickly transferred their 737 cases of whisky over to the steamer. But just days away from taking on his new command, and having already sent over all of his and Emmie May’s personal effects, Captain Stuart Stone suffered a severe attack of appendicitis. He refused offers to run him into San Diego, fearing that Uncle Sam hadn’t forgiven him for his successful evasion of charges for his escapades off the California coast and, in particular, his nose-thumbing victory following the Federalship trial. When his appendix ruptured during the night of July 2, his brother and wife rushed him ashore into Ensenada. But since there was little in the way of medical help available in the small Mexican town, it was decided to fly him to Los Angeles. Unfortunately, it was already too late. The July 5, 1933, entry in Malahat’s logbook reads: “S. S. Stone died this day of appendicitis. The First Mate J. V. Donohue has this day taken command [with] McGillivary Second Mate.” Following the tragic loss, it was decided that Captain Kennedy was to remain with Mogul out on Rum Row, while the first mate, Stone’s best friend James Donohue, took charge of Malahat and sailed her home.
The Malahat’s logbook entry for the passing of Captain Stuart Stone on July 5, 1933. City of Vancouver Archives.
On December 5, 1933, the fleet out on Rum Row heard breaking news over the California radio station KNX: It was all over and done with; the US Congress had finally repealed the Eighteenth Amendment, the Volstead Act.
It was while crewing on Mogul that Hugh Garling and shipmates finally got to step ashore at Ensenada. In later life, he described it as stepping into another world: “The people on the street, women, a tree, a blade of grass or a flower were all so unfamiliar.” But once he got past the experience of having his feet on solid ground again, he quickly discovered that Ensenada could be best described as “Sin City” since it provided all that the wanton and debauched could ever desire. There was Cecilia’s Place with the longest bar he’d ever seen on one side of the dance floor and all Cecilia’s “dark-eyed beauties” on hand and eager to please. Outside in a courtyard were little huts in which the girls “befriended” tourists, tough old prospectors and sailors alike. By the early thirties, it became quite common and even fashionable for the Hollywood movie crowd to arrive and pick up their liquor directly from the rum ships. Well-known stars of the day such as Douglas Fairbanks Jr.; Georgie Jessel; Buster Keaton and his wife, Natalie Talmadge; Robert Montgomery; and John Barrymore aboard his yacht Infanta were all regular visitors, along with world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey, who opened the lovely Playa Hotel out along the beach. (Emmie May Stone recalled that when she and Stuart boarded Georgie Jessel’s yacht Kamin with a case of champagne, his eyes lit up and he nearly knocked her over as he staggered past and went down on his knees to hug the champagne as if it were a long-lost lover.)
But it was riding off into the countryside that Garling got the most pleasure from, “where there were small farms, adobe houses and the ubiquitous donkey … the real fabric of the country.” One day he came upon a charming farmhouse set in the midst of an oasis of green. When he stopped to gaze and take in its beauty, he saw a very attractive girl standing on the verandah. He gave a friendly wave and she waved back, then walked down the path to greet him. Even though they didn’t speak the same language, they communicated the best they could and Garling was soon convinced he’d finally met the love of his life. Later that day, when he wandered back down to Cecilia’s and told his new friend Domingo, who occasionally arrived alongside Mogul for a case of booze, that he had a new girlfriend named Margarita and explained where the farm was, Domingo broke out laughing. “That farm belongs to Cecilia … and Margarita is out there gettin’ over a dose of clap!” Consequently, Garling didn’t bother to keep his date at the cinema with Margarita that night after all. Besides Cecilia’s Place, another Ensenada establishment that was frequented by the rum running fraternity was Hussong’s Cantina which, as it happened, claimed to be the originator of the ever-popular drink, the margarita. Established in 1892, the cantina is still going strong today, but unfortunately the photograph of Emmie May Stone sitting next to Malahat’s life ring, which hung over the bar during the 1930s, is no longer there.
After spending over three weeks in Ensenada discharging her cargo into lighters alongside and taking on water, Mogul, the last mother ship left on Rum Row, departed on May 26, 1934, in ballast. After encountering strong winds on the voyage home, along with the handicap of her bottom being badly fouled with over twelve months’ growth of barnacles and weeds, it was sixteen days before they arrived back to British Columbia waters. Once docked in North Vancouver, the old worn-out steamship was sold to Japanese owners who loaded her full of scrap metal. Japan, at the time, was buying up old steamers and sailing them home where both ship and cargo were thrown into furnaces and melted down.
Fraser Miles pointed out in his autobiography that of all the ships and boats that saw service rum running along the coast, it was Malahat that was crowned “Queen of the Rum Runners.” He didn’t exactly agree with that glowing testimonial, since he figured the glamorous title was all courtesy of writers who had never seen, and certainly never crewed on her. As far he was concerned, “she was a shabby old ship—the owners were as tight with paint as they were with sailors’ pay. Crew members each received sixty-seven dollars and fifty cents a month and, in the end, had to seize the ship to get paid, a shabby kind of queen.” Despite Miles’s opinion, Jim Stone figured Malahat developed some of her reputation as “Queen of the Rum Fleet,” simply for the fact that she was always being restocked with supplies. Besides her liquor cargo, the big schooner also served as a warehouse for everything the smaller vessels in the rum fleet might be in need of. As well as the thousands of gallons of fresh water Malahat’s condenser produced, there was fuel, food and medicine brought down the coast in vessels arriving in from the ports of Vancouver and Victoria, or brought out to the ship from Ensenada. In the end though, the five-masted auxiliary schooner proved to be as much of a success in the rum running fleet as she was as a deep-water lumber freighter. While a number of the West Coast mother ships, Quadra, Pescawha, Coal Harbour and L’Aquila (Federalship), ended up captured and seized by the US Coast Guard, Malahat sailed through the Prohibition years unscathed.
After the flagship of the fleet returned to British Columbia, she entered a new trade: log carrying. Malahat was lying at Burrard Dry Dock’s wharf in North Vancouver with writ against her in 1934, when the Admiralty Court finally sold her off to William Clark Gibson for $2,500 in November that year. Based at Ahousat in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Gibson family was involved in a number of ventures, primarily logging and lumber milling. Soon after purchase, the Gibsons transformed Malahat into what they claimed was the first self-propelled, self-loading and unloading log barge. They quickly set to work making alterations and fitting her out with steam donkeys for loading and unloading logs. As it happened, it was her old skipper, John Vosper, who took command upon completion, but after a couple of hair-raising crossings of Queen Charlotte Sound loaded down with old-growth timber, he decided it best to move on. After a few more close calls operating the under-powered log carrier in the treacherous and confined waters of British Columbia’s coast, the Gibsons decided it was probably a lot safer to delegate Malahat to the towline.
The log-beaten barge finally met its end off the entrance to Barkley Sound, Vancouver Island, when she foundered under tow of the tug Commodore in March 1944. Tug and barge got caught in large swells off Cape Beale in a storm and the barge’s load of spruce logs broke loose, pounding the bulwarks until the seams opened up. Malahat was consequently towed into Uchucklesit Inlet and abandoned. Canada’s Department of Transport lost patience with the floating hazard to navigation and informed the owners in October 1945 that the derelict had to be removed. Old towboater Richard Simpson recalled that the Gibson brothers sent their tug Joan G to retrieve the hulk and tow it to the Powell River Company log pond over in Powell River, where she arrived on November 9, 1945, and her cargo of logs was unloaded.
The big pulp and paper company intended to use Malahat as part of the floating hulk breakwater protecting their log pond, but she was in poor condition, her hull having been badly beaten by logs being dropped in her. Consequently, she was put on the bottom off a rock breakwater at the southeast end of the mill’s log pond and booming grounds in November 1946. Today the last of the old five-masted lumber schooner is a registered underwater heritage site and popular Powell River dive spot, where she still serves a useful role a century after her launch from the Cameron-Genoa Mills Shipbuilders yard in Victoria’s Upper Harbour in 1917.