Chapter Four
Mother Ships and the Disaster Years (1923–24)
Just outside the territorial limit they all lie, riding at anchor, great, rust-streaked, iron steamships, once-palatial ocean-going yachts of multi-millionaires, stout, heavily-built, powerfully-engined, deep-water towboats, lofty-sparred, noble, old ships and barks with wide crossed yards, salt-encrusted tramps, and all filled to the hatches, laden to waterline or plimsoll, with their cargos of liquor from every quarter of the globe—rum from the West Indies, gin from Holland, whisky from Scotland, wines and brandy from Spain, Portugal and France, beer from Panama, Chile and Germany …
A substantial amount of the rum running business, and perhaps the most rewarding, took place far from coastal BC waters. The deep-sea liquor trade was the stuff of legend, with mother ships—deep-sea steamers along with retired lumber and sealing schooners—that travelled south from ports such as Vancouver and Victoria to sit well out in international waters off the Oregon and California coastline or, in the later years of Prohibition, to anchor not too far south from the small Mexican port town of Ensenada. Companies such as Consolidated Exporters and Archie MacGillis’s Canadian-Mexican Shipping and Roy Olmstead’s Western Freighters had mother ships sitting at anchor or drifting off the US west coast. They acted as large sea-going liquor emporiums that supplied the smaller vessels that ran their orders into various points along the coast.
Hugh Garling went into more detail on how it all worked: “the [motor ship] Lillehorn would be the mother ship until it was time for her to return home. The [five-masted auxiliary schooner] Malahat would relieve her and the Lillehorn would transfer the balance of her cargo to the Malahat which would arrive with a cargo of liquor. She would stay there for four months to a year or more. These were the larger ships that could stay at sea for long periods of time and would supply the next in the hierarchy, distributor boats [usually large fishboats or packers], with liquor, provisions, diesel oil and even food supplies. The primary function of the distributor boats was to transport their load of liquor up to various agreed to positions off the coast where buyers’ boats would come out to pick up their pre-ordered liquor. The buyers’ boats came last in the hierarchy and were small, fast boats, usually American, which would make contact, identify themselves and take their prepaid load, landing it on the beach, sometimes running it right in a harbour, through the Coast Guard blockade.”
But still, often Canadian “shore boats” took on a big risk and loaded from a mother ship to run a load of liquor across the line directly into American waters. In researching his memoir, Fraser Miles gained access to a 1977 taped interview of crewman Clarence Greenan, who was with Malahat in her early years operating as a mother ship off the California coast. Greenan, who sailed on Malahat for five years as donkeyman and shore boat runner, was only twenty-one years old when he finally signed off the ship in 1924. He made two hundred dollars a month plus a trip bonus of two months’ pay while crewing on the mother ship. After he quit the racket some three or four years later, he claimed he took home a sizeable stake of twenty thousand dollars. Most of this, he pointed out, was for driving Malahat’s fast shore boat inshore all the way up the Sacramento River to a private dock at the state capital once or twice a week, for which he was paid $450 a trip. Here, he would land at a private dock and, after unloading, would gas up to replace the five hundred gallons burned through making the run. Of course, these deliveries were all done at night. He would cast off from Malahat just before dark and be back alongside the big schooner just after daylight.
In 1984, George Winterburn, a crewman aboard the five-masted auxiliary schooner turned mother ship Malahat, explained how it all worked to BC writer Susan Mayse, whose tape of the interview sits in the BC Archives. “Several launches came out to us and upon presenting their credentials, consisting of one half of a one dollar bill that had to be matched with the other half that the supercargo kept, the order which was written on his half bill was filled and away he went to shore with his launch full of liquor.” Land agents ashore collected cash payments in advance from American bootleggers and an order number was written on both sides of the dollar bill. Then, once enough orders and money had been collected to account for half the cargo, a mother ship was able to leave Vancouver. The whole operation was a straightforward shipping operation once the liquor was loaded in Burrard Inlet from bonded warehouses aboard steamers and sailing ships.
Mother ship captain Charles Hudson noted that while the rum running industry turned into one of the most fabulous money-making operations in Canada at the time, it still involved a lot of tedious shipboard work. Besides the routine duties such as washing down decks every morning, sail and rigging maintenance and repair, scraping marine growth off ship’s bottoms, tarring decks and so on, they also had to deal with their substantial payloads. This was particularly labour intensive for the crews of the mother ships, since they devoted so much time to “sacking.” In order to safely and quickly manhandle cargo over to small boats running alongside, the twenty-four-bottle crates’ tops were broken open with an axe and their contents sewn up in gunny sacks. The crates’ packing was used to protect the bottles while each sack was labelled with a special code to identify the various brands it contained. Also, they were all sewn up with two ears, or lugs, on top to make the sacks easier for handling and for throwing down into the boats. There was also another benefit to sacking the bottles, besides easier handling and loading. If there was trouble in the air—for example, if a US Coast Guard ship was spotted nearby—the sacks could be dumped and laid on the bottom of the ocean on long lines to escape detection.
Working aboard a mother ship required a lot of hard labour. Here the crew is transferring a load of liquor cases aboard the mother ship Malahat after the schooner Marechal Foch arrived on Rum Row, Ensenada, from Tahiti in the early 1930s. Hugh Garling collection.
The remains of the broken boxes were thrown overboard or saved to fire the boilers of desalination condensers to produce fresh water. Writer Philip Metcalfe said that, “From Cape Flattery, Washington, to La Jolla, California, the empty cases washed ashore, their sides bearing the names of distilleries in Glasgow and London.”
Local newspapers, like Victoria’s Daily Colonist, were diligent in keeping the public up to date on the movements of the fleet. On September 23, 1924, it was reported on the Marine and Transportation page that “Stadacona Due Back Wednesday to Load Liquor for South—Malahat Is Expected Next Week and Will Load Here and at Vancouver—Principio Is Taking Out 25,000 Cases of Liquor.”
It also noted that “these [three] vessels are operated by a consolidated company, in which considerable Victoria capital has been invested.” (James “Jimmy” Hunter, president of Consolidated Exporters Corporation, managed the Victoria branch of the operation from the Pither & Leiser building in the Inner Harbour.) All three mother ships were to take on the Thanksgiving supply of liquor and return again in November. The Christmas supply was already on its way out to British Columbia from Europe “in a steady stream of consignments aboard Canadian Government Merchant Marine freighters, Harrison-Direct liners and Royal Mail Steam Packet ships. Canadian Freighter, which left the Old Country on September 8, has one of the largest shipments of liquor ever brought from the United Kingdom.”
The 247-foot, 6-inch Malahat was perhaps the most successful of the mother ships and years later was to be recognized as the queen of the rum runners. On June 30, 1923, Malahat was loaded with booze and ready to depart on her first voyage in the lucrative trade. A wire report from San Francisco appeared on the Marine and Transportation page of The Daily Colonist under the headline “Rum Ship Anchors at San Francisco” on July 19. It reported that “a big vessel, believed to be the mothership Malahat, is at anchor beyond the three-mile limit off San Francisco, and is supposed to have supplied liquor to a swarm of smaller boats, according to an announcement today from the headquarters of the district federal prohibition enforcement officer here. The vessel left Vancouver, BC, for Mexico … While the supposed liquor was being transferred, the small boats formed virtually a continuous line between the ship and the shore, and operated during the daytime as well as at night, the prohibition office was informed.”
The retired lumber schooner was well suited for the trade since she was capable of taking on sixty thousand cases of liquor. When she put to sea, her hatches were plugged full and decks packed with case upon case of the choicest brands from Canadian and European breweries and distilleries. As Hugh Garling, who crewed on Malahat, wrote in one of a series of articles on rum running that ran in Harbour & Shipping magazine between 1989 and 1991, “Canadian-produced bourbon whiskey and Canadian rye, were the most in demand, but large quantities of famous proprietary brands of scotch, gin, rum, brandy, and well known vintage champagnes, sparkling burgundies, still wines and renowned liqueurs, were carried. Mother ships might carry up to 150 or 175 different items.”
While Malahat made it through the Prohibition years unscathed, the West Coast’s deep-sea liquor trade wasn’t exactly trouble-free or without serious incident, including losses due to marine mishap as well as seizures on the high seas. While Fraser Miles claimed in his autobiography that the years 1922 and 1923 were “the fabulous years of rum running” since it was still a relatively simple, presumably profitable and trouble-free undertaking, he did go on to say that the next two years, 1924 and 1925, were “the years of disaster.” Miles attributes the losses during this period to “error, carelessness or overconfidence on the part of the rum runner ship captains involved, of which the US Coast Guard was happy to take advantage.”
Miles claimed that the two-masted auxiliary schooner City of San Diego became the very first vessel to make a rum running voyage when she left a BC port with her holds filled with liquor on April 15, 1922. But what Miles may have been suggesting was that the vessel was likely the very first mother ship to head out and sit in international waters just off the Washington, Oregon or California coastlines. As it happens, City of San Diego, which was built as a sealing vessel and launched from the J. Turner shipyard in San Francisco in 1881, was 67 feet, 6 inches in length and registered to the Reifel interest’s Northern Freighters.
But the first mother ship to make big headline news up and down the coast was actually a vessel that had loaded and sailed from a European port, not a British Columbian one, though her ultimate destination was Victoria. After departing Leith, Scotland, with twenty-five thousand cases of Scotch whisky early in 1923, the British steamer Ardenza (210 feet in length, launched in 1920 from the yard of Hawthorns & Company in Leith) passed through the Panama Canal and steamed up the California coast where she sat for nearly eight months before arriving in Victoria after a ten-month voyage.
In its June 1, 1924, edition, The Daily Colonist devoted five columns to the inside story on “mystery ship” Ardenza. After detailing the flight of Mr. C. T. Steven, the ship’s owner, from Scotland to Argentina to escape his creditors, the reporter went on to tell a tale “which set the whole Pacific Coast agog with interest. Shades of Captain Kidd, of Bloody Morgan, and all that company of rollicking swashbucklers, must surely have hovered delightedly above the rum-running Glasgow freighter, during her fantastic voyage.”
The article reported that after arriving in Victoria “without a scrap of paper as evidence of her registry, her destination, or the nature or quantity of her cargo, her career was shrouded in mystery.” That is until Able Bodied Seaman Murchison, “disgruntled with his lot in life and harbouring a grudge against his captain and shipmates, under the influence of Bass ale in a waterfront grogshop, lifted the veil of secrecy.” Murchison told of how the ship’s papers were thrown overboard, and of the drunken carousals and fierce fights that marked the voyage, as well as mutiny and even attempts to wreck the steamer. He also went into some detail explaining how the whole rum running business operated off the California coast and how the owners of Ardenza hoped to benefit from the lucrative trade.
“We left in May last year with about two dozen cases of gramophones and case goods mixed in with 27,000 cases of whiskey, to give us the right to clearance with a general cargo for Vancouver.” He said it was rather a prosaic voyage at first, but things went downhill once they were off the California coast. When they arrived off Los Angeles, no small boats came out to pick up orders since word had been received that the “prohis” (Prohibition officers) there couldn’t be fixed satisfactorily, so they steamed up the coast to sit off Half Moon Bay. Here, conditions appeared better since San Francisco’s prohis were easily persuaded for $2.50 a case “to put the telescope to the blind eye” and look the other way. But troubles arose when “bibulous San Franciscans” refused to drink Ardenza’s product. While the whisky bottles were indeed affixed with quality labels reading “Johnnie Walker” and “Black & White,” discerning imbibers were quick to catch on that while it was undoubtedly whisky, it was of “a quality never to be found on the table of a Highland connoisseur.” And where did they obtain these labels? To start with, Murchison said that there was no shortage of printing presses in San Francisco where forged labels could be run off. He added that the crew spent a long time aboard the steamer opening cases and changing labels.
At first, the volume of business was good, with the average price of a case, which probably only cost five dollars in bond to ship from Scotland, going over the side for ninety dollars. “All manners of small craft ventured out at night to Ardenza … manned by men armed to the teeth, the biggest and toughest rogues in San Francisco … hard-boiled gunmen from the Barbary Coast. For hijackers infested the waters and the game was dangerous. More than one battle was fought within full view of the Glasgow ship.” Murchison said that rum runners “outside the ring” were having a rough time of it trying to sell into the San Francisco market because of the competition from Canadian mother ships.
After three months of struggling to make a go of it, sales began to fall off dramatically since their competitors, Prince Albert and Coal Harbour, were cutting prices. The cost of a case went down from ninety dollars to eighty and then seventy dollars, and still kept dropping. Also, once the news was out in the bars and taverns of the city that Ardenza’s cargo was cheap stuff and her British Columbia rivals were peddling the quality brands, buyers’ boats stopped coming alongside. As a result, conditions on the ship worsened. Soon the crew were subsisting on “salt horse” while fresh water supplies ran dangerously low. Then the North Pacific gales rolled in and mutiny was in the air while night after night the crew continued to filch cases of whisky from the hold and all (with the exception of Captain Whittle and one of the engineers, a teetotaler) would lie around in a drunken stupor. Broken heads and lacerated features quickly became common occurrences.
In February of 1924, several weeks after abandoning the failed venture and arriving in Victoria, Ardenza was seized for debt and sold to new owners. The steamer finally obtained provisional papers from Ottawa and was to return to Scotland, but not until after she unloaded the 7,400 cases of unsold whisky cargo in the capital city. The Daily Colonist reported on the twenty-sixth of that month, “It will go into bond to await disposition by its owner.” After proceeding to Union Bay to fill coal bunkers, the ship returned to Victoria to load four to five hundred thousand feet of lumber from Victoria’s Canadian Puget Sound mill as cargo for their return voyage to the United Kingdom. Later that summer, with Ardenza long departed, the Colonist added a footnote to the tale. It had received word that the disastrous outcome of the steamer’s failed venture was probably the leading cause that led Sir John Stewart, the Scottish whisky baron who sent the “mystery ship” out on her fateful voyage to the Pacific Coast, to blow his brains out at Fingask Castle.
Overall, though, up until the fall of 1924, the deep-water liquor export shipping business working out of British Columbia ports appeared to be rolling along quite well and without undue problems. There had been a capture in May of that year by the Mexican fisheries patrol vessel Tecate off the Coronado Islands, but the seized West Coast was only a small two-masted schooner of 55 feet in length. Since the vessel had no Mexican clearance papers, boat and cargo were confiscated. Registered to the Red Star Navigation Company of Vancouver, the crew consisted of only the skipper and his wife.
The seemingly well-oiled liquor distribution system began to unravel when the steamer Quadra was seized off San Francisco on October 12, 1924. Second Engineer George Winterburn described what transpired in Ruth Greene’s Personality Ships of British Columbia. “We loaded up in Vancouver with 22,000 cases of choice liquors, wines, rums and a large quantity of beer which was all consigned to Ensenada in Mexico. Papers were arranged to show that we had been there, discharged our cargo and left again with a clear bill of health. This we had done before we even left Vancouver.”
As it happened, it was the Quadra’s first voyage in the liquor-carrying trade. She was working out of Victoria and Vancouver after undergoing reconditioning at the Victoria Machinery Depot. Originally purpose-built as a lighthouse and buoy tender, the Quadra, 174 feet, 6 inches in length, was launched in 1891 in Paisley, Scotland, as a steel screw steamer for Canada’s Department of Marine and Fisheries. A 120-horsepower quadruple-expansion four-cylinder engine drove a single screw. She had also doubled as a fisheries patrol vessel and, with these government duties (the crew wore uniforms and were well disciplined, much like the crew of a naval vessel), served as symbol of law and order up and down the coast. In one of his Harbour & Shipping articles, Hugh Garling pointed out that she was easily recognizable and a particularly distinctive vessel. “Her clipper bow, the bowsprit, the overhanging counter of her elliptical stern, her raking masts and funnel, gave her a most yacht-like appearance.” After being retired from government service, the Quadra had been purchased by Britannia Mining and Smelting Company to transport ore from Howe Sound to a Tacoma smelter. In September 1924, Archie MacGillis’s Canadian-Mexican Shipping Company purchased Quadra from Britannia Mining and chartered the steamer to Consolidated Exporters. Quadra wasn’t even out of the Strait of Juan de Fuca that October when they stopped for their first night of business.
From Juan de Fuca, Quadra sailed south to sit out off the mouth of the Columbia River, where they carried on a brisk business with the suppliers to the Portland market. They then left for San Francisco and took a position in supposedly international waters just outside the Farallon Islands and fifty miles offshore from the Golden Gate. As writer Ed Starkins describes, this location served as “a virtual open sea marketplace for smuggled liquor” throughout the early 1920s until it became too “hot” with US Coast Guard cutters. Unfortunately, Quadra was forced to sit out a bad storm for a week, but still there was no rest for the crew since they were kept busy “sacking” liquor.
When the mother ship Malahat appeared on the scene to deliver more cargo to the Quadra, the Malahat’s captain tried to bring her alongside. However, he misjudged the distance and accidently rammed her, taking the steamer’s bowsprit right off and punching a sizeable hole in her side. Bob Gisborne, who was crewing on Quadra, told Hugh Garling that his cabin was right up forward and after the collision he could almost walk right out into the sea. He said that the Quadra would have gone down in a Pacific blow. Then, while both crews were engaged repairing the breeched hull by stuffing it with mattresses to keep the sea out, they failed to maintain their usual close watch on the waters around them. They soon realized they’d made a grievous mistake when they found themselves looking down the gun barrel of the US Coast Guard cutter Shawnee’s twelve-pounder.
The Quadra just after her capture. Note the missing bowsprit, which was broken off in a collision with another mother ship, the Malahat, out on Rum Row off the Farallon Islands. US National Park Service, B05.19408.
As it happened, the Shawnee, which was stationed at San Francisco and responsible for patrolling from Cape Blanco, Oregon, down to the Mexican border, was cruising offshore keeping a sharp lookout for the 190-foot freighter Principio when it received word that Quadra might be about too. The Shawnee was a Coast Guard auxiliary steam tug, 158 feet in length with a cruising speed of ten and top speed of twelve knots. With Lieutenant Commander Charles F. “Shorty” Howell in command, she was six miles northwest of the Farallones when they spotted a vessel off on the horizon. Steaming around to seaward to cut off a possible escape to open waters, they soon identified the vessel as Quadra. Shawnee quickly went in pursuit and, once the rum runner was overhauled, gave four blasts of her whistle signalling for the mother ship to stop. A small fishboat, C-55, which just happened to be caught alongside after loading some fifty sacks of liquor, attempted to escape but after Shawnee sent a shot across her bows, gave up and surrendered. It is likely that the Malahat slipped away during the action.
The us Coast Guard cutter Shawnee lies at anchor off Sausalito on August 24, 1936. US National Park Service, B06.38479.
In Ruth Greene’s book, Personality Ships of British Columbia, George F. Winterburn, another Quadra crewman, said he would never forget the incident. “He fired a warning shot at a launch which tried to slip away. That proved conclusively to us that he meant business and would not take a few cases of liquor to let us go.” Third Mate and Bosun Bob Gisborne told Hugh Garling, “She fired one shot, he’d [the Quadra’s captain, George Ford] never been in the war before … I’d been shot at, but he wanted to stop but I said ‘he’ll never hit us.’ Next shot lifted the stern right up, so the skipper decided to stop then … They came alongside and wanted us to take the [tow] line.” Winterburn said that he hid seven cases of whisky down the double-hull tank in the engine room, and then flooded the tank in the event the cargo was seized and the ship returned. “We would at least have some fortification against melancholia or seasickness, but alas we were taken ashore next morning and I never laid eyes on her since.” Since Captain Ford refused to give his name or show his manifest and wouldn’t get steam up for San Francisco Bay, a prize crew was put aboard. Quadra was then taken in tow by the cutter along with the “fireboats” C-55 and D-905, captured while standing off waiting to load from the Quadra. Short for “fire water boats,” fireboats were the small, fast boats that would come out from US beaches and ports to pick up deliveries from Canadian vessels. Captain Ford, an ex-Navy officer, protested their arrest on the grounds that they were more than an hour’s steaming time from the US coast, therefore well out in international waters. It was to no avail.
Lieutenant Commander Howell credited his good fortune in making the sensational seizure to the rum runner’s failure to receive a perfectly innocent wireless message that somebody’s grandmother was about to die. Explaining, he said, “These wireless messages are sent from amateur shore stations. The rum-runners never send one in return. They merely receive. Innocent messages like ‘Grandmother died today,’ or ‘I am going to the ball game,’ fill the air every time the Shawnee gets ready to put out. That is why we are rarely able to find anything. They know we are going out before we start and they just steam out of sight until the coast is clear.”
When The Daily Colonist broke the story of the Quadra seizure on October 12, 1924, it said, “It is claimed on good authority if Captain Ford was able to prove that his cargo was destined for Mexico and none had been touched, then Quadra would be released. It was pointed out, however, that under the new British-US treaty signed earlier in the year no ship carrying liquor was allowed within the twelve-mile limit unless it was under the British flag and the cargo sealed.” Lieutenant Commander Howell’s report claimed that Quadra was well within the County of San Francisco, being only seven miles northwest of the Farallones. Captain Ford argued otherwise. He pointed out that he and two officers had just taken a sextant reading that set his position seventeen miles west of the island group, and there was no way Quadra could have steamed into a California port within an hour at the time they were seized. In the initial judgment given on January 5, 1925, United States District Judge John S. Partridge repeated the relevant provisions of the treaty. Probably the most pertinent provision was the one that stated that the one-hour steaming distance, used to determine whether an offence had been committed, was that of the vessel conveying the liquor into the United States: the fast American launches running into shore, rather than the slower mother ships that were actually boarded and searched.
In writing to the Commandant of the Coast Guard, the us attorney noted that the clean-cut, fine appearance of Captain Charles F. Howell and his men as they appeared in court, and the straightforward manner in which they testified, was a great credit to both the Coast Guard and the government. Archival photo published in Malcolm F. Willoughby, Rum War at Sea, United States Coast Guard, 1964.
While Bay Area residents were eager to get down to the Embarcadero and get a first-hand look at some Canadian rum pirates being brought to justice, Captain Ford let his crew know that while they were probably headed for jail, they were not to worry as arrangements were being made to get them out on bail as soon as possible. In order to achieve this goal, he ordered them all to shave, clean themselves up and put on their best clothes, since it was all going to be part of the show. So contrary to what the crowd was expecting, they were surprised to see some twenty to thirty pleasant-looking, clean-cut young men coming down the gangplank.
As Captain Ford promised, the very next day officers and crew were released on bail on bonds totalling $175,000 while their cargo of what was reported to be some twelve thousand cases of whisky and champagne was placed under federal guard. Following his crew putting on a fine display of their best behaviour for the American public, Captain Ford informed local reporters that two of Shawnee’s crew got quite drunk while on board Quadra. One even became so inebriated he had to be put in irons by the cutter’s officers.
After Quadra’s crew was released on bail, Consolidated Exporters paid them full salary and shore maintenance (most likely room and board) in order to keep them on hand for when they were called to testify and give evidence in court. As a result, they got to enjoy time ashore for eight months while collecting a wage estimated to be double that of the standard mercantile pay of the day. Rumour had it that nearly all of them appeared to be broke by the time the next payday rolled around. Ruth Greene quoted Charlie Coppins, a mate on Quadra, about his experiences once ashore. “We lived like lords in San Francisco. We had the best food, lived in hotels, and had to report to the authorities during the day.” Still, Charlie had some explaining to do since he had told his wife that he was going off fishing. Bob Gisborne did all right himself while waiting it out in San Francisco. He quickly settled into a regular routine: in the morning he’d go play pool, in the afternoon go for a swim in the public pool and then in the evening maybe take in a dance. He said there were lots of parties but since he didn’t drink, he didn’t bother going to any. On the other hand, some of the crew had their wives come down to ’Frisco for a holiday. Gisborne recalled visiting Captain Ford when he was initially locked up in a cell. “Did you know they had sheets on the bed? We never had sheets on the boat, and bacon and eggs for breakfast … he had a table with a nice cloth on it … and bananas and oranges on the table. And this is supposed to be jail.”
Hugh Garling learned that Donald McDonald Donald, who was also crewing on Quadra at the time, put his paid idleness ashore to good use. He purchased course books, hired a master mariner as a tutor and proceeded to study for his certificate. Before the Quadra trial ended, he’d passed his examinations to qualify as master, coastwise. While he was entirely grateful to running for where it got him, he still took a dim view of the trade and its effect on many who served on the rum ships. “Rum runnin’ spoils a man’s morale and might tend to make him dissatisfied wi’ ordinary wages when he has to go back to work. So I thought I’d get out before I got wedded to it. ’Tis an enticin’ lazy pastime.”
On January 5, 1925, Judge Partridge handed down his decision that the seizure of Quadra “with its supposed cargo of illicit liquor, valued at $500,000, was regular in every way, and not in contravention of any treaty” according to Victoria’s Daily Colonist. Objections to the admitting of some of the evidence were rejected and the trial proceeded. Along with the captain, officers and crew of the Quadra, Vincent Quartararo and Charles H. Belanger were also charged with conspiracy to violate the National Prohibition Act and the Tariff Act of 1922. (The Fordney–McCumber Tariff Act was a law that raised American tariffs on many imported goods to protect factories and farms.) Quartararo, who was based on shore in San Francisco, was claimed to be the most active agent of the conspiracy working for Consolidated Exporters while Belanger served as its director in San Francisco.
It was charged that while sitting off the Farallones, the captains of the mother ships Malahat, Coal Harbour and Quadra were in constant contact with Quartararo and Belanger and, to some extent, acting under their orders. It was discovered that Belanger, as the Bay Area director for Consolidated Exporters, arranged for and had sent out to Malahat the burlap sacking used to pass over the liquor to Quadra. US government evidence found that Belanger was also the one giving the orders to transfer liquor from one vessel to another and even to transport designated liquor from ship to shore. He also made the arrangements for Quadra to be supplied with fuel oil from the Bay Area. When Chief Justice Taft finally delivered the opinion of the court, on April 11, 1927, some two years later, it was pointed out that “none of the three seagoing vessels proceeded to their destinations officially described in their ship’s papers, but cruised up and down between the Farallones and the Golden Gate, where the exchanges of liquor and sacks were made, and where the needed [fuel] oil was delivered, and from which the liquor was carried by small boats to a landing place called Oakland Creek in San Francisco.”
As the trial proceeded, it soon proved a great source of fascination and amusement to both the Canadian and American public. On 15 March 1925, The Daily Colonist reported that Federal Judge Partridge’s court “took on an appearance of an old time saloon when customs officers wheeled evidence into court tank after tank of beer, barrel after barrel of whiskey, case after case of wines, cordials, champagnes and rums … All that was missing was the brass bar … Jurors gasped, court attaches mumbled ‘Aaahs’ and ‘Ooohs’ and the court audience generally smiled … It was a pleasing sight for some and a scene that they had not witnessed for years, that is, the appearance of so much whiskey. They never anticipated that they would gaze on such a quantity and be so near to it, and ‘yet so far away.’” It was even too much for Judge Partridge, who refused to allow the court clerk to take custody of the liquor and leave it in the building overnight. Instead he ordered, “Take it back to the Customs services or to the Inland Revenue, whose custody it belongs. Bring it back again … if necessary, but do not leave it here.” As it was, it took several trucks to transport the liquor back to the appraiser’s building.
Also admitted as evidence—and objected to by the defence attorneys—were eighty-three one-dollar bills cut in two with liquor orders written on them associated with Mr. Quartararo. As the most active agent of the conspiracy on shore, he was charged with sending them out to the officers of the rum runners to identify his agents for the safe delivery of the liquor.
One of the key points that the American government built their case on was whether Quadra was indeed within an hour’s steaming of American waters. It was argued that the ship was seized at a distance of 5.7 miles from the Farallon Islands, so a test was made with the launch C-55, which was caught with liquor aboard. It revealed that it could traverse 6.6 miles in an hour.
On April 3, 1925, the trial came to a close and the jury presented its judgment. While thirty-two members of the crew of Quadra were acquitted, twelve defendants were found guilty. Captain George Ford, First Mate George Harris, Second Mate Joseph Evelyn and Chief Engineer J. H. Mason, along with Vincent Quartararo, Charles H. Belanger and six others were all found guilty on a charge of conspiracy to violate Prohibition laws. Ford received a two-year jail sentence and a ten-thousand-dollar fine; George Harris, thirteen months; Evelyn, ten months; and Mason, a five-hundred-dollar fine. Quartararo and Belanger received two years and a ten-thousand-dollar fine each. Four operators of San Francisco “liquor boat runners” received eight months’ imprisonment, and the two others, who pleaded guilty, didn’t receive their sentences that day. Later that year, on July 19, Quadra’s supercargo, J. A. McLennan, was fined twenty-five thousand dollars.
When The Daily Colonist reported on the judgment and sentencing the following day, it noted that the cargo on board was estimated to be worth $500,000 “local price” and, once out on the streets of San Francisco, worth as much as $1,000,000. It also noted that while Captain Ford was now a Vancouver resident, he was actually a Victoria man, as were most of his crew, who had families there. As is happened, many of the shareholders of Consolidated Exporters, as shown in the original indictment, included men from BC’s capital city. The liquor export consortium, along with the captain and officers of Quadra, appealed the ruling of the United States circuit court and a week later the officers, along with Quartararo and Belanger, who were all imprisoned in Ingleside Jail, were released on bail. The appeal, Ford et al. v. United States, questioned Judge Partridge’s comment and rulings relative to Quadra’s seizure on the high seas. The case was to take some two years before Chief Justice Taft of the US Supreme Court came to a decision with the help of a jury. He overruled their contentions, thereby validating the lower court’s judgment. According to the April 12, 1927, Daily Colonist, persons aboard vessels may be tried for conspiracy to violate Prohibition laws “when they have entered into an arrangement with persons ashore to accomplish that end, and cannot plead innocence because they had not actually violated the prohibition of customs laws by sending liquor ashore.”
Captain Ford, First Mate Harris and Second Mate Evelyn appealed the verdict but in San Francisco on June 22, 1927, Federal Judge Frank H. Kerrigan’s court decided in favour of the United States Supreme Court mandate, affirming the decision of the United States circuit court, and the sentences and convictions were confirmed. (Meanwhile, according to British Columbia historian and writer George Nicolson, while all this litigation was going back and forth, apparently a sizeable quantity of Quadra’s liquor cargo “evaporated.”)
As a consequence, Captain Ford slipped away back to Canada, as did four members of the crew. Unfortunately, by the time the case was over and done with, Quadra had deteriorated and rotted away at her anchorage near Government Island, the US Coast Guard’s Base 11 in the Oakland Estuary. In March 1929, one of British Columbia’s most historic vessels, was sold at auction for $1,625 and finally in August 1931, depending on the source, she was either scrapped or towed to Los Angeles for use as a fish barge.
Three days following the capture of Quadra off the California coast in October 1924, Sherriff H. W. Goggin seized the steamship Prince Albert as she lay alongside the Yarrows shipyard dock in Esquimalt, BC, waiting to be overhauled. The Commercial Cable Company had laid two lawsuits against the rum running mother ship through 1924 and 1925 in two separate incidents off California’s Rum Row for damaging their Pacific telegraph cable that ran underwater from San Francisco to Honolulu.
One of those who served aboard the Prince Albert prior to her being seized was D. O. MacKenzie, a fireman during her three rum running voyages through 1923 and 1924. MacKenzie had initially signed on to the Prince Albert—a steel steamer 232 feet in length—as a deckhand while she was registered with Grand Trunk Pacific Coast Steamship Company. At that time, she was a passenger and freight vessel on the Queen Charlotte Islands (today’s Haida Gwaii) where, as a young man, MacKenzie was required to learn the ropes: handling general freight, loading cargos of canned salmon and shovelling tons of coal ashore at the canneries.
Although the steamer was registered under Grand Trunk Pacific, Western Freighters purchased the vessel from the Canadian National Railway in September 1923. (A number of Canadian railways that were on the point of bankruptcy had been taken over by the federal government, including the Canadian Northern Railway in 1917 and the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in 1920. These two western railways, along with some other lines, were consolidated as the Canadian National Railways in 1923.)
Western Freighters Limited, with its head office in downtown Vancouver, was an American-controlled liquor shipping enterprise. As author Philip Metcalfe explained, it was Roy Olmstead, who had been kicked out of the Seattle police force, who came up with the idea of setting up a Canadian-based office. Metcalfe noted that instead of “the quiet respectability that characterized the Canadian hotel men and capitalists behind Consolidated Exporters, Western Freighters was organized by a colourful group of San Francisco bootleggers. Olmstead himself invested $31,000 under the name of ‘Steele’ and was listed as a director.” With its office located across the line in British Columbia, Western Freighters was able to keep Prince Albert’s Canadian registry, but more importantly her British flag. According to Metcalfe, Joseph William Hobbs—one of Vancouver’s most colourful personalities and a prominent businessman who promoted the city’s tallest skyscraper, the Marine Building—was Western Freighters’ chief supplier of Canadian liquor. (Hobbs was listed in the 1923 Vancouver city directory as “Manufacturers Agent, representing W & A Gilbey Ltd. (London, Eng.) and Peter Dawson Ltd. Glasgow, Scotland.”)
D. O. MacKenzie wrote of his experiences in The Bulletin: Quarterly Journal of the Maritime Museum of British Columbia in 1980. MacKenzie soon discovered that Prince Albert’s first trip as a mother ship in the fall of 1923 was a far different undertaking from what he had experienced working on her when she was a coastal steamer. They loaded eight thousand cases of liquor aboard in Vancouver harbour and then shifted over to New Westminster where another four thousand cases, along with barrels of bottled beer, were taken on at the Northern Pacific dock. Once her holds were filled, Prince Albert steamed down the coast to drop anchor at an agreed-upon location off the Farallon Islands. After a few weeks sitting out on Rum Row, the skipper remarked one day after having trouble raising the anchor that they’d probably got hung up on the Pacific telegraph cable. The skipper would have been aware of the cable and would have had some idea where it had been laid. This was to be the first of two incidents that would come back to haunt them.
MacKenzie noted that generally it was a rather quiet life and, although they were a floating booze emporium, it was the driest ship he ever worked on. One bottle of beer was given out at lunch time and breaking into the cargo meant instant dismissal. Overall, living conditions on the ship were good and they were fed the best of food since they were kept well supplied by the small fishing craft that came alongside for liquor orders. The larger items such as water and forty-five-gallon drums of fuel oil, along with fresh fruit and other food supplies, were brought out on the American lumber schooner Point Reyes. While some of the crew were preoccupied with the task of pumping fresh water and hoisting the drums of oil aboard, MacKenzie said that their other primary endeavour was to open up the hundreds of cases of liquor and repack them in burlap sacks in order to provide better stowage in small boats.
Prince Albert sitting out on Rum Row, Ensenada, in the early 1930s, loaded down to the gunnels with liquor. Fraser Miles collection.
It was on their third trip out during the winter of 1923–24, with the hatches filled with twelve thousand cases of whisky and beer, that MacKenzie described how, again off the Farallones, they came to foul their anchor, this time for certain, on the underwater cable. He recalled that the weather hadn’t improved any so the ship stuck to drifting and steaming back to position, as was so often required of mother ships sitting out on Rum Row. Attempts were made to anchor during calm spells and finally they were successful. Unfortunately, when bad weather returned and the captain called for the anchor to be raised, it got caught up on the Pacific cable.
More than likely, the anchor was dragging a lot due to the vessel constantly having to manoeuvre to stay in position. After the cable was brought up hanging on one of the anchor flukes, a line was tied around the cable and the anchor lowered sufficiently to clear the cable so it could be dropped back into the sea. MacKenzie noted that once free, they returned to their favoured spot a few days later, where the cable layer and repair ship Restorer appeared on the scene. (It is interesting to note that no one ever owned up to actually cutting the cable to free their anchor.) Looking back, MacKenzie believed the Restorer was there to take photographs to be submitted later in their lawsuit against Western Freighters. (The steel twin screw steamer—which was 358 feet in length and built as a cable vessel in 1903 at the shipyard of Armstrong Whitworth & Company in Newcastle, England—was owned by the Commercial Pacific Cable Company, New York.)
As it happened, Bent Sivertz, who was eighteen years old at the time, signed on Restorer in early January 1924 as an able seaman, and was aboard when they arrived off the Farallones later that month to try and locate the damaged Pacific cable and make necessary repairs. Sivertz was assisting the two bowmen, who sat in boatswain’s chairs slung from a davit either side of the bow. Here, they were in the perfect position to ascertain the state of the cable as it was pulled up to the surface by a grapnel attached to a line hauled in on the cable winch on the foredeck. Once it was out of the water, they ran along it, examining it for holes or nicks in its armour or insulation that would have caused a short circuit. They weren’t seeing any abrasions when all of a sudden, they came up with a bitter end. The cable men had never seen the likes of it; someone had cut the cable clean through with an axe. In his autobiography, The Life of Bent Gestur Sivertz: A Seaman, a Teacher, and a Worker in the Canadian Arctic, Sivertz explained, “A ship had hooked the cable on an anchor, hoisted it up to her anchor hawsepipe, and instead of clearing it in seaman-like fashion, had tried to break it.” But not only that, after Restorer picked up the other end of the cable, they discovered damage all along it with tarred jute torn off, the cable partially flattened and strands of the heavy armour wire broken and wrapped around the cable in loops and whorls. As it appeared to the cable ship crew, Prince Albert’s captain had attempted to under-run (pass under) the cable and then put the helm hard over, to jump the cable off. When that didn’t work, they grabbed an axe.
Once the repair job was completed, Restorer went into San Francisco to lay at the Embarcadero to await orders to make their way to Guam. It was here they learned Prince Albert had proceeded into San Francisco the day after the cable went dead. Although it was common knowledge that the vessel was an out and out rum runner, she wasn’t arrested once inside American waters. This was due to the fact that she was protected under the “right of innocent passage,” considered the first law of the sea, which allows for a vessel to pass through the territorial waters of another state so long as it is not prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal state.
It was quite common all through the Prohibition years for shipping outbound from Europe with liquor consignments aboard destined for Vancouver to enter San Francisco and possibly discharge other cargo, as well as take on water or fuel, or have repairs made. Still, one is left wondering why the American authorities went easy on the mother ship Prince Albert, especially after their somewhat controversial seizure of Quadra. Perhaps it was because there were colourful San Francisco bootleggers invested in Roy Olmstead’s Western Freighters shipping company and the vessel’s cargo. This question would present itself again after the capture of another mother ship, Coal Harbour, off the California coast a few months later, when the rivalry between rum running interests, and the extent that they would go to deter their competitors, would come to light in a San Francisco courtroom.
It was while they lay alongside at the Embarcadero that Restorer’s crew heard stories from American immigration authorities about the interesting condition they found captain and crew of Prince Albert in after they tied up in the Bay City. Apparently, many of them were drunk, while one had to be taken to hospital due to a knife wound. Overall, Bent Sivertz mused that from what he learned about how the ship was being run and especially how the ship’s officers would even consider freeing the Pacific cable by under-running it or severing it with an axe, he wondered if the captain was simply incompetent and the chief mate perhaps lacking enough courage to lock him up.
After reading D. O. MacKenzie’s account fifty-six years later, Sivertz congratulated him for leaving Prince Albert upon arrival back at Vancouver. The deciding incident for MacKenzie and the rest of the engine room staff was the appearance of the US Coast Guard cutter Shawnee, which caught them unawares as they all sat on deck enjoying one of the few nice days off the Farallones. The commander of the cutter had taken his ship seawards and then came down on them unnoticed, with its white hull directly in line with the sun. Although the cutter made no attempt to stop them on this occasion (they were probably outside the limit), the encounter put a damper on further adventure for nearly all aboard. MacKenzie said that the prospect of “breaking big rocks into little rocks in a San Francisco jail had no more appeal than taking the chance of being capsized while drifting around the ocean.” Sivertz agreed wholeheartedly and commented that “as a seaman during those years, I knew many men who sailed in rum runners. The majority were ruined by it, despite the high pay—or perhaps because of it. Most of us felt it best not to go into the twilight of doubtful legality and fly-by-night work that was both unproductive and boring. Many men engaged in rum running lost quality in character and seamanship.”
Back in Canadian waters, Prince Albert was put under seizure while tied to the dock in Victoria harbour. On March 5, 1925, the Commercial Pacific Cable Company made an application to the Admiralty court for conversion of the vessel into cash in order to recoup the fines for the two legal claims made against the steamer for damage to the San Francisco–Honolulu cable. The first fine was $99,124 for the first instance that occurred on November 13, 1923, and the second was $91,932 for intentionally severing the cable on January 2, 1924. Apparently the Prince Albert’s owners, Western Freighters, were ultimately able to avoid payment by transferring ownership to a dummy company. In 1927, she was owned by Pan American Shipping Company and then in 1930, she was bought by the Atlantic & Pacific Navigation Company, a shipping arm of the Reifel family. As a result, Prince Albert ended up seeing the Prohibition years to their end while serving as a mother ship off Rum Row, Ensenada. By 1935, she was back on Canada’s West Coast working as a tug with Badwater Towing Company Limited of Vancouver. In March 1945 she towed what was claimed to be the largest Davis raft of logs ever to go up the Fraser River and may have been owned by the Gibson brothers’ logging company by this time. By 1949 she was registered under the name of the Tahsis Company of Vancouver, a large lumber mill venture constructed at the head of Tahsis Inlet and owned by the Gibson brothers, recognized pioneers in Vancouver Island’s West Coast forest industry.
By early 1925, as more rum running vessels were being seized by the US Coast Guard or lost to marine mishap, there was some concern over the state of the west coast liquor supply fleet and whether it was up to meeting the demands of the export trade. On January 4, 1925, Victoria’s Daily Colonist reported the unsettling news that “if the report regarding the Malahat is confirmed, it will leave but two liquor carriers in operation out of Victoria and Vancouver. These are the Principio and Stadacona. The Quadra is held at San Francisco after being seized by the US cutter Shawnee as an alleged rum-runner; the Prince Albert is tied up here awaiting the decision on the Commercial Pacific Cable Company’s suit for damages, while the Malahat is believed sunk.” (This report, which originated in Los Angeles, suggested that Malahat may have been lost in a bad storm, which was found to be erroneous a few days later.) It would seem then that running liquor by mother ships was in danger of coming to an end, as other news-grabbing US Coast Guard seizures continued to occur through 1925.