CHAPTER
9
The sun had barely risen when the customs officer began his rounds along the Oak Bay waterfront in Victoria. Something aroused his suspicions, and he hastened along the beach. There in the sand close by the water lay two incubators. Just offshore, a schooner, all sails flying, was headed out “at a steamboat rate” toward Discovery Island.
“Aha,” thought the officer, “what have we here? Someone has clearly been smuggling.” Doubling his suspicions, a horse-drawn wagon came rumbling down the road to the beach “giving him a new idea as to the mysterious proceedings going on around him.” It was too late for him to hide and watch what went on, so he hailed the two men in the wagon, one Chinese, one white. They denied that they were doing anything wrong and trundled back away from the beach.
Too late, the customs officer decided he should have stopped the wagon from leaving and found out who the men were. “There was,” recounted the Colonist, “good reason why such an outfit should be secured.” The large white sailing vessel was believed to have come from Bellingham Bay, presumably with the two large incubators aboard. “They are of immense size, and were evidently intended for someone entering the ranching industry,” possibly to be used for hatching chicks.
The officer believed that the schooner had landed far more than just the incubators, but there was no sign of any other contraband. The incubators were seized for evidence, but presumably the trial never took place, for there is no further mention of the case in the press.
Such was the lighter side of smuggling in 19th- and early 20th-century British Columbia. There was very little that could not be smuggled into or out of Canada if there was enough profit in it. In 1907, for example, a “vigilant customs officer” spied a Chinese woman coming off a ship much stouter than when she had begun her visit. A subsequent search after she tried to run away revealed a large parcel of embroidery from Hong Kong. In 1908, three “Italians” were caught as they made their way off the ocean liner Empress of India. They had, they said, gone aboard to see about getting a job, but they carried a bundle with them when they left. Opened by customs, it revealed embroidered shawls and other goods.
Sometimes the courts decided that accused smugglers had not been smuggling at all, according to the letter of the law. In March 1897, eagle-eyed customs officers searched the cargo aboard the steamer Walla Walla. Destined for San Francisco, the ship listed bales of sheepskins, salt hides and similar cargo. But “information received, of an unusually reliable character” suggested not all was so innocent. “Cunningly concealed within them [the sheepskins] were deer hides of no small value.” At the time, the export of raw deer skins was illegal. A subsequent trial revealed that 777 skins were hidden on the ship.
However, said the first judge, there was no evidence that an illegal act had been committed, since mere possession of the skins was not illegal. Yes, said the second judge in the appeal court, but according to the Customs Act, the onus was on the accused to prove his innocence. The case must be retried. In January of 1898, the accused smuggler was again acquitted. “May I have my deer skins back?” he asked. No, said the Crown, we want to appeal again. By then, though, the papers seemed to have tired of the case, for nothing more was reported.
The hue and cry over the exportation of deer skins was far from over. The following year, dealers tried to send off 50 sacks of “raw hides” on Walla Walla, treated in such a way that it was difficult to ascertain what kind of animal they came from. Again, authorities accused them of smuggling illegal raw skins. The would-be exporters claimed the export was perfectly legal because the skins had been partially tanned. To prove their point, they had a witness clean and dry a hide in court. The defence submitted correspondence with the government agreeing that tanned hides were legal for export. The prosecution brought forward a learned witness from the provincial museum who said the skins were not tanned.
In the end, the court found for the defence, and the charge of illegal export was dismissed. The company, which had found an American market for deer hides, was now presumably able to ship the 18,000 it had on hand, in addition to the 3,000 already shipped. Legislators were poor losers. In the next session of the house, a member proposed new wording for the Game Protection Act, trying to prevent the indiscriminate slaughter of deer. The argument about the export of skins went on for years, some saying that to allow the killing of deer and the exportation of skins, raw or not, would practically exterminate the deer population on Vancouver Island—a somewhat ironic prediction given today’s reality.
Finally, in 1904, the legislature passed an act making it illegal to kill a deer in order to sell any part of it and banning the export of any deer hide, whether raw or tanned. It is not known whether this ended the trade in skins or if smugglers simply became more adept.
Some smugglers took advantage of the long land border between British Columbia and the United States. The New York Times carried a squib in 1900 alluding to “a great deal of smuggling in recent days.” Miners’ supplies were once more in question, but this time the smuggled goods were headed south. Two men had attempted to lead five pack horses loaded with goods from British Columbia to the mines in the Mount Baker district of Washington State, but were caught near the border.
In 1905, another customs inspector told of all the smuggling that went on between rural areas of the Fraser Valley and towns across the border to the south. Many farmers, he said, saw no harm in crossing over to buy the supplies, machinery and provisions they wanted. “They have no intention of smuggling . . . it is simply a matter of convenience and saving of time. Reports have circulated that livestock and immense quantities of groceries have been brought across without the knowledge of customs.”
That same year, readers were all agog at the idea that “about a thousand women of Vancouver, Victoria and other cities are wearing dainty apparel on which the duty has not been paid,” a duty that would have amounted to about 35 cents per item. The smuggler in this case did himself in. As he was selling the “waists,” he saw a Turkish boy whom he accused of defrauding him of $60. At the police station, the boy turned on his accuser, and the story of the shirtwaists emerged. His method of smuggling was to “place about 100 waists in two overcoats, roll them up on a seat or in the racks and cross the line, which he always did without difficulty.”
As opium smugglers had discovered and liquor smugglers during American Prohibition would gleefully determine, the inlets, straits and island coastlines just across Juan de Fuca Strait from Vancouver and Victoria were an open invitation to smuggling. So frequent were the dashes from one side of the border to the other with foodstuffs, supplies, machinery, liquor, cigarettes and farm produce that few outside the customs services of the United States and Canada gave the trade a second thought. Every once in a while, though, customs officers would swoop. In 1887, for example, the New York Times reported that the ship Ida Wilson had been seized by Canadian customs officers, who took possession of 300 sheep and other stock on board. “It is said,” reported the Times with remarkable straight-facedness, “that smuggling has been systematically practised in this locality.”
In 1894, a customs officer, possibly the same one who had come upon the incubators, “happened to be out at Oak Bay” one evening when he saw a small American boat landing something. He made an inventory of the groceries thus landed and then seized them and the boat, much to the captain’s disgust, since he had no other way of getting home. “Investigation into the sloop’s smuggling operations brought to light the fact that she was bringing the goods at wholesale from the American side, to be retailed in this city.”
Cigars and tobacco were other popular items with smugglers and their customers. A ship’s pilot from Seattle was arrested in 1898 and charged with smuggling cigars from Seattle to Victoria. He had, authorities suggested, been doing this for some time, and various small hotels around town were offering the smuggled items for sale. In 1908, “what the inland revenue officer believe to be an organized scheme of smuggling was nipped in the bud last night, when they discovered in the bar of the Negro Porter’s Club, on Water street, a box of cigars without the necessary label.” They were very good cigars too, 20 cents each if brought over legally. The secretary of the club was fined $50 and costs.
What fun it was for the reporter: “This is a tale,” revealed the Colonist in 1908, “of daring-do on the waterfront; of the bold, bad contrabandist and the exciseman; and of how the customs man played detective and a cigar dealer and a captain paid a fine of $100 for smuggling some tobacco.”
The exciseman had apparently done work worthy of Sherlock Holmes, much in vogue in 1908, finding three caddies of smuggled tobacco that had been delivered when “the lynx-eyed customs man” was not there to see it. Though the customs agent had his suspicions, he could find nothing when he searched. He waited and saw an expressman drive away from the address he was watching and go to a schooner on the waterfront. He pounced and discovered the contraband on board, resulting in arrests, trials and small fines all around.
The following year, customs seized 3,300 cigars at Nanaimo from the ship Georgia. Finding them had not been easy; a preliminary search turned up nothing, since they were hidden in the water tank. Believing himself safe, the Chinese smuggler took the cigars out and prepared to sell them, but he was turned in by a shipmate.
Chinese wine, tobacco, cattle, sugar shipped south in sacks, apples, shoes and playing cards were all opportunities for the smuggler—as were strawberries. In 1894, customs officers captured a 25-foot (7.5-metre) sloop at Cadboro Bay and confiscated its load of “the best strawberries Orcas Island can produce, which were being smuggled for sale here.”
The best sting of all took place in an attempt to stop wool smuggling. Through to the 20th century, wool was cheaper on the Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island than it was on the San Juans and in Washington State. A hefty tariff was imposed on any wool brought south; records showed that almost no wool had been legally imported over the years, although much wool had been sold. But short of actually catching the smugglers in the act of crossing the border and landing fleeces, how could illicit wool be identified?
In a 1902 dispatch from the American side, a reporter outlined the situation. Many Native people, he wrote, were raising sheep along the east coast of Vancouver Island, especially on the Saanich Peninsula, and on the small islets on the Canadian side of the border. Stuart Island, “long bearing an ill name as a smugglers’ rendezvous, is said to be the centre of operations on the American side.”
In the dark of night, the Native sheep farmers arrived on the rocky shores of the American islands with bales of wool. Met on the beach by the crews of small, fast sloops, they turned over the wool in return for whisky, tobacco, calico cloth and guns. According to the reporter:
Very quietly, the sloops are loaded with the white bales. Without lights they slip away into the blackness, while the natives noisily make their way back to the large potlatch houses . . . Once away from the shore, the sloops with all sail on, make speedy passage to the American side. The run of a few miles is soon accomplished. The wool is stored in the warehouses. Unlike stamped opium, it cannot be identified. With that of his own flocks, the smuggler can market it openly and without fear.
In 1905, customs agents came up with an answer to the problem. In sheep-shearing season, two agents disguised themselves as seal hunters and rowed a small boat across to the Canadian islands, where they began visiting every sheep ranch they could find. How interesting this process is, they said to the ranchers, meanwhile inserting surreptitiously into the fleeces wooden skewers that could not be seen from the outside of the bale.
Customs had long been sure that Alfred Burke, a resident of the San Juans’ Shaw Island, was a frequent smuggler of many items, wool foremost among them. On South Pender Island, the disguised customs agents came upon Burke, described as small, of quiet demeanour, some 70 years old, “bent and wrinkled and gray, but still active, agile and alert,” according to the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Burke was travelling in a slender rowboat stained dull black so it could not easily be seen from a distance. They had a chat, then watched as Burke set out for Orcas Island. The agents followed; in a store warehouse, they found half a ton of wool, run through with their skewers. They arrested Burke, but he evaded charges because the customs officers had not actually seen him cross the border with the wool. The wool was confiscated and sold, depriving Burke of his anticipated profit.
The customs officer in charge was confident they had seriously reduced the amount of smuggling that would henceforth take place. “[He] is determined to make wool smuggling so hazardous that few are likely to engage in it,” the Post Intelligencer declared.
By 1907, customs agents boasted that large-scale smuggling on Puget Sound had been stopped for good. “We have been unable to unearth anything exciting for a long time.” They still had to watch for a few Chinese or Japanese who tried to smuggle themselves south, and Canadian fishermen occasionally would try to send their fish to the American side. They found a little opium on board boats, but “as far as the smuggling operations go our experiences with operators are decidedly limited in number these days,” reported a lieutenant aboard a US revenue cutter stationed at Port Townsend. “They are not operating on a scale of any size and in my estimation have deserted the water as their field of action and try now to get across the border by train or in teams.”
Little more than a decade later, when the United States banned the sale of alcoholic beverages, the situation changed completely.