THERE ARE TIMES WHEN HISTORY SEEMS SO close, you can almost reach out and touch it.
The beaches and coastal inlets around my small Rhode Island town are unchanging places where the past can still wash in on the tide, bringing the same dark nights, sudden lights, disembodied voices and sounds of speedboat engines known to residents here during the 1920s rum-running era. My father recalls being awakened, at age eight, by a commotion on the shore below his family home. Bootleggers! Breathless, he watched from his window as their headlights danced across the sand.
Black Duck was written out of this immediate local memory, and features a notorious rumrunner craft of that name, which really did smuggle thousands of cases of liquor in to our shores during Prohibition before meeting her final fate. Manned by a crew of four from communities around Narragansett Bay, the Black Duck ferried goods off foreign ships from Canada, Europe and the West Indies. These boats moored along the southern New England coast outside U.S. territorial limits, beyond the legal reach of the Coast Guard. Rum Row, they came to be known, and as the decade wore on, their numbers increased until a variety of freighters, schooners, sailing craft and fishing boats stretched for miles at sea, each awaiting contact with a shore runner like the Black Duck.
There wasn’t much the government could do about this. America’s 1919 Prohibition law against the consumption or sale of liquor pitted a poorly funded assortment of policing agencies against a black market driven equally by the country’s mounting thirst for liquor and the enormous profits up for grabs to those who could supply it. The Duck was just one among many smuggling craft, some locally owned, some built, funded and backed by crime syndicates, competing against each other along the shore, often with bloody results.
The Black Duck’s crew ran its smuggling operations at night, the darker the better, and often in bad weather to avoid detection. A true speedboat of her day, she was outfitted with a pair of 300-horsepower World War I airplane engines, enabling her to outrun most government boats. In addition, the men on board knew their coast well, and had the advantage of friends and allies onshore who could help them hide at short notice. Over time, their narrow escapes took on a sort of Robin Hood–like aura. And when, on the night of December 29, 1929, the crew was fired on, in dense fog, by a Coast Guard cutter that had apparently been lying in wait tied up to a bell buoy, the reaction in local communities was outrage. Three men died in a barrage of machine-gun bullets; a fourth, the boat’s captain, was shot through the hand.
Protest came from all sides as many questioned whether “fair warning” had been given to the unarmed boat. A riot against the Coast Guard broke out in Boston. Threats were made against the family of the skipper who ordered the shooting. There was vandalism of Coast Guard stations, and politicians responding to public outcry demanded that the guardsmen involved be charged with murder and brought to trial. The furor carried all the way to Washington, D.C., where lawmakers, already alarmed by the dramatic rise in smuggling-related violence, began to look with new eyes at the problem. Demands were made in Congress for repeal of Prohibition. Meanwhile, reporting on the incident increased the general public’s awareness of the pitfalls of enforcing such regulations. Opinions wavered, then were swayed. Four years later, in December of 1933, the “noble experiment” for enforced sobriety in America ended when Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment, repealing the law.
Within weeks of the killings, the skipper and crew of patrol boat CG-290 were cleared by a grand jury of all wrongdoing. “Fair warning” was given the smugglers, the Coast Guard insisted. Testimony was recorded in court to back this up. And yet doubts remained, and have remained down to the present, as to what really occurred out on the water that foggy night. Did the Coast Guard, either by design or in frustration, fire without warning on an unarmed vessel? Was this a case of authorities bringing undue force to bear? Even more interesting, had CG-290 been tipped off to the Black Duck’s route? If so, who was responsible: a competing crime organization, or an honest citizen attempting to uphold the law? The mystery remains unsolved to this day.