‘You grew up with secrets’: A century later, Nova Scotia’s rum-running legacy lives on

For Gary Kent, the heyday of rum-running in Nova Scotia isn’t just history from 100 years ago, but part of the cherished memories passed down to him by his father.

Growing up in a rum-running family in Yarmouth, Kent said he was told at a very early age not to talk to anyone about what his father, Oland, did for a living.

“You grew up with secrets, family secrets of our relatives,” he said.

According to Kent, his mother kept a stuffed owl in the window of their home. If the owl wasn’t there, it warned his father that police were around and he should avoid the house.

Kent drew on his childhood memories and the stories his father shared to write a fictionalized account of the period in his 2006 book, The Coverunners.

His father was far from alone. In 1924, rum-running was big business in Nova Scotia.

With the province’s fishing industry in a slump in the 1920s and 1930s, many chose to put their maritime skills to more profitable use transporting alcohol to the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S.

Prohibition came into effect in the U.S. in 1920 and in Nova Scotia in 1921. But unlike the U.S., while Canadian law prohibited the consumption and sale of alcoholic beverages within Canada, it did not prohibit their manufacture and export.

Many Nova Scotians took advantage of this loophole.

“A lot had to do with the cod fishing industry and it was a living but it wasn’t great, whereas rum-running you can make a few thousand dollars a trip if you were an ordinary seaman, compared to maybe $50 for the same amount of time if you were a cod fisherman,” Kent said.

“It was very lucrative in comparison.”

Nova Scotia an ideal location

Adrian Morrison, curator of the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenburg, said the province’s location made it ideal for the trade.

According to Morrison, most rum-runners in the province would pick up their cargo from the warehouses in Saint Pierre and Miquelon, off Newfoundland. Being part of France, it did not have prohibition.

From there, he said they would make their way down the Eastern Seaboard and position themselves at least 12 miles from shore, in international waters outside of U.S. jurisdiction, in what came to be called rum row.

Smaller vessels would come from the mainland to buy the cargo, often after exchanging secret codes to show they were bona fide buyers, and then smuggle the alcohol back into the United States.

In his 1979 book The Black Ships: Rumrunners of Prohibition, Massachusetts author Everett Allen quotes a Nova Scotia schooner crew member who said rum row was “like going to a supermarket.”

Morrison said not every community in Nova Scotia participated in rum-running but it was widespread across the province.

“In somewhere like Lunenburg, running would became a critically important part of the economy during those prohibition years early in the 1920s,” he said.

“In 1925, for example, the Maritime Merchant reported that approximately half of Lunenburg’s fleet was engaged in running.”

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In the 1920’s and 30’s – many sailors in Nova Scotia did the unthinkable – they stopped fishing and became international smugglers.

Allen said a number of Nova Scotia schooners were chartered by Americans for rum-running and crewed by Nova Scotians.

“The money involved in provisioning the vessels and paying the crews has all been spent in the province and has been no small factor in the prosperity of the province,” Everett said.

U.S. Coast Guard cracks down

In the first years of prohibition, doing business on rum row was a fairly safe exercise as the sheer number of rum-running vessels from Nova Scotia proved impossible for the U.S. Coast Guard to tackle.

A 1922 report by the Federal Prohibition Commission said there were hundreds of so-called mother ships off the U.S. coast, including 60 off the Jersey shore alone.

Coast Guard vessels were outnumbered four to one in 1924, according to a 2001 book called Intelligence in the Rum War at Sea 1920-1933 by Eric Ensign, who was a lieutenant with the U.S. Coast Guard.

In response, the U.S. government greatly expanded the coast guard’s fleet in 1924, adding 20 refurbished navy destroyers, 223 cabin cruiser-type boats and 100 smaller motorized vessels.

Morrison said rum-runners in turn began to build purpose-built vessels that were faster, lower to the water and painted in drab colours that made them harder to spot and allowed them to better outrun the authorities.

Many also included metal reinforced sections to shield them from bullets.

According to Kent, resourceful rum-runners adapted the latest technology to give them as much speed on the water as possible.

“Some of them took the big Duesenberg 16-cylinder motors, and the big Cadillac 16-cylinders at the time, and my dad was involved in taking two of those motors and putting them in the back of a small boat,” Kent said.

Kent said a rum-runner in Lunenburg put an airplane engine with a propeller on the back of his boat, noting that what it lacked in stealth it made up for in speed.

Although the risk of being caught increased after 1924, the usual punishment for rum-runners was a fine or short period of imprisonment, according to Morrison, and the rewards were far greater.

But rum-running could be deadly.

In 1929, I’m Alone, a Lunenburg-registered vessel and one of the most successful rum-runners, sank after being shelled by the U.S. Coast Guard patrol boat Dexter in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in the death of one crew member.

Prohibition ended in Nova Scotia in 1930 and 1933 in the U.S., bringing a gradual end to the rum-runners.

As Kent put it in his book: “These men were not violent gangsters and mobsters but for the most part, straightforward, well-meaning men who were just trying to make an honest living, albeit in a dishonest way.”