Nova Scotia (41 page)

   
Nova Scotian boat builders were probably never in a happier
disposition. Twenty-five craft were made exclusively for this new
purpose in Meteghan, Shelburne, Mahone Bay, Lunenburg, Liverpool,
Dayspring and elsewhere. A true rum-runner was long and low (when
loaded) and probably painted grey – for obvious reasons. It was a
wooden boat with a low deckhouse and slightly more formidable
wheelhouse. An average runner might be 31.5 metres in length, 6.5
metres wide at the centre. It was built to haul maximum cargo but
with a profile as low to the water as possible. Although these
boats often had substantial Fairbanks-Morse engines, they were not
particularly fast. Cruising speeds would only run at about ten
knots. They were also sulim, making them somewhat shaky in rough
seas. Close to American shores, they met up with faster forty-knot
boats that would scoot the goods ashore before the Coast Guard
could show up.

   
Lacking speed, the Nova Scotian runners used whatever means
they could to avoid getting caught if detected, including the
environmentally unfriendly method of spewing out a smoke screen
from a smoke generator or stuffing oily rags into the engine
exhaust.

“Once a Scrapper…”

The story of the Bluenose
rum-runners is one of fact, fancy and legend. Lives were lost,
great fortunes were made and there was a general sense of
high-spirited daring and adventure. For the most part, it was an
amoral business entered into by fishermen who saw their traditional
livelihood dwindling because of economic factors at work outside
the boundaries of Nova Scotia. It may have been a way of fighting
back, of making a fortune or asserting the defiant and independent
spirit that has always been kin to these men of the sea. Perhaps no
one embodies this spirit more than rum-runner par excellence Jack
Randell.

   
In his lively book
Bluenose Justice
, Dean Jobb captures the story of Jack Randell of
Lunenburg, whose motto was “once a scrapper, always a scrapper.”
Randell didn’t have one of the fancy new specially designed
rum-running vessels. Instead, his boss, Big Jamie Clark, had
purchased the 38-metre schooner
I’m Alone
for
$18,000. It was rigged with a pair of no-nonsense
hundred-horsepower diesel engines, just in case the winds weren’t
favourable or if she needed to run for her life from the U.S. Coast
Guard. Randell was a seasoned skipper and couldn’t turn down the
$500 per month that Clark would pay him to haul rum far away to the
warmer parts of the States.

   
Randell was happy to get the work rather than
sit idle all winter and so, in November of 1928, he sailed
the
I’m Alone
to St. Pierre, loaded up 1,500 cases
of good liquor and turned her south. Of course, his job was not to
actually run the goods ashore but to meet up with his contacts
twenty kilometres off the Louisiana coast. Once in the warm Gulf
waters, he unloaded his first shipment and then set about finding
new suppliers of freight (alcoholic, of course) from British
Honduras, rather than lugging the goods all the way from northerly
St. Pierre.

   
The Coast Guard, however, was catching on to his
activities and he had to use his best nautical skills to outsmart
them on several occasions. Then on March 20 of 1929, Randell
brought his ship to a stop at a rendezvous point which he reckoned
to be about twenty-four kilometres off the American coast. On board
was more than $60,000 worth of assorted refreshments for the
parched American shore dwellers. Much to his chagrin, he saw the
Coast Guard vessel
Wolcott
approach,
prompting Randell to weigh anchor and prepare to outrun his
adversary. The
Wolcott
closed in and hailed Captain
Randell. Randell did not respond and so the
Wolcott
fired over her bow and issued an order to stop. Randell
would have none of it and yelled back over a megaphone that he was
in international waters and could not legally be
stopped.

   
Three hours of further pursuit and Randell
finally agreed to let the skipper of the r
Wolcott
, Frank
Paul, board to discuss the matter. Unarmed and in his slippers,
Paul boarded the
I’m
Alone
and told Randell he had
been within the twelve-mile limit of the United States. The Coast
Guard, he argued, had a legal right of pursuit to chase and seize
the vessel. Randell couldn’t be persuaded by the cool logic of the
Coast Guard captain and he allowed Paul to return to his ship. Both
boats kept heading south until Paul grew frustrated and signalled
that he was going to fire if Randell didn’t stop. True to his word,
the
Wolcott
began firing shells at the schooner
and the Coast Guard sailors opened fire with rifles as
well.

   
Jack Randell was struck in the leg by a wax
bullet and his ship’s sails and rigging had already sustained some
damage, but he couldn’t quite be convinced that he should admit
defeat to this pestering American. The *
Wolcott
’s big
deck gun had jammed by then and she gave up the pursuit on March 22
and turned the chase over to Captain Powell of the
Dexter
. The
Dexter
unloaded shells, machine-gun bullets
and rifle ammunition into the Lunenburg schooner until it had
nowhere to go but down. One of Randell’s men drowned as they
abandoned ship, but the rest were picked up by the Coast
Guard.

   
Despite the fact that Randell had obviously been
carrying liquor destined to come ashore in Louisiana, he swore
innocence and even demanded retribution for what he declared as
this “cowardly attack.” Charged with conspiracy, Randell fumed in
his New Orleans cell. Word eventually reached Canada about what had
happened and the good skipper became a celebrity. One paper called
him “an international hero for upholding British naval tradition on
the high seas.” Well, that might have been stretching it a bit, but
Ottawa politicians jumped on the cause, calling the sinking
“piracy” and even “an act of war.” After all, the
I’m Alone
was a humble sailing vessel from Lunenburg, Nova
Scotia. Was Ottawa really ready to go to war with the U.S. to
protect a smuggler’s rights?

   
Not quite. But protest shouts from Canada were
heard as far away as Washington for this grave infringement of the
international law of the sea. The case of conspiracy was dropped,
and in 1935 the American government apologized with words and money
– $25,000 worth – for sinking the
I’m Alone
. Randell
had returned to Canada but continued to work as a skipper, this
time of a steamship on the Great Lakes.

Chapter 36

Chapter 36

“A Triumph of
Americanism”

The
official lifespan of the sailing ship
Bluenose
ran
from March 6, 1921, to January 28, 1946. It was built to race in a
high-profile sailing competition for the North Atlantic Fishermen’s
International Trophy, which was a pretty big deal for all who lived
along this coast, Americans and Canadians alike. But she was never
just an elite racing schooner; the
Bluenose
was also
built to be a true fishing vessel and she worked the Grand Banks,
bringing tons of fish back to her home port,
Lunenburg.

   
Sailing in races had generally been the game of big men with
big money. Fishermen sailing daily for a living might have envied
the sailors on the flashy racing vessels but secretly many
harboured the thought that “real sailors” were a tougher breed,
undoubtedly more seaworthy, more sea-knowledgeable and more
resilient than anybody else scudding the North Atlantic waves.
Around 1920 news arrived north about a race off Sandy Hook, New
Jersey, that had been postponed because of so-called strong winds,
a mere twenty-three-knot gale. Sailors on fishing vessels in New
England, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia thought this show of
cowardice absurd and ached for a chance to
compete.

   
William Dennis, owner of the Halifax
Herald
and
Evening
Mail
, convinced some of his
friends to put up some money to create a competition for fishing
schooners that would far outshine the elitist America’s Cup. The
first two races were held off Halifax and the third near
Gloucester, Massachusetts. The rules stated that ships must be
genuine working vessels.

   
In the first elimination race in Canada, Thomas
Himmelman in the
Delawana
beat out
Angus Walters in his
Gilbert
B. Walters
, when Walters lost
a mast. In October of that year, the
Delawana
took on the
American
Esperanto
, captained
by Marty Welch, a “whitewashed Yankee” originally from Digby. The
races in a best-of-three series were set off Halifax. The
Esperanto
won. In the second race, Welch took a chance by taking
to the shoals off Devil’s Island to win the race. The
Esperanto
had been constructed for short hauls and quick trips
to sea, nothing like the high-capacity Lunenburg schooners designed
for longer trips and bigger catches. The
Esperanto
returned to Gloucester to a hero’s welcome and a hail from
vice-president Calvin Coolidge, who boasted that “the victory was a
triumph of Americanism.”

   
Nova Scotians, particularly the fishermen who
worked the Banks and the landlubbers who had wagered on the races,
were angry and wanted an honest revenge. It was a matter of both
money and pride. Revenge, however, came from the Atlantic itself
and there would never be a chance to beat the
Esperanto
in a race. She sank with 140,000 pounds of salt cod, while
fishing off Sable Island in 1921. The ship struck the wreck of the
SS
Virginia
and the crew abandoned her and were
picked up by another fishing vessel, the
Elsie
. Three
attempts were made to bring the
Esperanto
back up out
of the ten fathoms of sea water, but it turned out that it would be
the
Elsie
herself that would be the American vessel to
defend the title when October of that year rolled
around.

A Conflict of Interests

Meanwhile, Nova Scotians were preparing a new faster ship
to meet whatever American vessel would take up the challenge for
the next race. At a cost of $35,000, the
Bluenose
was
built by Captain Angus Walters and four Halifax investors. Walters
turned down the offer to actually captain the vessel, since he was
making good money as a working captain of his
Gilbert B. Walters
, which had paid for itself twice over in its first season
at sea. The man knew how to make money at fishing like no one else,
and he was reluctant to give up until he had garnered for himself a
controlling share of the
Bluenose
. Then a deal
was struck. He would have final say about nearly everything
concerning the building and running of the
schooner.

   
A naval architect named Bill Roue (who also ran
a family ginger-ale business in Halifax) was commissioned to design
the schooner that would be built at the Smith and Rhuland Shipyards
in Lunenburg. Roue’s innovative ideas concerning the design met
some flak from the shipbuilders but they eventually settled on an
agreeable shape and, in December of 1920, the keel-laying ceremony
was underway. The Duke of Devonshire had come to Lunenburg to take
part by driving a gold spike with a silver mallet. The Duke had
perhaps over-socialized a bit the night before and missed the gold
spike a few times, leaving someone else to finish the job. After
that, the shipbuilding moved full speed ahead. By March of 1921,
the
Bluenose
was complete and ready to launch on
the twenty-sixth.

   
Marty Welch was back in the 1921 race, this time
with the
Elsie
. The event was
of passionate interest to people near and far. Perhaps the most
intense audience, however, was the one gathered on Sackville Street
in Halifax, where wires were stretched between two buildings and
models of the
Bluenose
and the
Elsie
were run
along to show the respective positions at sea in the actual races.
The jam-packed crowd cheered as they watched this bizarre little
display that was updated by wireless reports coming in from the
coast. P

   
The
Bluenose
won and took
home the cup and the $5,000. Her owners moved on to another battle,
this one with the taxman over whether the winnings were taxable.
When it came to money, it seemed the
Bluenose
owners were
quite anxious to hang onto what they won and miserly in doling it
out. Even Bill Roue had to put up a fight to get paid for designing
the wondrous ship. (Later in his career, however, he would make
really big money designing the less glamorous sectional barge,
which was widely used in World War II.)