By Chris Chiller
Part 3 of Pirates, Smugglers, and Rum-Runners. In previous installments of Fact of Fiction we reviewed pirates and smugglers in Maine from Colonial times up to early US restrictions on trade with Great Britain which led to coastal Maine becoming a center of illicit trade for all of New England. Maine’s first Governor, William King, appears to have enriched himself by running British goods from Barbados to Bath, Maine.
One of the lucrative British items smugglers brought back from Barbados was rum, consumed in such quantity that Mainers began to fear moral decay. The town of Calais on the Canadian border was a center of smuggling and tolerant of much transgressive behavior but also the location of a temperance society in 1828. While the first society didn’t last long, probably collapsing under the weight of irony, by 1841 a temperance society again rose in Calais and proved to be influential leading to the state enacting a law in 1846 which prohibited the sale of alcohol, “by the drink.” In fact the 1846 law banned the sale of alcohol in any container under 28 gallons, making strong drink only available to the wealthy. Unsatisfied with closing down saloons, temperance societies pushed for more, leading to the infamous 1851 “Maine Law” which banned production and sales of all alcoholic beverages statewide. Maine’s legal prohibition lasted until the constitutional repeal in 1933—82 years.
All the conditions that made Maine a locus of smuggling prosaic goods, such as gypsum or British cloth, fostered a lively, though illegal, shift towards moving alcohol in quantity. Mainers who had been eking out a living by smuggling to escape paying duty suddenly saw a much greater reward for continuing to do what they were doing anyway. While some broke the law by bringing alcohol across the border, others found a new trade by taking thirsty Mainers to Canada for a weekend to legal libations.
The alcohol was mostly Belgian-produced in 3 gallon cans with a Hand marking the origin. These were known as Hands and contained 180 proof alcohol, 90% alcohol. For reference, Whiskey is 80-100 proof or 40-50% alcohol, so the Hand liquor was intended to be watered down before it was distributed to the thirsty citizens of New England. The cans were concealed in any way possible, under lumber in horse-drawn wagons or under the backseat in a carload of children. It appears that children were useful in discouraging customs agents from looking too closely at what might be in a conveyance.
Alcohol was concealed in all sorts of unexpected and sometimes goofy ways. Men with wooden legs were suspected of carrying quarts of Hand alcohol. Hollow canes were discovered by law enforcement. In one town, someone showed up with a load of winter squash offered at 75 cents each when other vendors were asking two to three cents each. Buyers of the expensive squash were delighted to find them hollowed out to hold a pint bottle of whiskey.
In 1920 prohibition became enshrined in the US constitution and bootlegging shifted into high gear. Large ships, many under a Belgian flag, anchored 3 miles off shore ready to offload into smaller boats with Scotch whiskey, French wines and Jamaican rum. The Hand cans still were a popular item as saloons could water down the alcohol, pay whatever fines were imposed, and still turn a tidy profit. Some lobstermen found it easier to fill their traps with liquor from the Rum Row ships than the hard work of their traditional harvest. Many were arrested as the revenue agents began to inspect their traps as they came to the dock.
A rumrunner named Bill McCoy would pick up good whiskey and rum in Canada or from the French territorial island of St Pierre and park his boat on Rum Row. He sold at fair prices without watering down what was in the bottles. The rest of the rumrunners thought that was unsound business and they watered down their liquor. McCoy’s alcohol may have given rise to the expression, “That is the real McCoy.” Thirty some years later, the expression was widely circulated enough to become the title of a television comedy, The Real McCoys.
As the law began to press the rum running lobstermen, demand for faster boats was met by Maine boat builder Will Frost. Frost’s design was a semi displacement hull which allowed the boats to plane at lower speeds, that is, to mostly rise above the water’s surface, greatly reducing drag and raising top speed. Frost paired this hull design with WWI-era airplane engines such as three 565 hp Sterling Vikings to create 40 mph boats the coast guard could not run down—that is, until the Coast Guard captured or had built their own Frost designed hulls, and installed the best modern engines.
In an effort to curb bootlegging, the boundary of territorial waters was moved out and the US Supreme court ruled that boats as far as 34 miles off the American coast that were suspected of carrying alcohol could be stopped and seized. While their efforts were valiant and determined, on the day the 21st amendment repealed Prohibition, saloons were able to serve most anyone who wished to slake their thirst for alcohol. It was the end for the rumrunners who appear to have either gone back to lobster fishing or, for some, to jail.
Americans’ demand for illicit euphoria did not disappear, and bottles of whiskey slowly were replaced by bales of marijuana and bundles of hashish. Mt Deseret Island was a center for scallop fishermen, who used drag nets to scoop up the expensive shellfish from the shallow sea bottom. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the fisher men began to find encrusted chunks of Hashish in their nets, which they sold, often in large enough quantities, that the boat owners were able to buy new pickups and even a new house. It was a different kind of smuggling made possible by boats that were trying to bring in tonne quantities of hash but had to dump their cargo over the side as the Coast Guard closed in.
Does smuggling continue in Maine? What do you think? I lean towards a belief that the fundamental nature of Mainers persists. Meanwhile, here is a link to Robert Hunter’s song which is attached to an obvious pirate and thus bookends the Pirates, Smugglers and Rum Runners series in Fact of Fiction.
AJ Alanson, Author 
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