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Saint-Pierre: The Town Illicit Liquor Built

Prohibition ranks among America’s most vivid historic epochs. Yet the era of flappers and jazz is also curiously Oz-like. The drinking ban dominated the American social and cultural conversation between 1920 and 1933. Then one day the country awoke as if from a dream to find all traces of it gone, save for a few bootlegged bottles that washed up at local historical society museums, flotsam on history’s beach.

A little-known archipelago off the coast of Newfoundland, which served as a major entrepôt for smuggling on the Eastern Seaboard. The islands are to this day part of France, the last vestige of a once-sprawling colonial empire. They’re just 93 square miles—slightly smaller than the borough of Queens, New York—but these tiny islands were to Prohibition what Iwo Jima was to the Pacific Theater in World War II, dots on a map whose history far surpassed their humble geography.

On January 16, 1919, Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify a constitutional amendment prohibiting liquor sales in America. Soon after, Congress passed the Volstead Act, which contained the legal mechanics to enforce the ban. Starting in January 1920, anyone involved in the production, transfer, or sale of any alcoholic beverage in America would face jail time and confiscation of property.

Liquor, like any liquid, has a natural propensity to seek its way around obstacles. So bootleggers decanted whiskey into the spare tires of their cars in Canada and crossed the border with a practiced insouciance. In the South, liquor flowed into Florida’s mangrove swamps from Bimini and the Bahamas under cloudy night skies. Business took off in the least expected places.

Among them: Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, a compact cluster of small, largely treeless islands, which the Portuguese explorer João Alvarez Faguendes had come upon in 1520. French and Basque fishermen subsequently showed a keen interest in them, thanks to the teeming stocks of codfish on nearby fishing banks. France claimed the islands and fortified Saint-Pierre’s harbor in 1700, but the British overran the defenses two years later and occupied it until 1763.

That year marked the French defeat in the Seven Years’ War and the end of France’s New World dominion—an empire that once included much of present-day Canada and several strategic islands in the West Indies. British negotiators evidently took sympathy on France and in the end returned Saint-Pierre and Miquelon in order that the French might fish for cod. (One imagines British negotiators privately snickering about leaving the once-powerful French with what one visitor later called “little dots of gorse and granite.”)

Saint-Pierre is the smallest of the three inhabited islands, but blessed with the best harbor, it is thus home to most residents. (It has about 6,000 islanders, compared with 700 on Miquelon and just a handful on Langlade.)

A Florida ship captain named Bill McCoy is said to have invented the smuggling trade on Saint-Pierre. One day the rumrunner was stuck at a hotel in Halifax, Nova Scotia, trying to figure out what to do with a shipment of liquor that was under threat of confiscation by overzealous Canadian customs agents.

Pacing the lobby, McCoy ran into a man with a French accent and asked if he was from Quebec. No, the man replied, he was from the French island of Saint-Pierre. He happened also to be a licensed shipping agent, and he told McCoy his problems would be solved if he would divert his cargo northward and offload at his warehouse. McCoy did just that, and a profitable business relationship bloomed.

Others followed McCoy’s lead, and Saint-Pierre soon attracted a new class of visitor. “Steamers that ply between North Sydney and those attractive isles of the North Atlantic, St. Pierre and Miquelon, are carrying ever-increasing numbers of very busy American ‘business men’ these days,” The New York Times reported in 1921. The paper described the new arrivals as “well-dressed, black-cigar-smoking gentlemen.” Their business was euphemistically called the “St. Pierre–Bahamas trade.” Fishing schooners would fill their holds with Canadian whiskey or French brandy, then file manifests claiming they were destined for the Britishheld Bahamas.

En route, however, the ships found themselves pulled westward by an irresistible economic tide. The “Bahamas-bound” fishing schooners would appear on the horizon off New England or Long Island near nightfall. As darkness fell, sleek motor launches would dart out from the mainland and ferry their cargo back to dark coves.

At the outset smugglers used converted fishing schooners, which could transport up to 3,000 cases. But business changed after Canada tightened export rules, under pressure from the United States. (In exchange, the United States dropped criminal charges against Canadians arrested for smuggling.) Canada thenceforth required all liquor exporters to post a substantial bond, which would be refunded only with proof that their cargo had been offloaded at a legal destination. “It appears logical,” The New York Times reported, “that smugglers would clear their liquor for St. Pierre and Miquelon and make those islands bases for operations along the North Atlantic Coast of the United States.”

It was logical, and smugglers did exactly that, trading in their schooners for specially built rumrunners that could haul as many as 25,000 cases at a time. (This shift to larger boats was also prodded by Congress’s decision to extend territorial waters to 12 miles from 3, making the offshore transfer more logistically challenging.)

Offices housing shell companies established by Canadian distillers soon lined the waterfront, and some two dozen stout new liquor warehouses sprouted up to accommodate the burgeoning trade. By one estimate, these storage facilities could hold a million cases of liquor. The harbor was also bettered with new concrete wharves equipped with chutes that allowed stevedores to load liquor onto the ships directly from carts and trucks and with a vastly improved breakwater. Ships poured in. One reporter estimated that 15 to 20 rumrunners were tied up at Saint-Pierre at any given time, with 4 or 5 heading south every day. In 1931 enough liquor was imported to the island for every resident to consume 453 gallons (had they done so, it would have produced a hangover visible from Europe).

Life on the island, a place accustomed to the hardscrabble vagaries of fishing, was suddenly sweet. The New York Times reported that “certain sailors who used to be impecunious … have become free spenders and flashy dressers.” The sounds of accordions spilled out of the Café de Paris, and “St. Pierre went in for pianos,” a reporter noted, “and every coastal boat unloaded at least one to try its strings against an unhappy climate.” An automobile dealer opened his doors, selling cars on an island whose longest road stretched all of four miles.

As it did with Canada, the United States took umbrage at the illicit exports and sought to pressure France to stanch the flow. France collectively hunched its shoulders, pursed its lips, and slowly turned its palms upward in the international “What can be done?” gesture. “The government of France has no knowledge of any trafficking in liquor from St Pierre et Miquelon,” the island’s acting governor replied. “The government is not in the wine or liquor business.”

Full silence was essential in transferring the goods from rum ship to basement speakeasy, but wooden cases filled with bottles clanked and rattled inconveniently. So the bottles were taken from the crates in Saint-Pierre and repacked in straw and jute sacks. The broken crates were abandoned outside the warehouses. The island had so many discarded cases that “a pyramid of them rises in every yard,” said one account, and for several years they provided fuel to take the chill out of the damp island air.

Enterprising islanders also used the crate ends to panel the insides of their homes and, in one instance, built a whole house out of unused crates. Two concrete warehouses were emblazoned with spss, standing for St. Pierre Slips and Stores, and dated 1928 and 1929. (Today they house a hardware store and a Lions Club.) Another sturdy warehouse had been built by one Louis Hardy around 1925 and used by Morazé, and a hulking warehouse—that of Morue Française, built in 1928—lay farther along the harbor. Saint-Pierre was the town illicit liquor had built.

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