This Tiny French Archipelago Became America’s Alcohol Warehouse During Prohibition (Excerpt)
Before the 21st amendment was ratified, remote islands off Canada’s Newfoundland province floated on a sea of whiskey and wine
By Marc Wortman
January 17, 2018
The tiny islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon—cold, fogbound and windswept specks in the North Atlantic midway between New York City and Greenland—lie far closer to polar bears and icebergs than the speakeasies and clubs where Americans tippled during Prohibition. But thanks to quirks of geography, history and law, the French archipelago served up much of the booze that Prohibition was supposed to keep Americans from drinking.
The remote islands imported a total of 98,500 liters in all between 1911 and 1918. That was before Prohibition began on January 16, 1920. A decade later, with the ban on the production, importation and sale of alcohol in full swing, more than 4 million liters in whiskey alone flowed into the islands’ warehouses—along with hundreds of thousands of cases of wine, Champagne, brandy, and rum—and then flowed right back out. Almost every drop went aboard rumrunners—smugglers’ ships sailing south with their costly cargo to quench an insatiable American thirst for the prohibited booze.
During Prohibition, the port in St. Pierre, about a thousand nautical miles north of New York City, became a wholesale trading post for the alcohol Americans craved. Although 2,400 miles from the homeland, the French colonial possessions sit just 16 miles off Canada’s Newfoundland province; nonetheless, they remain the last vestiges of French territory from the wars that long ago divvied up North America. For centuries, the hearty islanders—about 4,000 inhabitants in 1920 and a little over 6,000 today— made their living off the sea, mainly by fishing for cod. Prohibition changed everything. Fishermen pulled their dories up on land and hung up their nets and lines while their home islands floated on a veritable sea of whiskey, wine and money.
Despite the ban on booze, millions of Americans still wanted to drink. Canadians were willing to supply their needs, and when the Canadian government tried to halt the bootlegging trade with its southern neighbor, the French citizens of St. Pierre and Miquelon sailed to the rescue.
Canadians actually faced a mixed bag of alcohol restrictions themselves; no laws prevented them from making liquor, just selling it, and when U.S. production ended, the volume of whiskey Canada’s distilling industry produced exploded. All of those millions of gallons of high proof alcoholic drinks should have remained in their distilleries, because, by law, nobody could purchase it almost anywhere in North America. Yet eager hands were willing to fork over lots of dollars to purchase the Canadian products and smuggle bottles and barrels of whiskey, vodka, bourbon and rye south over the border. The problem was how to get the valuable contraband across the line and into American drinkers’ hands. At first, the 3,987-mile boundary between the two countries proved little more than a line on a map. Smugglers departed Canada for the U.S. in cars and trucks with secret compartments filled with booze. Far more motored in fast boats plying the Detroit River from Windsor, Ontario, a major distilling center, through what became known as the “Detroit-Windsor Funnel.”
Big money was made bootlegging; north of the border fortunes were also being made. While entirely dependent on American gangsters like the notorious Al Capone for their delivery, distribution and sales networks, Canadian distillers flourished like never before. Many of today’s well-known brands became part of the American speakeasy scene during Prohibition, including The Hiram Walker Company’s immensely popular Canadian Club and Samuel Bronfman’s Distillers Corporation’s North American distribution of Scotland’s Haig, Black & White, Dewar’s, and Vat 69 whiskey brands and, after a 1928 merger, production of Seagram’s ’83 and V.O.
Nobody knows just how much booze flowed across the border, but many profited. Revenues from liquor taxes to the Canadian government increased fourfold during Prohibition despite statistics that suggest Canadians’ own drinking fell by half.
However, overland transport grew more and more risky as a result of crackdowns by federal agents and battles among gangsters for a piece of the lucrative trade. Bootleggers looked to the immense Eastern seaboard coastline, with its many ports, small inlets and hidden docks. A single “bottle-fishing” schooner could carry as many as 5,000 cases of liquor bottles.
Those ships sailed to just beyond the U.S. three-mile territorial limit, the “rum line.” Once there, by international law, they were outside the reach of the Coast Guard. They anchored at predesignated spots, “rum row.” Business was open at what Daniel Okrent, author of the lively and comprehensive Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, describes as long rows of “wholesale liquor warehouses” anchored offshore. “Someone said,” Okrent told me, “that when viewed from the Truro Lighthouse on Cape Cod, rum row looked like a city out there because there were so many lights from the boats.” Rum rows flourished off virtually every coastal metropolitan center from Florida to Maine.
However, almost all of this illegal commerce came crashing down in 1924. That’s when St. Pierre and Miquelon took center stage in the Prohibition story.