Slow Boat on Rum Row

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Say the compound word “rumrunner” and instantly a vision of
high-speed boat chases, blazing guns, and desperate criminals come to
mind. At least, that’s what the publishers of this book seem to want
you to think. The dust-cover promotion begins with Fraser Miles’s
account of a smuggler’s cutter dodging bullets from a U.S. Coast Guard
vessel, and goes on to imply that this is what the actual book is about.

Not quite. The author’s choice of title is much more honest. Slow
Boat on Rum Row is about the less heroic end of Pacific Coast alcohol
smuggling in the 1930s. Neither of the boats Miles worked on was capable
of more than eight knots; neither was armed. The only thing desperate
about the crews was their desire to go home. Life on these slow boats is
best summed up in a photo caption: “A typical day on an offshore
rum-runner: nothing to do and all day to do it in.” However, people
who are dodging bullets rarely keep diaries or take photographs. Fraser
Miles, with little else to do, kept a diary and wielded a camera in a
business that, until now, has been a hidden part of North American
history.

Miles’s writing style, especially at the beginning of the book, is
raw and uninformed by political correctness. The author grew up as a
poor boy in a poor town, and, frankly, he writes like one. But his
instincts as a historian more than compensate for his lack of eloquence
as an essayist. The diary accounts are supported by appendixes,
including Coast Guard reports, interviews with other bootleggers, and a
superbly detailed roll call of West Coast rumrunners. The text is
augmented by photographs, code charts, and a few humorous sketches, so
that posterity now has a historical document of rare thoroughness.