Pass the Bottle: Rum Tales of the West Coast

Joseph Leydon teaches geography at the University of Toronto.

Pass the Bottle deals with rum-running along the Canadian and American
west coasts during the period of American prohibition. Rum was the
generic term used to cover all hard liquors landed illegally in the
United States at this time. The text is divided into nine chapters; six
tell rum-running stories, and three are concerned with changes in U.S.
and Canadian law, law enforcement agencies such as the Coast Guard and
the Prohibition Bureau, and the American courts. The ultimate goal of
any rum-runner was to smuggle liquor into the U.S. undetected, but the
tales reveal that attempts to do so often involved murder, betrayal,
intrigue, and frequently failure. Throughout the text we are introduced
to the characters involved (Roy Almstead, the Eggers brothers, Owen
“Cannonball” Baker, Captain Pamphlet, Roy C. Lyle), the ships
(Malahat, Quadra, Pescawha), and such evocative places as “Rum Row”
and “Smugglers Rock.”

The stories make interesting reading; but the chapters dealing with the
legalities and organization of rum-running are disappointing. There is
little information on the role played by the Canadian authorities, both
provincial and federal, or about their ambivalent attitude toward
rum-running. Likewise, many of the organizational details—about the
communications network, the stages involved in getting the liquor from
Canada to the United States, and the financial aspects of rum
running—are glossed over. The author would have been well advised to
include more tales and to leave the other aspects of rum-running to
another text.