The Preventer and Rum Runners

  These stories were told to me by my mother.

Louisbourg is a quiet little fishing Village now, but in the days of coal fired ships it was a busy place as it was a major port to bunker coal because the Harbour did not freeze in the winter.

On one foggy March night the town was watching as a mountie pursuit boat roared into the harbour and then back out to sea obviously searching for something.

The rumour soon spread around A rum runner got into trouble and was coming in. They watched it emerge from the fog with the RCMP in hot pursuit. They tied up at the wharf and the mounties hurried aboard. 

It seems some of the crew had got gassed down below and were seriously ill. There was no hospital in Louisbourg so they were taken to my grandmother's boarding house and the doctor sent for. 

The RCMP were frustrated that no booze had been found aboard the ship 

So the boat and the house were locked down and guarded so nobody could talk to the crew while they tried to find the payload.

Now they couldn't stop my grandfather Charlie Shaw from going into his own house. 

The search and interrogations went on for a week or so but the mounties couldn't find the cargo.  

As the men got better and with  few shots of rum  my grandfather soon got the whole  story. Before they came in they hid the cargo of booze in a large net and marked it with a black buoy under the ice at black point at the entrance to kennington cove.

it did not take long for my grandfather and a few buddies to take a boat around and find the motherlode.  Burlap sacks of booze were buried everywhere and my grandfather had bottles stashed his all over the next door lumber yard and my grandmother used to follow him when he went out the door. Needless to say most of them were drunk for years and they say Hughy Mcintyre got the blind staggers.

In 1933, a Canadian  Custom agent named John "Machine Gun" Kelly killed a Lunenburg man when he opened fire on a small boat unloading booze outside that town's harbour.

Kelly was transferred to Cape Breton and took command of new parol boat 'Preventer'

He was not well liked because of his reputation but when he was coming  to Louisburg the town all went down on the government wharf to see the new boat. Seeing the crowd he gunned the engine and ran at the dock at full speed and threw it into reverse and nothing happened. He went crashing into the dock as the crowd scattered doing serious damage. he never lived that down either.