Rum Days In

Tahiti

Memories of "Chinless"

Murphy

rE placid Tahiti of the present day is in great contrast with the period when our island was a supply base of illicit liquor during Prohibition in the United States of America.

The king of rum-runners in those feverish days was one spoken of surrep tltiously as "Chinless” Murphy but addressed in his presence with all the titles of respect and deference; for he was an exhaustless fountain of favours and revenues.

Mr. Murphy did have a retreating chin.

His cranium was, by compensation, fully developed. No more canny individual has ever landed on Tahiti’s shores. He did not partake of his own merchandise and, surrounded tlmugh he was by greed, sycophancy and wishful expectation, no penny of his resources was wastefully expended. . , , There was, however, a lavish distribu tion of the King’s shillings, pounds and pence, as well as francs, Canadian and USA dollars, in the course of his opera tions. The cargoes were brought from Canada and accumulated in Tahiti warehouses; thence to be transported on power-schooners and other craft to a store-ship off the coast of Mexico—well out of the three-miles limit.

Other countries than Canada contri buted wines, champagne, liqueurs, gin, saki. It seemed as though all the liquor in the world was coming to Papeete.

To this Damascus—whose gardens sounded with the tinkling of alcoholic waters and whose very gutters gushed reviving streams —the tribes of the parched Arabia of Prohibition came m ever-increasing numbers. They came on steamers, on yachts, on cutters, on tiny sail-boats, on skiffs—and, we came to believe, on rafts. A motley company, urged by the common quest of rum and license.

Papeete assumed the aspects of a roar ing frontier mining town and a circus parade.

Steamer days had the true Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum” atmosphere. The first whistle summoned the passengers from the nearby tourists’ club, and the lesser honky-tonks of the waterfront.

The procession resembled the return from a striken Flodden Field.

The dead and dying were dragged up the gangway by the ship’s winches and deposited in their several cabins. The battered survivors lined the railings, ges ticulating and emitting loud, uncouth noises which nearly drowned out the ship’s bugler who, on the boat-deck, valiantly trumpeted “Aloha Oe”, while the steamer sailed down the harbour and out of the pass.

Natives from every part of the island, and, of course, every man, woman and child in Papeete, gathered on the water front to witness these spectacles.

This sort of thing continued, until the repeal of Prohibition and the later withdrawal of passenger steamers from the San Francisco-Tahiti-Australasia run.

It left behind it, however, a demorali sation of our Tahitian people which will require many years to remedy.—A.C.R.

Captain J. Rankine, of the Union SS Co., retired in May. His commands included the cargo steamer “Wairuna”.