My Great Uncle was the Skipper
of the Black Duck

“They opened fire on us without warning” he said bitterly. "Killed my first mate and mechanic. I jumped over the side."

I sat at his feet on a hassock in the sunny living room of my grandfather's house on Nobska Road in Woods Hole. He seemed bigger than life to me. My great uncle "Charles" Travers. The rumrunner. Skipper of the infamous Black Duck.

He was a big man, tall, broad shouldered and powerful looking even in his later years. With a shock of white hair and an easy wide smile he drew me further into the story.

“We had a load of liquor on board all right and we was making headway speed through the fog, coming into Narragansett Bay when they started shooting. No warning, just started shooting that machine gun into the wheelhouse.”

He held up his left hand. The middle finger was gone above the second knuckle and there were scars on both sides of his hand where a bullet had passed clear through. He studied it for a few seconds like it was talking to him while I tried to absorb the real meaning of what he was saying.

“They didn’t give you any warning?” I repeated the obvious question.

He seemed not to hear me and went on. “When the machine gun stopped I crawled back in the boat and took off, out to sea.” His face darkened. “I radioed back in that I had a man all shot up but still alive”. I held my breath. “But the bastards held me offshore for an hour and he died at my feet.” The “man” was Charles’ cousin, Johnny Goulart.

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. I was 15 and it was 1959. I had grown up watching John Wayne movies where our soldiers were always valiant and righteous. American serviceman didn’t do the things my great uncle was describing. I started to doubt that he was telling me the truth.

“I was bleeding bad and after an hour I couldn’t wait any longer so I brought the Duck back into the harbor and headed for the (Coast Guard) cutter. I figured if they was going to finish me off they’d do it then.”

Now my emotions were raging and I turned to my father and grandfather for some sign of confirmation but saw only tight lips on each of them. My grandfather fidgeted in his chair. I knew I wasn’t going to get any more answers that day.

For years, this was all I knew about the Black Duck incident of December 29, 1929. We didn’t talk about it much at my grandparent’s house as it seemed to embarrass my churchgoing grandmother, Rose. If I asked about the Black Duck she’d tilt her head in the direction of the living room and with only the slightest hint of sarcasm would say; “Charles is in there” and I knew I had better be quiet about the Black Duck around Grandma or I would be eating dinner by myself in the kitchen.

Some years later I had occasion to ask my father if “Uncle Charles” was really a rumrunner. He seemed to weigh the question a long time but then went on to tell me how Charles ran “the fastest boat that ever put to water out of Massachusetts”, how he would pick up cases of whiskey from a Canadian freighter offshore, then bring it back to the shallow water where my grandfather had organized a fleet of rowboats to offload the whiskey from the Duck. My father even admitted he worked the lines of men standing on the beach who would pass cases of whiskey, hand to hand, from the rowboats to waiting trucks.

My father! About the most conservative man I knew, was a rumrunner!

“You have to understand times were different back then”, he lectured me. “It was the Recession and a lot of people were going hungry. We did what we had to do.”

It all seemed harmlessly romantic to me. I couldn’t understand why it had turned so violent.

I got one more chance to talk to my great uncle before he was gone, and I asked him what had gone so wrong that night. Again we sat by the window on Nobska Road.

He put his chin down to his chest, gave a little sigh and finished the story for me. “Keith, everybody knew what we were doing. Hell, we used to moor the Duck in the slip next to the Coast Guard cutters during the day! We weren’t exactly friends, but we all knew each other and the rules of the game was the Coast Guard had to catch you with the alcohol on your boat.”

He was getting a little agitated now, the easy smile was gone and it seemed to me he was fighting to maintain his composure. “They got a new Boatswain named Cornell on the cutter that was moored next to me. He was the one who shot us up. There was an investigation but nothing came of it.”

So that was it. It was something between my Uncle Charles and Boatswain Cornell, but could it have been so bad it lead to an unprovoked attack on an unarmed boat?

Thirty Five years later Judith A. Babcock researched and wrote an article for the December, 1999 issue of Yankee Magazine entitled; “The Night the Coast Guard Opened Fire. A new look at a 70-year-old file raises a troubling question: Was the rum-running crew of the Black Duck Murdered?” I read that title and was stunned! Had Charles been telling me the truth all along?

Prior to Babcock all the stories about the Black Duck seem to have been written from the same script; the cutter gave clear warning, the rumrunner tried to flee, shots were fired to the rear of the boat but the rumrunner turned into the line of fire, twenty one bullets accidentally entered the wheelhouse, the Coast Guard immediately tended the wounded, etc. No matter who wrote about the Black Duck, the stories all sounded the same. Somewhere deep in my gut, I had a hard time believing it.

The Babcock story was well researched from “new evidence that had been locked away by the Coast Guard for decades” and from information out of the National Archives. It revealed the angle of the bullet holes in the Duck’s hull and “…the Coast Guard’s own chart of the action, contradicted testimony by Cornell…”.

It seems Boatswain Alexander C. Cornell was somewhat of a maverick. He had resigned a higher ranking position in the U.S. Navy to take the more adventurous job of chasing rumrunners in the Coast Guard. In July of 1929 Cornell was involved in an incident where he directed machine gun fire on the rumrunner Idle Hour and through poor judgment ended up directing live fire into houses on the shore of Jamestown Island.

When Rear Admiral F.C. Billard got the report he fired off his own salvo stating , "...that Boatswain Cornell violated the three injunctions cited that are specifically laid down in Reference C (Law Enforcement Duties, issued April 11, 1929)." That sections states: machine guns shall never be used for the purpose of firing warning shots.

According to Babcock's story, "For months the Black Duck had shown it's heels to frustrated Coast Guard pursuers. Boatswain Cornell has not taken it well. The one time Cornell actually forced the Black Duck to heave to, his search turned up nothing. But Cornell had been heard to warn the Black Duck's captain, Charles Travers, that "someone" might fire into his boat someday."

When we talk about the Black Duck shooting in our family, that “someday” became reality on December 29th, 1929.

Copyright 2001© Keith Bettencourt
Great Nephew of Charles Travers

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