Changing the Flag: The Cloak of Newfoundland Registry for American Rum-Running, 1924-1934
Bibliographic record
Abstract
USING REGULAR AND SECRET DISPATCHES between London, St. John’s, and Washington, intelligence lists of suspect vessels, vessel crew agreements, and data from the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project [ACSP], this paper assesses the Newfoundland government’s perspective on policing rum-running to the United States, and the reaction of the rumrunners themselves. It shows that the nature of Newfoundland’s government and economy was such that during the 1920s the colony provided a safe haven for rumrunners. 1 During the American Civil War, Atlantic shippers who dealt with the southern United States faced increased transaction costs, and as a result shifted their activities to intermediary points outside the North’s blockade zone. 2 Similarly, because of the nature of American policing during the 1920s, liquor smugglers came under increased pressure from British and US authorities. Faced with a crackdown, culminating in 1926-7 with the implementation of formal intelligence sharing to enforce a 1924 anti-liquor smuggling treaty, many rumrunners shifted their flags to Newfoundland. Their actions, and Newfoundland’s reaction, demonstrate how the country’s economic means shaped its external affairs policies. With few resources even to enforce prohibition within Newfoundland, policing rumrunners who hid under Newfoundland registry was impossible, even when London urged St. John’s to do so. The development of Newfoundland’s governmental infrastructure was slow, and its status within the Empire fragile. Both were functions of a narrowly based economy which supported a relatively small population. Nevertheless, once the colony possessed responsible government (1855), it was regarded as constitutionally equal to the other colonies of settlement, and came to be regarded as one of the
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".