Postcard based on a 1922 photograph by John R. Smith. [Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell 10:133 / Dowd Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 4506] Cleaned up by A.I.
[Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell 10:131 / Dowd Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 4504] Cleaned up by A.I.
Note that the rigging is still present in this photo. [Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell 10:132 / Dowd Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 4505] Cleaned up by A.I.
There’s less rigging, but it still makes a fine site for a picnic. [Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell 10:131 / Dowd Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 4504] Cleaned up by A.I.
Annie Spindler was a big attraction. [Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell 10:132 / Dowd Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 4505] Cleaned up by A.I.
Note the masts of Annie Spindler peeking over the embankment at right. [Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell 10:164 / Dowd Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 4536]
The masts are gone. [Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell 10:133 / Dowd Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 4506] Cleaned up by A.I.
Spindler looking like a beached whale. The upland building is extant today at Race Point. [Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell 10:130 / Dowd Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 4503]
[Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell 10:132 / Dowd Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 4505]
[Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell 10:3 / Dowd Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 4395]
Updated on 11 September 2026 | Annie L. Spindler, a two-masted, 12-year-old schooner from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, had no fish in its hold on the morning of 29 December 1922 as it battled 70-mile-an-hour winds off the treacherous Peaked Hill Bars. Its cargo was liquor. A lot of it. At least 538 cases, or 6,456 bottles. Or 1,291 gallons. Or 110,178 shots.
Paperwork said the cargo was bound for the Bahamas. Cape dwellers’ sixth sense told them the destination would be a lot closer.
And Provincetown was thirsty. Prohibition had been in force nearly three years. So it’s easy to imagine the excitement in town when word came from the Back Shore that a whisky-laden schooner was ashore near the Race Point Coast Guard Station, where it was being pummeled by waves.
[Cora Fuller Scrapbook, Prior to 1930 / Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum Collection / Provincetown History Presevation Project Page 4663]
Some of the liquor was stored for a month in the barn at the Race Point Coast Guard Station before being sent on its way. [2009, Dunlap]
“Many Throng Provincetown Beach in Hope Schooner May Break Up and Booze Be Washed Ashore,” The Boston Post declared in a headline. Said The Boston Globe: “Watching Schooner; Folk Hope to Save Whisky.”1
Mooncussers were largely frustrated, however, by the insistence of Capt. Henry Irving Collins of the U.S. Coast Guard that the job of his men was to ensure the orderly trans-shipment of Spindler‘s nominally international cargo; never mind that it was contraband where it came ashore.
A month after the wreck, the liquor was taken from the cellar of the Race Point station and the nearby barn. It was transported under the solicitous care of federal agents who would ordinarily be charged with seizing and destroying spirituous liquors. The irony was lost on no one. “The obliging authorities of the Coast Guard provided trucks and took enough men off rum patrol duty to transport the Spindler‘s cargo,” Josef Berger wrote in Cape Cod Pilot.2 On arrival at Railroad Wharf, it was loaded aboard the British schooner Douglas B. Conrad, supposedly bound for Nassau.3
“That night the liquor was taken across [Cape Cod] Bay and unloaded at Plymouth,” Berger wrote.
Left in the wake of this perfectly Provincetown misadventure was the wreck of Annie L. Spindler, which became one of the town’s great attractions in the 1920s and ’30s, before disappearing in the 1940s.
Spindler was built in 1910 at Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, about 40 miles west-southwest of Halifax. It was constructed as a fishing vessel of 95 gross tons; in other words, having a total interior volume of 9,500 cubic feet. Henry A. Amiro of Yarmouth, N.S., purchased Spindler in 1919 for fishing on the Grand Banks. One single two-week trip in May 1921 yielded 23,300 pounds of halibut, 18,000 pounds of cusk, and 9,000 pounds of cod.
On 16 October 1922, one John J. Crowley chartered Spindler from Amiro for a three-month term. Under Capt. Daniel Amero, it sailed from Yarmouth with a crew of six, ostensibly headed to the Caribbean. “It was common practice of vessels bound for our shores with ‘hot cargo’ to have their papers made out for the Indies,” Berger wrote. “The Spindler‘s real destination was a spot on the Plymouth shore, where by prearrangement assistance was waiting.”
Spindler took a lashing on 28-29 December. “Off the Race, the skipper tried to square away for the Plymouth shore,” Berger wrote, “but the vessel was batted back like shuttlecock. Then she struck. She went wildly bouncing over the sand, and at last — on the fourth bounce — landed high and dry.”
Riding to safety on a breeches buoy (though not from Annie L. Spindler). [Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell 4:152 / Dowd Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 400] Enhanced by A.I.
Although Spindler was aground, the surf between the hull and the shore made escape impossible for the crew members. Cue the well-seasoned Coast Guard (formerly known as the U.S. Life-Saving Service). One by one, the men of the Race Point station rescued the crew of Spindler by pulling them along a hawser fixed to one of the schooner’s masts and anchored upland on the beach. The men traveled across with their legs inside a “breeches buoy” — a combination britches and life preserver suspended from a block that rode along the hawser. All aboard were rescued.
What about the booze? Captain Collins reasoned that the liquor was traveling “in bond” through the United States (where it was illegal) from Canada (where it was legal) to the Bahamas (where it was also legal). Rather than confiscate it, he ensured that it was kept safe until it could resume its journey southward. We’re lucky to have the firsthand account of Surfman Frank Silva of the Race Point station:
“Dec. 29, 1922.”
“Sch. Annie L. Spindler loaded with controbrand liquor came ashore Friday morning in a 70 mile breeze, wind N.E. Rescued 6 of crew in breeches-buoy. Crew left station at 12:00 Monday noon Jan. 1, walked to town, took train to Boston bound to Nova Scotia. Crew had 10 meals apiece. Capt. had 14 meals. 64 meals all told. Capt. left at 7:30 a.m. Wed.”
“Sch. had 538 cases of liquor on board was carted in Sta. cellar and upstairs in Barn. Crew stood guard every night for about 2 weeks. Trucks took it in and it was loaded aboard another Sch. at R.R. Wharf.”4
That, at least, was the official line. “Many a Provincetowner had seen the fine liquor,” Mary Heaton Vorse wrote in Time and the Town, “and a large portion of it was said to have come back quietly by night.” She even identified the brand: Haig & Haig whisky from Scotland.5
There may a hint of its fate in the identity of the schooner on which the liquor was supposedly headed to the Bahamas. The next time Douglas B. Conrad surfaced in the public record, in 1924, it was one of six mother ships along a “rum row” of bootleg suppliers anchored 12 miles off Cape Ann.6
Spindler’s owner, Henry Amiro, sued the charterer, John Crowley, to recover the value of the vessel. The case reached the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1926, which found for Crowley. “The loss was not attributable to negligence on the part of any one,” Justice George A. Sanderson wrote. “The terms of the agreement quoted are not fairly susceptible of the interpretation that the charterer [Crowley] guaranteed the safe return of the vessel.”7
In 1926, four years after the wreck, Spindler still had its foremast and mainmast; even its wheel. It had become, The Boston Globe reported, “a play house and picture resort for the children of Summer campers.”
“Children have made swings of the riggings, and the cabin, with its bunks where captain and officers slept, is now the play room and dining room of laughing boys and girls from all over the country. For this spot … is a favorite camping for automobile tourists …. They pitch their tents and many of them remain with their families for weeks.”8
Two years later, the masts were gone and The Globe reported that Spindler was nothing more than “a resort for picnickers in Summer and the sport of storms in Winter.”9 There was still enough of the hull remaining in 1937 that it was featured in a half-page photograph in Life magazine on 23 August 1937 as a sun-bathing spot for aspiring actors in Provincetown.10
Heavy seas and flood tides in April 1940 took a toll. “The wreck of the Annie Spindler, photographed by thousands every summer, and painted and sketched by artists, took a terrific beating on her stern,” the Advocate reported, “reducing it almost to wreckage.”11
Little has been written about it since, but I can’t help believing Annie Spindler still lies in its grave at Race Point, with a bottle or two of very aged Haig & Haig nearby.
Annie L. Spindler began its final journey in Yarmouth, N.S.
In memoriam
• Hnery I. Collins (1870-1924
Find a Grave Memorial No. 50460214.
• Frank Silva (1893-1955)
Find a Grave Memorial No. 139033422.
1 “Guard Liquor on Wrecked Vessel; Many Throng Provincetown Beach in Hope Schooner May Break Up and Booze Be Washed Ashore,” The Boston Post, 30 December 1922; “Watching Schooner; Folk Hope to Save Whisky; Spindler Breaking Up Off Race Point; Crew of Six Saved by Breeches Buoy,” The Boston Globe, 30 December 1922, p. 1.
2 Cape Cod Pilot, by Josef Berger (writing as Jeremiah Digges), Modern Pilgrim Press, 1937, pp. 283-285.
3 “Liquors Reshipped at Provincetown; Another Schooner Takes on Spindler’s Cargo,” The Boston Globe, 25 January 1923, p. 22.
4 Reproduced in 23rd Annual Provincetown Portuguese Festival 2019, p. 31.
5 Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle, by Mary Heaton Vorse, Dial Press, 1942, p. 182.
6 “Liquor Fleet Anchors Off Bay State Coast; Cost Guard Cutter Watches Six Vessels and Boats From Gloucester Turn Back,” The New York Times, 22 February 1924, p. 17.
7 Amiro v. Crowley, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, 256 Mass. 53, decided 26 May 1926.
8 “Stranded Rum-Runner on Race Point Beach Now ‘Play Boat’ for Campers’ Children; Schooner Annie Spindler, Swept Ashore by Fierce Storm Four Years Ago, When Coast Guards Saved Crew, Rendezvous for Youngsters,” The Boston Globe, 1 September 1926, p. 22.
9 “Cape Cod Wreck Now Picnic Resort,” The Boston Globe, 19 July 1928, p. 8.
10 “Provincetown Has a Theatre Tradition,” Life, 23 August 1937, p. 30.
11 “Ten Years Ago; Heavy Flood Tides,” Provincetown Advocate, 27 April 1950, p. 8.