LITHO CN TSS "PRINCE DAVID" circa 1934 ID 10 249

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Winning bid: $3.00 CAD
Bidding Closed and Complete

Divided, unused, age fading, corner & edge wear.

The Great Depression and the End of Prohibition: The effect of Prohibition, which had started in 1919, had been good for the Bahamas. But with the market crash and the onset of the Depression in 1929, the Munson Line began to run into difficulties. These eventually forced it to drop the annual winter charter of the New Northland with the end of the 1931 season. Instead, it substituted a fortnightly New York-Nassau-Miami-Havana-Miami-Nassau-New York service with its own Munargo, meaning only one sailing in each direction every two weeks between Miami and Nassau, where the Bahamians had been used to two or three a week. Service declined. As the end of American Prohibition approached in December 1933, however, Nassau was changing from a haven for bootleggers, with its levy of £1 ($5) for every bottle of liquor brought into the colony, into a more sophisticated tourist capital. Sir Bede Clifford, the Governor, put it this way: "Well gentlemen, it amounts to this: if we can't take the liquor to the Americans, we must bring the Americans to the liquor." For 1934, the matter of a regular Miami-Nassau service was resolved when the Bahamians contracted Canadian National's 335-passenger Prince David for the service, with American Express acting as agents in Miami. This ship proved to be too big for the trade, however, and lasted only one season.