Daniel A. Laliberte

Drawing his pistol, Duke stalked toward the bridge. When one of the crew tried to block his access to the pilothouse, Duke immediately clubbed him to the deck.

Almost all smugglers could be expected to try their hardest to outrun the Coast Guard, though if peaceably apprehended and given a small load and a first offense, smugglers could expect to get off easy, but Alderman was by no means a first-time offender.

On the evening of March 8, 1973, Coast Guard cutter Dauntless made the Coast Guard’s first-ever seizure of a marijuana smuggler when it stopped the sport fisherman Big L at the western edge of the Bahamas.

Following a decades-long pause that began soon after the end of Prohibition, the Coast Guard was once again called upon to combat maritime drug smugglers in the early 1970s.

With a seizure of opium near the entrance to San Francisco Bay in November 1886, cutters of the Revenue Marine Service began a fight against maritime drug smuggling that continues to this day.

After the schooner rolled over and disappeared beneath the surface, the only evidence that the vessel had ever been there were a single lifeboat with two persons aboard, and around half-a-dozen men thrashing in the frigid water

While 1980 is most remembered for the arrival of 125,00 Cuban refugees during the Mariel Boatlift, thousands of Haitians also arrived in south Florida by sea that same year. They were collectively referred to as “Cuban-Haitian Entrants.”

"On August 31 the American Steamer George E Starr was seized on Puget Sound by a detail of four officers and 18 men sent from the Wolcott. Two Chinese subjects, together with a quantity of opium, were discovered secreted on board. "

On Aug. 23, 1899, the terse message: “Sherman is sighted,” announced the return of the troopship after the Spanish-American War. Transmitted from Lightship 70, this message was the first wireless ship-to-shore telegraph message in U.S. history.