Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, April 1923 · page 3 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #44 — page 3: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humorous column by the magazine's editor, written from Miami. The first section satirizes ocean voyages—mocking the common belief that sea travel is healthy while describing the cramped, unpleasant reality of ship life (narrow aisles, greasy water, discomfort). The second section pivots to Prohibition-era smuggling. A Massachusetts congressman is quoted reporting that two million gallons of liquor have been shipped into the U.S. from the nearby Bahamas. This references the widespread bootlegging during Prohibition (1920-1933), when alcohol smuggling from Caribbean ports was rampant. The juxtaposition—placing this smuggling news amid casual travel commentary—suggests the casual, commonplace nature of illegal alcohol importation in that era. The column appears to satirize both naive assumptions about travel and the obvious scale of Prohibition's failure.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang 3 Drippings From the Fawcett S I am contriving these austere lines on Hotel Flamingo stationery at Miami, Fla., my red-headed wife is upstairs packing the carpet bags in prepara- tion for a sea voyage to Nassau in the West Indies. I don't like sea voyages—walking up and down narrow aisles, running short of socks and undershirts, and gazing eternally on fresh paint, gum, tar, pitch and dismal stretches of gray and greasy water. Plenty of people imagine that an ocean voyage is healthful and that it does them good, but the only evidence that will convince me is the evidence that I hope to find at the other end of the voyage—which isn't a long one, thank goodness. W HILE I am polishing up these pulsating paragraphs, my eye runs across an item in a Miami paper. It quotes a Massa- chusetts congressman to the effect that two million gallons of liquors have been shipped into the United States from the Bahamas since