The Smugglers. Charles G. HarperЧитать онлайн книгу.
advances that gave them much more than their miserable twopence a day.
Transportation for wool-smugglers who did not pay the fines awarded against them was enacted in 1717; ineffectually, for in 1720 it was found necessary to issue a proclamation, enforcing the law; and in five successive years from 1731 the cloth-workers are found petitioning for greater vigilance against the continued clandestine exportation, alleging a great decay in the woollen manufactures owing to this illegal export; 150,000 packs being shipped yearly. “It is feared,” said these petitioners, fighting for their own hand, regardless, of course, of other interests, “that some gentlemen of no mean rank, whose estates border on the sea-coast, are too much influenced by a near, but false, prospect of gain”: to which the gentlemen in question, being generally brought up on the dead classic languages, might most fairly have replied, had they cared to do so, with the easy Latinity of Tu quoque!
This renewed daring and enterprise of the Sussex smugglers led to many encounters with the customs officers. Among these was the desperate engagement between sixty armed smugglers and customs men at Ferring, on June 21st, 1720, when William Goldsmith, of the Customs, had his horse shot under him.
A humorous touch, so far at least as the modern reader of these things is concerned, is found in the Treasury warrant issued about this time, for the sum of £200, for supplying a regiment with new boots and stockings; their usual allowance of these indispensable articles having been “worn out in the pursuit of smugglers.”
In spite of all attempts to suppress these illegal activities, it had to be acknowledged, in the preamble of an Act passed in 1739, that the export of wool was “notoriously continued.”
The old-established owling trade of Romney Marsh at length, after many centuries, gave place to the clandestine import of silks, tea, spirits, and tobacco; but it was only by slow and insensible degrees that the owlers’ occupation dwindled away, in the lessening foreign demand for English wool. The last was not heard of this more than five-centuries-old question of the export of wool, that had so severely exercised the minds of some twenty generations, and had baffled the lawgivers in all that space of time, until the concluding year of the final wars with France at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Many other articles were at the same time forbidden to be exported; among them Fuller’s-earth, used in the manufacture of cloth, and so, of course, subject to the same interdict as wool. A comparatively late Exchequer trial for the offence of exporting Fuller’s-earth was that of one Edmund Warren, in 1693. Fortunately for the defendant, he was able to show that what he had exported was not Fuller’s-earth at all, but potter’s clay.
CHAPTER II
Growth of Tea and Tobacco Smuggling in the Eighteenth Century—Repressive Laws a Failure
Side by side with the export smuggling of wool, the import smuggling of tobacco and tea grew and throve amazingly in later ages. Every one, knowingly or unsuspectingly, smoked tobacco and drank tea that had paid no duty.
“Great Anna” herself, who was among the earliest to yield to the refining influence of tea—
Great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Doth sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tay—
in all probability often drank tea which had contributed nothing to the revenue. Between them tea and tobacco, in the illegal landing of the goods, found employment for hundreds of hardy seafaring men and stalwart landsmen, and led to much violence and bloodshed, beside which the long-drawn annals of the owlers seem almost barren of incident.
Early in the eighteenth century, when continental wars of vast magnitude were in progress, the list of dutiable articles began to grow quickly, and concurrently with the growth of this list the already existing tariff was continually increased. The smugglers’ trade grew with these growths, and for the first time became a highly organised and widely distributed trade, involving every class. The time had come at last when every necessary of daily use was taxed heavily, often far above its ordinary trading value; and an absurd, and indeed desperate, condition of affairs had been reached, in which people of all ranks were more or less faced with the degrading dilemma of being unable to afford many articles generally consumed by persons of their station in life, or of procuring them of the smugglers—the “free traders,” as they rightly styled themselves—often at a mere one-third of the cost to which they would have been put had their illicit purchasers paid duty.
The Government was, as we now perceive, in the mental perspective afforded by lapse of time, in the clearly indefensible position of heavily taxing the needs of the country, and of making certain practices illegal that tended to supply those needs at much lower rates than those thus artificially created, and yet of being unable to provide adequate means by which these generally detested laws could be enforced. It was, and is, no defence to hold that the revenues thus hoped for were a sufficient excuse. To create an artificial restraint of trade, to elevate trading in spite of restraint into a crime, and yet not to provide an overmastering force that shall secure obedience, if not in one sense respect, for those unnatural laws, was in itself a course of action that any impartial historian might well hold to be in itself criminal; for it led to continual disturbances throughout the country, with appalling violence, and great loss of life, in conflict, or in the darker way of secret murder.
But no historian would, on weighing the evidence available, feel altogether sure of so sweeping an indictment of the eighteenth-century governance of England. It was corrupt, it was self-seeking, it had no breadth of view; but the times were well calculated to test the most Heaven-sent statesmanship. The country, as were all other countries, was governed for the classes; and governed, as one would conduct a business, for revenue; whether the revenue was to be applied in conducting foreign wars, or to find its way plentifully into the pockets of placemen, does not greatly matter. This misgovernment was a characteristic failing of the age; and it must, moreover, be recognised that the historian, with his comprehensive outlook upon the past, spread out, so to speak, map-like to his gaze, has the advantage of seeing these things as a whole, and of criticising them as such; while the givers and administrators of laws were under the obvious disadvantages of each planning and working for what they considered to be the needs of their own particular period, with those of the future unknown, and perhaps uncared for. That there were some few among those in authority who wrought according to their lights, however feeble might be their illumination, must be conceded even to that age.
At the opening of this era, when Marlborough’s great victories were yet fresh, and when the cost of them and of other military glories was wearing the country threadbare, the most remarkable series of repressive Acts, directed against smuggling, began. Vessels of very small tonnage and light draught, being found peculiarly useful to smugglers, the use of such, even in legalised importing, was strictly forbidden, and no craft of a lesser burthen than fifteen tons was permitted. This provision, it was fondly conceived, would strike a blow at smuggling, by rendering it impossible to slip up narrow and shallow waterways; but this pious expectation was doomed to disappointment, and the limit was accordingly raised to thirty tons; and again, in 1721, to forty tons. At the same time, the severest restrictions were imposed upon boats, in order to cope with the ten, or even twelve and fourteen-oared galleys, rowed by determined “free-traders.”
To quote the text of one among these drastic ordinances:
“Any boat built to row with more than four oars, found upon land or water within the counties of Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, or Sussex, or in the river Thames, or within the limits of the ports of London, Sandwich, or Ipswich, or any boat rowing with more than six oars found either upon land or water, in any other port, or within two leagues of the coast of Great Britain, shall be forfeited, and every person using or rowing in such boat shall forfeit £40.”
These prohibitions were, in 1779, in respect of boats to row with more than six oars, extended to all other English counties; the port of Bristol only excepted.
As for smuggling craft captured with smuggled