Some very startling figures are available by which the enormous amount of smuggling effected for generations may be guessed. It would be possible to prepare a tabulated form from the various reports of the Board of Customs, setting forth the relation between duty-paid goods and the estimated value of smuggled commodities during a term of years, but as this work is scarce designed to fill the place of a statistical abstract, I will forbear. A few illuminating items, it may be, will suffice.
Thus in 1743 it was calculated that the annual average import of tea through the legitimate channels was 650,000 lb.; but that the total consumption was three times this amount. One Dutch house alone was known to illegally import an annual weight of 500,000 lb.
An even greater amount of spirit-smuggling may legitimately be deduced from the perusal of the foregoing pages, and, although in course of time considerably abated, as the coastguard and other organisations settled down to their work of prevention and detection, it remained to a late date of very large proportions. Thus the official customs report for 1831 placed the loss to the Revenue on smuggled goods at £800,000 annually. To this amount the item of French brandy contributed £500,000. The annual cost of protecting the Revenue (excise, customs, and preventive service) was at the same time between £700,000 and £800,000.
An interesting detailed statement of the contraband trade in spirits from Roscoff, one of the Brittany ports, shows that, two years later than the above, from March 15th to 17th, 1833, there were shipped to England, per smuggling craft, 850 tubs of brandy; and between April 13th and 20th in the same year 750 tubs; that is to say, 6,400 gallons in little more than one month. And although Roscoff was a prominent port in this trade, it was but one of several.
So late as 1840, forty-eight per cent. of the French silks brought into this country were said to have paid no duty; and for years afterwards silk-smugglers, swathed apoplectically in contraband of this description, formed the early steamship companies’ most regular patrons.
The seaside holiday-maker of that age was an easy prey of pretended smugglers, cunning rascals who traded upon that most wide-spread of human failings, the love of a bargain, no matter how illegitimately it may be procured. The lounger on the seaside parades of that time was certain, sooner or later, to be approached by a mysterious figure with an indefinable air of mystery and a semi-nautical rig, who, with many careful glances to right and left, and in a hoarse whisper behind a secretive hand, told a tale of smuggled brandy or cigars, watches or silks. “Not ’arf the price you’d pay for ’em in the shops, guv’nor,” the shameless impostor would say, producing a bundle of cigars, “but the real thing; better than them wot most of the shops keep. I see you’re a gent. as knows a good smoke. You shall ’ave ’em”—at some preposterously low price. And generally the greenhorn did have them; finding, when he came to smoke the genuine Flor de Cabbage he had bought, that they would have been dear at any price. To that complexion of mean fraud did the old smuggling traditions of courage, adventure, and derring-do come at last!