Chambers's journal of popular literature, science, and art, fifth series, no. 122, vol. III, May 1, 1886

LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART, FIFTH SERIES, NO. 122, VOL. III, MAY 1, 1886 ***

[Illustration: CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL

OF

POPULAR

LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART

Fifth Series

ESTABLISHED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1832

CONDUCTED BY R. CHAMBERS (SECUNDUS)

NO. 122.—VOL. III. SATURDAY, MAY 1, 1886. PRICE 1½_d._]

SMUGGLING, PAST AND PRESENT.

BY AN EXAMINING OFFICER.

In a recently issued, readable little volume by Mr W. D. Chester, H.M. Customs, London, entitled _Chronicles of the Customs_, there occurs a chapter on the tricks of smugglers, which suggests an interesting comparison of past and present methods of smuggling. The volume referred to treats of many matters connected with Customs’ work besides the prevention of smuggling; but we must confine our remarks to smuggling pure and simple, with a few examples of clever evasions of the Customs’ laws.

From the days of Ethelred, when it was enacted that ‘every smaller boat arriving at Billingsgate should pay for toll or custom one halfpenny, a larger boat with sails one penny,’ those who have had to carry out the collection of the revenue have been disliked by everybody who had to submit to taxation. It is not easy to understand this dislike. People who use coal, gas, water, or any of the necessities of existence do not, as a rule, view with very great disfavour the people whom they pay to supply these commodities. Why they should dislike those whose business it is to collect the funds which provide government with the wherewithal to insure protection for life, property, and trade, is an anomaly which it is difficult to comprehend. In olden days, the bold and daring smuggler was the darling of the coast, and the officers who endeavoured to prevent his depredations the most disliked of all government officials. Yellow-backed novels have portrayed his prowess in the most glowing colours. The word-pictures which represent him as a free-and-easy, good-natured soul, with gentlemanly manners and genteel exterior, have been read and admired wherever English novels of a seafaring type have been circulated; and no exciting ocean tale is considered sufficiently spicy unless a chapter or two is devoted to the daring thief who defies his country’s laws, and is rewarded with admiration for doing so; while ordinary thieves are spoken of with contempt, and obtain a far from acceptable recompense in the shape of jail ‘skilly.’

No longer ago than 1883, an amusing case, illustrative of this feeling, occurred in the neighbourhood of Sunderland. A party of officers had been away at Hull attending a departmental examination. On their return journey in the train, they met with a seafaring man, who, not knowing the profession of his fellow-passengers, entered into a long conversation on the comparatively easy methods by which he—the sailor—evaded detection. Growing eloquent on this theme, he further explained the _modus operandi_ of his proceedings, and informed the officers that he had in his chest an ingeniously concealed receptacle for the very purpose of smuggling, and that he then had in it several pounds of foreign tobacco. Great was his consternation to find, on his arrival at Sunderland, that his fellow-passengers were Customs’ officers, who at once seized the man’s chest and confiscated the tobacco found therein, for the possession of which the loquacious seaman was subsequently fined. The moral of the story rests in the fact, that no sooner was the affair made known, than the local press went ablaze with denunciations of the unfortunate officers who had prevented the country’s pockets being pilfered of the amount of duty leviable on the quantity of tobacco found. The incident is one which proves that among a certain class of people the smuggler is a hero still. With the audience in a police court the smuggler is no end of a favourite. Only a few months ago, a case occurred at Whitby where a couple of fishermen were charged with smuggling about forty-four pounds of tobacco, the highest penalty for which being £42 with alternative imprisonment. The Bench, however, let the prisoners off with the mitigated fine of £30, and yet, on the announcement of the merciful decision, ‘there were,’ says the police-court reporter, ‘expressions of disapprobation in the crowded court.’

In contradistinction to the sympathising feeling which in the olden time and at the present day was and is extended to the smuggler, it is satisfactory to find that his nefarious transactions do not always shield him from ridicule. Not long ago, a friend of mine was crossing from the continent to one of the eastern English ports, and on the voyage was applied to by another passenger as to how he—the passenger—could most successfully evade paying the duty on two or three boxes of cigars which he had in his possession. My friend, who knew something of Custom House strictness, and had, besides, a conscientious respect for the laws of his country, advised his fellow-voyager either to throw the cigars overboard, or to ‘declare’ and pay duty upon them when he landed. This, it subsequently transpired, the passenger did not do, but rolled up the cigars in some soiled linen and placed the lot in a portmanteau. When it came to declaring baggage at the landing-stage or railway station, the smuggler, like many of his class, grew timid, and left his portmanteau in the hands of the Customs’ officials without owning it as his property. My friend declares that the scared look of the gentleman-smuggler as he hid back in the railway carriage while a Customs’ boatman walked up and down the platform with the unlucky portmanteau, and calling out stentoriously, ‘Claim your luggage! claim your luggage!’ was a sight, once seen, never to be forgotten. The unfortunate passenger of course lost his portmanteau, clothes, and cigars.

In order to present to the reader the unromantic aspect of present-day smuggling in a comparative light, the writer is induced to quote one or two cases mentioned by Mr Chester. By perusing these selected instances, and comparing them with the methods adopted in our own day, it will be seen that smuggling in former times was surrounded with an adventurous atmosphere which certainly does not obtain in a matter-of-fact age like the present. One of the cases quoted by Mr Chester is a characteristic one. It occurred at the time when duties were levied on laces, silks, gloves, &c. These were mostly French manufactures, and, consequently, Dover and other southern ports were the most convenient localities in which the smuggling fraternity exercised their calling. At that time, well-horsed spring vans were used to convey the goods from Dover to London, and at intervals on the journey, particular houses were used as storage places for the booty until it could be safely conveyed to the metropolis. ‘On one occasion,’ says Mr Chester, ‘the Customs’ officers at Dover were sent on a fool’s errand. A van loaded with silk and lace left the town at night; and to insure it a successful journey, an accomplice informed the officers of its departure, the venture being suspected. Forthwith they went in pursuit in a postchaise. The parties in the van, after going about four miles, drew into a side-road, extinguished the lights, and remained quiet. The officers soon rushed by in hot haste; and when they had passed, the smugglers betook themselves in another direction, and got safely off with their booty.’

At a time when goods were subjected to _ad valorem_ duties, there were no end of tricks practised by which an importer, whose goods were seized, obtained his own importations for the veriest trifle, and thus made a handsome profit by his cleverness. Mr Chester relates an instance of an importer, more shrewd than honest, who imported into Folkestone a case of gloves on which he declined to pay duty. The goods, of course, were seized. Into London, the same gentleman imported a similar case with a like result. When the goods were offered for sale at the two places, it was found that the Folkestone case contained all right-hand gloves, while those in London were all left-hand gloves. Being considered valueless, they were knocked down to the buyer for a mere trifle. It is needless to add that the buyer in each case was the importer, who paired the gloves and pocketed a respectable profit by the transaction.

Another instance from the same authority illustrates the stratagems which were resorted to for the purpose of evading Customs’ duties on watches, when such imports were in vogue. A foreigner, it appears, had made up his mind to realise a small fortune at the expense of his comfort; so, taking a passage from Holland, he secreted a large number of watches round his body in leathern receptacles. The weight was so great that the unfortunate smuggler was unable to lie down. He had calculated on a voyage of twenty-four hours, but, being a foreigner, he little knew the density or the stopping powers of a Thames fog. The fog detained the ship for another twenty-four hours; and when the vessel arrived in London, the strain on the smuggler’s system had been so enormous that he was completely exhausted; his courage oozed out with his strength; and at last he gave himself up to the Customs’ officials, who had had a watchful eye on his suspiciously distressed-looking features.

Since the so-called ‘good old days’ of the novelist, smuggling has lost much of its attractiveness. The abolition of duty on watches, silks, lace, gloves, &c., has done a great deal to lessen an illicit traffic, and wholesale attempts at smuggling are now of comparatively rare occurrence. Of course, now and again a case crops up in which the old spirit seems to have revived; but such cases are comparatively few. Yet, though petty smuggling is, in the main, the special offence with which Customs’ officers have now to deal, wholesale smuggling has not yet become a thing of the past. In 1881, a daring attempt to defraud the revenue took place in London. The writer happened to be stationed there at the time, and can well remember the excitement caused in official circles by the discovery, and can recollect the crowds of officers who used daily to visit the quayage front of the Custom House, where lay a pair of marine boilers in which five tons of tobacco had been conveyed to this country from Rotterdam. The history of the attempted fraud is an interesting one. An anonymous writer, it appears, had been giving continuous hints to the officials in London that extensive smuggling was being carried on between Rotterdam and England. Such anonymous communications being far from uncommon in Lower Thames Street, but little attention was paid to them, till at last the writer grew so persistent in his efforts, and gave such plausible and detailed information, that a detective officer was sent to Rotterdam to watch the ingenious proceedings.

Taking advantage of the information given by the informer, the officer occupied a room from which a view of a large boiler-foundry was obtainable. Keeping strict watch, he saw large quantities of tobacco being packed, by means of hydraulic pressure, into a couple of marine boilers, which, when the packing was completed, were placed on board a steamer for conveyance, if I remember aright, to Newcastle. Unfortunately, however, for the parties concerned in the smuggling transaction, a telegram arrived before the boilers. These were not seized at Newcastle, but were allowed to be placed on the railway and reach King’s Cross, London, without interference, the authorities wishing to take the principal participators red-handed. At King’s Cross they duly arrived, and remained unclaimed for several days. At last, one was taken to a railway arch at Stepney, where it was watched day and night until the smugglers came to claim it, when they were of course arrested. The other boiler, which had remained at King’s Cross, was—through a telegraphic error, which caused the police to relax their watchfulness—removed from that locality without their knowledge. But the conveyance on which it was removed broke down under the heavy weight, and through this unlooked-for casualty, it was at last secured. The smugglers were mulcted in a fine of nearly five thousand pounds, and being unable to pay it, were sent to jail. The writer remembers well inspecting the boilers when they were lying at the Custom House, and to those who had the opportunity of seeing them, their construction gave ample evidence that smuggling as a science was not yet entirely extinct. The boilers were simply ‘dummies.’ The iron used in their construction was too thin to resist steam-pressure, and they had evidently been made for the express purpose of conveying tobacco to this country. It is not at all improbable, either, that the ‘dummy’ boilers had made more than one trip to England, and had put a good many pounds sterling in the pockets of their ingenious but dishonest designers.

Another famous instance of present-day smuggling was brought to light in the Queen’s Bench division in 1883. From the evidence then given, it appeared that the smugglers had inaugurated a systematic method of conveying tobacco from Rotterdam, and that, by no means content with the old-fashioned practice of having a single buyer and seller, they had regularly appointed agents, whom they stationed at different ports in the United Kingdom. On the arrival of the tobacco, the agent or agents communicated by telegraph with the principals in the affair, and by means of an arranged cipher, gave information as to when the goods arrived and when they had passed the Customs’ officers undetected. The principal was an Irishman, who carried on business as a tobacco merchant. He had a brother who traded in flax-seed. It occurred to the former that importations of tobacco which had evaded the duty would be much more profitable than duty-paid importations, and what more natural than that his brother’s barrels of flax-seed would form a not easily detected mode of conveyance? The course adopted then was this: a large quantity of flax-seed was purchased at Rotterdam, and also a quantity of tobacco. Sixty pounds-weight of the tobacco was rammed firmly down into the bottom of a cask, which was then filled up with flax-seed; and the casks so filled were shipped to this country, and reported and entered as containing flax-seed only. On one occasion, four hundred casks containing tobacco stowed in this way escaped detection; and in April 1882, fourteen hundred pounds of tobacco were smuggled into the country in twenty-five casks, each containing half a hundredweight of tobacco. Later on in the same month, two thousand pounds of tobacco followed their predecessors, and further consignments occurred in May.

At last the crisis came. Somebody, in smuggling parlance, ‘split;’ the officers boarded a ship from Rotterdam, opened the casks, and the nefarious consignment was at last laid bare. Despite the discovery, the Attorney-general, who conducted the case for the Crown, had no little difficulty in bringing the guilt home to the proper parties. The concealed tobacco had all been addressed to fictitious consignees, but the evidence of an accomplice exposed such a state of affairs that the defendant consented to a verdict being entered against him for over six thousand pounds, being treble the value of the goods, of which penalty, however, only one-third was eventually enforced.

But this was by no means the end of the history of one of the most daring attempts in the annals of modern smuggling. Some few months later, an action was brought against a tenant farmer in Ireland to recover £1731, 12s. 6d., being treble the value of nearly two thousand pounds of tobacco found on his premises. The discovery, as in most cases of the sort, was brought about by information. A police constable, ‘from information received,’ reported his suspicions to his superiors. A search was then instituted among the outhouses of the defendant’s premises. In the first story of one of the outhouses were a piggery and carthouse, the loft being reached by a ladder. One of the constables mounted the ladder, and peering through a chink in the locked door, perceived a bag lying on the floor with tobacco protruding from it. The door having been forced, fourteen bags of tobacco were found, with flax-seed scattered over them, the latter naturally suggesting the quarter from which the tobacco was obtained. The farmer when questioned denied all knowledge of the tobacco, asserting that he had let the loft at a weekly rental to a man whom he did not know. Evidence, however, was stronger than assertion. It was proved that the farmer, subsequent to the flax-seed seizure mentioned above, frequently brought bags and bales of cake and leaf-tobacco to the tobacco merchant’s premises about six o’clock in the morning, and that it was spun during the night. The jury were inclined to think that the farmer was not so innocent as he pretended to be, and found a verdict for the Crown in the full amount claimed.

We have now, perhaps, given sufficient instances of wholesale smuggling to warrant the opinion that illicit traffic in dutiable articles is not yet confined to the sailor or fireman who ekes out a scanty wage by bringing a couple or three pounds of tobacco or a few bottles of spirits to dispose of at the end of a short continental voyage. We will, then, before bringing this paper to a conclusion, give a brief description of the methods of concealment now pursued in petty smuggling cases. One system, now happily on the wane, is known as that of ‘Coopering,’ and the method is as follows. For some years past, a number of Dutch vessels had taken up positions along the eastern coast just outside the ‘three-mile limit.’ Their object was to provide tobacco, spirits, and even obscene pictures to the fishermen who frequent the locality. The tobacco was of the vilest description; and the fiery, so-called brandy viler still. The fishermen, thinking that the Customs’ officers did not suspect, grew bold in their transactions, and bought tobacco and spirits right and left from the Dutch ‘Coopers.’ Suspicion was aroused, however, and a raid was made on the fishing-boats. Only a small quantity of dutiable articles was discovered; but, as it subsequently transpired that a fishing coble had slipped off to give warning of the raid to the vessels that were still coming in, and that suspicious parcels and stone bottles of foreign manufacture were thrown by many of these craft into the sea in full view of the people on the shore, the quantity discovered was by no means a criterion of the extent of the illicit traffic. It has been calculated that during the fishing season five hundred pounds of smuggled tobacco per week were consumed by the fishing population of a small port on the eastern coast, and that in a seaport fishing-town in the same district, of from twelve thousand to fifteen thousand inhabitants, the revenue was defrauded to the extent of from four thousand to five thousand pounds per annum.

The smuggler’s present methods of concealment, notwithstanding frequent detections, give evidence that if not so inventive as his more courageous predecessors, he still retains their faculty of hiding his contraband goods in places where they will probably be least suspected. A case occurred at Hull, in December 1883, which proves that perseverance at least is still an attribute possessed by the smuggler. On the arrival of a steamer at that port, the officers discovered in the donkey-engine boiler twenty-one pounds of tobacco. To effect the seizure, the officers were compelled to unscrew the manhole lid of the boiler; and on a consulting engineer being called to give evidence, he stated that it must have taken at least a couple of hours to stow the tobacco away. Another case of a similar nature occurred at Sunderland some time ago, when an engineer on board a steamer had a large tin made exactly to fit the manhole of a water-tank. The water-tight tin was packed with tobacco and sunk in the tank, so that the smuggler had to strip to get at it. With amusing candour, the prisoner explained, when brought before the magistrates, that ‘of course it was no use putting the can where the officers would easily find it.’ False-bottomed drawers and chests were formerly a favourite hiding-place for contraband goods; but the trick is now too well known to be safe.