On Aug. 11, 1758, Nicholas Wingfield and Adams Hyde, of Hastings, masters of two privateer cutters, piratically boarded the Danish ship “Der Reisende Jacob,” on board of which was the Marquis Pignatelli, Ambassador Extraordinary from his Catholic Majesty to the Court of Denmark; assaulting Jurgan Muller, the master of the vessel, and stealing twenty casks of butter. The Lords of the Admiralty offered a reward of 500l. Nicholas Wingfield and Adams Hyde, with four others, having been betrayed by some of their accomplices, were arrested; and on Jan. 15, 1759, were brought under a strong guard of soldiers, and lodged in the Marshalsea. They were tried at the Admiralty sessions, March 9, 1759, when Nicholas Wingfield and Adams Hyde were found guilty; and on the 28th of the same month, were hung at Execution Dock. The four others were acquitted. The punishment did not operate as a sufficient warning to the Hastings men. For seven years a gang known as Huxley’s crew, most of whom lived at Hastings, boarded and robbed several of the ships coming up the Channel; and in particular in 1768, they boarded a Dutch homeward-bound hoy, called “The Three Sisters,”[83] Peter Bootes, commander, about two leagues from Beachy Head, and chopped the master down the back with an axe. In November, 1768, the Government sent a detachment of two hundred of the Inniskilling Dragoons to Hastings, to arrest the men, who had been betrayed by their bragging to one another how the Dutchman wriggled when they had cut him on the backbone; and a man-of-war and cutter lay off Hastings to receive the men.[84] The soldiers had strict orders not to allow their mission to be known; but the day after their arrival, the Mayor (who was supposed to have aided in the evidence) was assaulted in the town, because he would not tell what the soldiers came for; the soldiers were thereupon called out, and several arrests made of parties, who were conveyed to the Marshalsea. At the Admiralty sessions holden on Oct. 30, 1869, Thomas Phillips, elder and younger, William and George Phillips, Mark Chatfield, Robert Webb, Thomas and Samuel Ailsbury, James and Richard Hyde, William Geary, alias Justice, alias George Wood, Thomas Knight and William Wenham, were indicted for the piracy of “The Three Sisters,” and capitally convicted; and of these Thomas Ailsbury, William Geary, William Wenham, and Richard Hyde were hung at Execution Dock, Nov. 27.
So great was the panic occasioned by these arrests, that a shop-keeper, reported to be worth £10,000, absconded on information of having bought goods of the smugglers.[85]
In 1779 it became necessary to pass another act against smuggling; and, in a pamphlet making the new law known,[86] it is stated that the practice of smuggling had made such rapid strides from the sea-coasts into the very heart of the country, pervading every city, town, and village, as to have brought universal distress on the fair dealer; that the greater part of the 3,867,500 gallons distilled annually at Schiedam, was to be smuggled into England; that a distillery had lately been set up for making Geneva, for the same purpose, at Dunkirk; that the French imported five or six millions of pounds of tea, the greatest part of which was to be smuggled here;[87] that the trade of Dunkirk (where, and at Flushing, the Sussex smugglers, so late as thirty years since, had regular resident agents) was mostly carried on by smugglers, in vessels not only large, but so well constructed for sailing, that seldom one of them was captured; that in many places near the sea, the farmer was unable to find hands to do his work, whilst great numbers were employed in smuggling goods from one part of the country to another; and that the smugglers paid for what they bought in cash, or by the illicit exportation of English wool, no other articles of any consequence being carried abroad by them.
Although the illicit trade in the bulky article of wool came to an end with the commencement of the war of 1793, yet the trade in tea, silks, tobacco, and spirits continued; and, after the close of the war, was largely carried on. By degrees, tea was not easily got, and the duty on silks left little profit to the smuggler. Spirits increased in value, by being some forty per cent. over proof, and tobacco still, however, gave a profitable return, and lives were freely risked.[88]
In such a society as the Sussex, it would be improper to enter into any details which might involve the characters of persons still alive; but I may glance briefly at some of the encounters which have taken place within my own time. The trial for murder, and conviction at Horsham, on March 28, 1821, of George England, a preventive man, for shooting Joseph Swaine, a fisherman of Hastings, in a scuffle, is in the recollection of many fishermen still alive there. On Feb. 11th, in the next year, three hundred smugglers went to Crow Link, near Eastbourne, to land a cargo, but were stopped by a signal from the sentinel; four nights afterwards, they landed at Cliff Point, Seaford, three hundred half-ankers, losing only sixty-three and a horse. On the 13th, they attacked the sentinel at Little Common with bats;[89] he, however, shot a smuggler with his pistol; the boat made sail from the land, and a coach-and-six, which was waiting at the back of the beach, drove off empty to Pevensey. In September, 1824, a run was attempted to Bexhill, when seven smugglers, with one hundred tubs of spirits, were taken; and one of the blockade-men, named Welch, having jumped into the boat, the smugglers pulled off with him, and his dead body was found on the sands in the morning, with the head and face bruised and lacerated. In May, 1856, a smuggling galley, chased by a guardboat, ran ashore near the mouth of Rye Harbour, and opened fire on the guard. The blockade-men from Camber watch-house came to the spot and seized one of the smugglers, when a body of not less than two hundred armed smugglers rushed from behind the sandhills, commenced a fire on the blockade, killing one and wounding another, but were ultimately driven off with the capture of their galley, carrying off, nevertheless, their wounded. On another occasion, four or five smugglers were killed whilst swimming the military canal at Pett-horse Race, having missed the spot where it was fordable. On April 13, 1827, about twenty smugglers went down to the eastward of Fairlight; a struggle ensued; the smugglers wrested some muskets from the blockade-men, beat them with the butt-ends, and ran one through with a bayonet; the smugglers at length retreated, leaving one of their number dead; another was found afterwards, having been apparently dropped by the smugglers; a third, some distance on the way to Icklesham, the body scarcely cold; the rest of the wounded men were carried off by their companions; and I have been informed that one of the party alone carried one of his fellows on his back, from the scene of the conflict at Fairlight to his residence at Udimore, a distance of six miles at least.
Another, and nearly the last of these bloodsheddings, took place on Jan. 3, 1828, near Bexhill. A lugger landed between that village and the little public-house at Bo-peep; a party of smugglers, armed with bats, rushed to the beach, landed the cargo, and made off with it in carts, on horses, and on men’s backs straight to Sidley Green; here they were come up with by the blockade, reinforced to about forty men; the armed portion of the smugglers drew themselves up in a regular line, and a desperate fight took place. The smugglers fought with such determination and courage that the blockade-men were repulsed, after many had been severely bruised and the Quartermaster Collins killed. In the first volley fired by the blockade, an old smuggler named Smithurst was killed; his body was found the next morning, with his bat still grasped in his hands, the weapon being almost hacked in pieces by the cutlasses and bayonets of the blockade-men. Here again, as was their invariable habit, the smugglers carried safely away all their wounded.
At the spring assizes at Horsham, in 1828, Spencer Whiteman of Udimore, Thomas Miller, Henry Miller, John Spray, Edward Shoesmith, William Bennett, John Ford and Stephen Stubberfield, were indicted for assembling armed on this night, for purposes of smuggling, and were removed for trial to the Old Bailey, where, on April 10, they all pleaded guilty; as did Whiteman, Thomas Miller, Spray, Bennett and Ford, together with Thomas Maynard and Plumb, for a like offence on Jan. 23, 1828, at Eastbourne. Sentence of death was passed on all, but the punishment was commuted to transportation. They were, with three exceptions, young men under thirty years of age.
Other, but minor affrays took place on Jan. 3, 1831, two miles east of Hastings, when two of the smugglers, William Cruttenden and Joseph Harrold, were shot dead; on Feb. 22, 1832, at Worthing, between two hundred and three hundred men there assembled, when one William Cowardson was shot dead, and several more were carried away wounded; and on January 23, 1833, at Eastbourne, when the smugglers, having killed the chief boatman, George Pitt, formed two lines on each side till the cargo was run, and then left—not, however, without having several of their party wounded; but on no one of these occasions was any of the gang discovered. The last occasion on which a life was sacrificed was on April 1, 1838, when Thomas Monk, a poor fiddler of Winchelsea, was shot by the coast-guard, in an affray at Camber Castle.[90]
The Abbey ruins, the dismantled Castles,[91] the “haunted” houses, were all used without interruption by the smugglers, as depositories for their goods. I have been present, in a house at Rye, when silks, for sale, were mysteriously produced from their hidingplaces; and it was the custom of the farmers, in that neighbourhood, to favour the smugglers so far as to allow the gates in the fields to be left unlocked at night; and to broach, without a scruple, the half-anker of Schiedem, which was considerately left in some hayrick or out-house, in acknowledgment of the farmer’s accommodating and kindred spirit.