East Coast Smuggling—Outrage at Beccles—A Colchester Raid—Canvey Island—Bradwell Quay—The East Anglian “Cart Gaps”—A Blakeney Story—Tragical Epitaph at Hunstanton—The Peddar’s Way
The doings of the Kentish and Sussex gangs entirely overshadow the annals of smuggling in other counties; and altogether, to the general reader, those two seaboards and the coasts of Devon and Cornwall stand out as typical scenes. But no part of our shores was immune; although the longer sea-passages to be made elsewhere of course stood greatly in the way of the “free-traders” of those less favoured regions. After Kent and Sussex, the east coast was probably the most favourable for smuggling. The distance across the North Sea might be greater and the passage often rough, but the low muddy shores and ramifying creeks of Essex and the sandy coastwise warrens of Suffolk, Norfolk, and Lincolnshire, very sparsely inhabited, offered their own peculiar facilities for the shy and secretive trade.
Nor did the East Anglian smugglers display much less ferocity when their interests were threatened, or their goods seized, than was shown by the yokels of those other counties. The stolid, ox-like rustics of the country-side there, as along the margin of the English Channel, were roused to almost incredible acts of brutality which do not seem to have been repeated in the West.
We do not find the hardy seafaring smugglers often behaving with the cold-blooded cruelty displayed, as a usual phenomenon, by the generally unemotional men of ploughed fields and rustic communities who took up the running and carried the goods inland from the water’s edge whither those sea-dogs had brought them. In the being of the men who dared tempestuous winds and waves there existed, as a rule, a more sportsmanlike and generous spirit. Something of the traditional heartiness inseparable from sea-life impelled them to give and take without the black blood that seethed evilly in the veins of the landsmen. The seamen, it seemed, realised that smuggling was a risk; something in the nature of any game of skill, into which they entered, with the various officers of the law naturally opposed to them; and when either side won, that was incidental to the game, and no enmity followed as the matter of course it was with their shore-going partners.
Perhaps these considerations, as greatly as the difference in racial characters, show us why the land-smugglers of the Home Counties should have been so criminal, while from the Devon and Cornish contrabandists we hear mostly of humorous passages.
At Beccles, in Suffolk, for example, we find the record, in 1744, of an incident that smacks rather of the Hawkhurst type of outrage. Smugglers there pulled a man out of bed, whipped him, tied him naked on a horse, and rode away with their prisoner, who was never again heard of, although a reward of £50 was offered.
Colchester was the scene, on April 16th, 1847, of as bold an act as the breaking open of the custom-house at Poole. At two o’clock in the morning two men arrived at the quay at Hythe, by Colchester, and, with the story that they were revenue officers come to lodge a seizure of captured goods, asked to be shown the way to the custom-house. They had no sooner been shown it than there followed thirty smugglers, well armed with blunderbusses and pistols, who, with a heavy blacksmith’s hammer and a crowbar, broke open the warehouse, in which a large quantity of dutiable goods was stored. They were not molested in their raid, and went off with sixty oil-bags, containing 1514 lb. of tea that had been seized near Woodbridge Haven. No one dared interfere with them, and by six o’clock that morning they had proceeded as far as Hadleigh, from which point all trace of them was lost.
Canvey Island, in the estuary of the Thames, off Benfleet, with its quaint old Dutch houses, relics of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Hollanders who settled there and carried on a more than questionable business, was reputedly a nest of smugglers. The “Lobster Smack,” a quaint old weatherboarded inn built just within the old earthen sea-wall for which those Dutchmen were responsible, and standing somewhat below the level of high water, has legends of smuggling that naturally do not lose by age or repetition.
The Blackwater estuary, running up from the Essex coast to Maldon, offered peculiar facilities for smuggling; and that, perhaps, is why a coastguard vessel is still stationed at Stansgate, half way along its length, opposite Osea Island. At the mouth of the Blackwater there branch other creeks and estuaries leading past Mersea Island to Colchester; and here, looking out upon a melancholy sea, and greatly resembling a barn, stands the ancient chapel of St. Peter-upon-the-Wall, situated in one of the most lonely spots conceivable, on what were, ages ago, the ramparts of the Roman station of Othona. It has long been used as a barn, and was in smuggling times a frequent rendezvous of the night-birds who waged ceaseless war with the Customs.