Very slyly does he withhold from us the subject of that application, and the nature of the Tartar’s commission; and it is left for us to discover that the bold smuggler had taken service at last with the revenue and customs authorities, and for a time placed his knowledge of the ins and outs of smuggling at the command of those whose duty it was to defeat the free-traders. It was perhaps the discovery that the work of spying and betraying was irksome, or perhaps the ready threats of his old associates, that caused him to relinquish the work.
However that may be, he was soon at smuggling again, carried on in between genuine trading enterprises; and in November 1831 was unlucky enough to be chased and captured by the Beer preventive boat. As usual, the cargo was carefully sunk before the capture was actually made, and although the preventive men strenuously grappled for it, they found nothing but a piece of rope, about one fathom long. On the very slight presumptive evidence of that length of rope, Rattenbury and his eldest son and two men were found guilty on their trial at Lyme Regis, and were committed to Dorchester gaol. There they remained until February 1833.
Rattenbury’s last smuggling experience was a shoregoing one, in the month of January 1836, at Torquay, where he was engaged with another man in carting a load of twenty tubs of brandy. They had got about a mile out of Newton Abbot, at ten o’clock at night, when a party of riding-officers came up and seized the consignment “in the King’s name.” Rattenbury escaped, being as eel-like and evasive as ever, but his companion was arrested.
Thus, before he was quite fifty-eight years of age, he quitted an exceptionally chequered career; but his wonted fires lived in his son, who continued the tradition, even though the great days of smuggling were by now done.
That son was charged, at Exeter Assizes, in March 1836, with having on the night of December 1st, 1835, taken part with others in assaulting two custom-house officers at Budleigh Salterton. Numerous witnesses swore to his having been at Beer that night, sixteen miles away, but he was found guilty and sentenced to seven years’ transportation; the Court being quite used to this abundant evidence, and quite convinced, Bible oaths to the contrary notwithstanding, that he was at Budleigh Salterton, and did in fact take part in maltreating His Majesty’s officers.
Jack Rattenbury was on this occasion cross-examined by the celebrated Mr. Serjeant Bompas, in which he declared he had brought up that son in a proper way, and “larnt him the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments.” (Perhaps also that important Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not be found out!”)
“You don’t find there, ‘Thou shalt not smuggle?’” asked Mr. Serjeant Bompas.
“No,” replied Rattenbury the ready, “but I find there, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.’”
The injured innocent, like to be transported for his country’s good, was granted a Royal Pardon, as the result of several petitions sent to Lord John Russell.
The village of Beer, deep down in one of the most romantic rocky coves of South Devon, is nowadays a very different kind of place from what it was in Rattenbury’s time. Then the home of fishermen daring alike in fishing and in smuggling, a village to which strangers came but rarely, it is now very much of a favourite seaside resort, and full of boarding-houses that have almost entirely abolished the ancient thatched cottages. A few of these yet linger on, together with one or two of the curious old stone water-conduits and some stretches of the primitive cobbled pavements, but they will not long survive. The sole characteristic industry of Beer that is left, besides the fishing and the stone-quarrying that has been in progress from the very earliest times, is the lace-making, nowadays experiencing a revival.