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.
Another method much in vogue in the old days of smuggling, but seldom practised now, was to conceal tobacco in loaves of bread specially baked for the purpose. This particular trick has not been lost sight of altogether. At Hull, in March 1884, on a Customs’ officer rummaging the firemen’s quarters on board a steamer, he found two loaves of bread baked in the German fashion. Taking them in his hand, he suspected the weight as being excessive, and cutting one in two with his knife, found four pounds of tobacco inside. The packages had been firmly tied together, and a thin crust baked over them.
An ingenious place of concealment was discovered by the officers at Hull in January 1883, when, on boarding a vessel from the continent, they found seventeen boxes of cigars concealed in the hollow of the port and starboard rails which surmounted the bulwarks. Underneath firewood, buried in ballast, hidden in chain lockers, beneath oilcloths, in the stuffing of sofa-pillows, behind cabin panels, in the empty interior of an innocent-looking cabin clock, in these and a thousand other places have the officers, from time to time, discovered the contraband of the smuggler; while it is known that the ropes apparently constituting the upper rigging of small craft have occasionally consisted of tobacco twisted into a resemblance of cordage!
From what we have written, it would appear that though smuggling on an extensive scale belongs more to past than to present days, yet the same spirit still exists among people, otherwise honest enough, whose education and social position ought to free them from thieving propensities. It is almost against human nature to expect that revenue frauds will ever be thoroughly eradicated while the present high duties on special commodities are maintained. The duty on tobacco, for instance, amounting to five times its value, makes it one of the greatest temptations to seamen. Most strenuous efforts on the part of the Customs’ authorities and shipowners have been made to eradicate the traffic, yet every now and then a successful detection—which represents three or four successful evasions—occurs, which shows that the spirit of smuggling is difficult to conquer.