LIFE OF A SMUGGLER: Fact and Fiction

A smuggler was 'a wretch who, in defiance of justice and the laws, imports or exports goods as either contraband or without payment of the customs,' according to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. Smuggling, or 'Free Trade', may have peaked in the 17th and 18th centuries but it first began in response to a toll on wine imports by Anglo-Saxon king Aethelred II (966-1016) who needed to pay for holding off Danish invaders. As a result, wine traders used any port or harbour except the toll ports. The book explains how, over the years, women could help unload and carry smuggled contraband as silk, bladders filled with alcohol and even ropes of tobacco could be wound around the legs and body and safely hidden beneath voluminous layers of skirt and petticoats. The cup of tea may be an established part of life today, but the history highlights that Portuguese merchants in the 1500s would smuggle tea into Europe and the fashion of tea drinking was supposedly introduced to England in the 1600s by Portuguese-born Catherine of Braganza when she married King Charles II in 1662. The chapters are dotted with "little known facts" including the detail that when smugglers were arrested during the 18th century, they received the sympathy of local magistrates reliant on receiving goods and, on one occasion, the magistrate dismissed the charge and ordered the arresting officer to be flogged for his impertinence instead. The facts are often amusing, from the story of a Dorset smuggler who taunted the revenue men by dropping his breeches and mooning them, to Joss Snelling who was still smuggling in his nineties and was presented to Queen Victoria. Photographs of routes which smugglers travelled are also included, a shot of a West Country lane that was typical of a hidden highway, Mermaid Street in Rye and graveyards and old ruins. Paperback, black and white images, 170pp.