so many fierce encounters, such clever moves and counter-moves: there
are so many thousands of people concerned in the events, so many
craft employed, and so much money expended that the story of the
smugglers possesses a right to be ranked second only to those larger
battles between two or more nations.

Everyone has, even nowadays, a sneaking regard for the smugglers of
that bygone age, an instinct that is based partly on a curious human
failing and partly on a keen admiration for men of dash and daring.
There is a sympathy, somehow, with a class of men who succeeded not
once but hundreds of times in setting the law at defiance; who, in
spite of all the resources of the Government, were not easily beaten.
In the novels of James, Marryat, and a host of lesser writers the
smuggler and the Preventive man have become familiar and standard
types, and there are very few, surely, who in the days of their youth
have not enjoyed the breathless excitement of some story depicting the
chasing of a contraband lugger or watched vicariously the landing of
the tubs of spirits along the pebbly beach on a night when the moon
never showed herself. But most of these were fiction and little else.
Even Marryat, though he was for some time actually engaged in Revenue
duty, is now known to have been inaccurate and loose in some of his
stories. Those who have followed afterwards have been scarcely better.

However, there is nothing in the following pages which belongs to
fiction. Every effort has been made to set forth only actual
historical facts, which are capable of verification, so that what is
herein contained represents not what _might_ have happened but
actually did take place. To write a complete history of smuggling
would be well-nigh impossible, owing to the fact that, unhappily
through fire and destruction, many of the records, which to-day would