h 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
be invaluable, have long since perished. The burning down of the
Customs House by the side of the Thames in 1814 and the inappreciation
of the right value of certain documents by former officials have
caused so desirable a history to be impossible to be written. Still,
happily, there is even now a vast amount of material in existence, and
the present Commissioners of the Board of Customs are using every
effort to preserve for posterity a mass of data connected with this
service.

Owing to the courtesy of the Commissioners it has been my good fortune
to make careful researches through the documents which are concerned
with the old smuggling days, the Revenue cutters, and the Preventive
Service generally; and it is from these pages of the past and from
other sources that I have been enabled to put forth the story as it is
here presented; and as such it represents an attempt to afford an
authentic picture of an extremely interesting and an equally exciting
period of our national history, to show the conditions of the
smuggling industry from the seventeenth to the nineteenth cent