lso a couple of months later the
difficulty he had to secure arrests of smugglers, for even when he had
obtained warrants for the apprehension of eight most notorious men,
the constables excused themselves from doing their duty in serving the
warrants, and pretended that the eight men had absconded.

And anyone who cares to examine the Treasury Books and Papers for this
period will find similar cases. In July of 1743 some smugglers had
seized the Custom House boat at Dover and coolly employed her for
their own purposes in running tea. The Custom officers deemed matters
to be in such a state that they begged that a man-of-war might be
stationed on that coast to prevent smuggling. Similarly in January of
1743-44, during a skirmish near Arundel between the preventive men
assisted by some dragoons against a band of smugglers, the latter had
wounded three of the soldiers and carried off an officer and two other
dragoons on board the smugglers' cutter. This was no unique
occurrence, for sometimes the contraband runners, when infuriated,
captured the would-be captors, hurried them out to sea, and then,
having bound the unfortunate victims with a bit of spare rope and
having tied a piece of ballast to their live bodies, they would be
hurled overboard into the sea, and the soldier or preventive man would
never be seen or heard of again unless his lifeless body were cast
upon the beach. At Folkestone, about this time, three men were carried
off by the smugglers in trying to effect an arrest, and the supervisor
at Colchester had been also carried off, but afterwards he had been
released on promising not to mention the smugglers' names. It was bad
enough, therefore, for the Revenue men when they had the assistance of
the dragoons, but it was infinitely worse when they had to contend
alone. There is an almost pathetic petition from the Folkestone
riding-officers sent on New Year's Day 1744-45, begging for military
assistance against the smugglers, as although there were soldiers
stationed at Dover yet they were unobtainable, since they refused to
march more than five miles.

And it was just as bad, if not worse, about this time in the Isle of
Man, for the latter's inhabitants consisted almost exclusively of
smugglers and their families, some of whom had long since been
outlawed from England and Ireland. So rich and prosperous, indeed, had
these Manxmen become by means of smuggling that they were recognised
with a degree of importa