by firing a broadside.
The Revenue cruiser now prepared to engage her, whereupon the shallop
hoisted an English pennant, which was evidently a signal for
assistance, for a large armed cutter promptly appeared and came to the
shallop's rescue. Seeing that he was overmatched, Bland, therefore,
sheered off. During the same month Captain Whitehead, of the _Eagle_,
to whom we have already referred, reported that he seldom went for a
cruise without being fired on, and he mentioned that sometimes these
smuggling vessels carried musket-proof breast-works--a kind of early
armour-plating, in fact.

The principal rendezvous of the smuggling craft in the North Sea was
Robin Hood's Bay. Whenever the cruisers used to approach that bight
the smugglers would sail out, fire upon them, and drive them along the
coast. Before firing, the smugglers always hoisted English colours,
and on one occasion a smuggling craft had the temerity to run
alongside a Revenue cruiser, hail her, and in a derisive manner
ordered the commander to send his boat aboard. We spoke just now of
the superior sailing qualities which these smuggling craft frequently
possessed over the Revenue cruisers, and on one occasion, in the North
Sea, the master of a smuggling shallop, when being pursued, impudently
lowered his lugsail--that would be his mizzen--to show that the
cruiser could not come up and catch him. And lest that dishonourable
incident previously mentioned, of a cruiser being ordered out of
Saltburn Bay, may be thought a mere isolated event, let us hasten to
add that the cruiser _Mermaid_ was lying at anchor off Dunstanburgh
Castle, on the Northumbrian coast, when Edward Browning came alongside
her in an armed shallop named the _Porcupine_, belonging to Sandwich.
He insisted on the _Mermaid_ getting up her anchor and leaving that
region: "otherwise he would do him a mischief." Indeed, were these
facts not shown unmistakably by actual eye-witnesses to be the very
reverse of fiction, one might indeed feel doubtful as to accepting
them. But it is unlikely that cruiser-commanders would go out of their
way to record incidents which injured their reputation, had these
events never in reality occurred.

Some idea of the degree of success which smuggling vessels attained
during this eighteenth century may be gathered from the achievements
of a cutter which was at work on the south coast. Her name was the
_Swift_, and she belonged to Bridport. She was of 100 tons b