Smuggling Under the Cover of Plague
For 18th-century smugglers in Guernsey and the Isle of Man, plague was a business opportunity.
In May 1720 an infected ship from the Levant arrived in Marseilles, bringing with it the last major epidemic of bubonic plague in Western Europe. The disease cut a devastating swathe through Provence, killing an estimated 119,000 people before it died out in late 1722. Reaction in the British Isles was febrile. Fears that here, too, the pestilence might travel as an unwelcome passenger of maritime commerce led to severe quarantine measures. Yet, as the London Journal wrote in December 1720, these measures could all be brought to nothing if smugglers ‘bring us the French Plague with their cursed Trade on the Sea Coast’.
Seeking to avoid an outbreak the British government tried to impose a maritime cordon sanitaire. Initially, in August 1720, the privy council ordered customs officers to prevent anyone (or anything) coming ashore from ships arriving from the Mediterranean, but in October 1720 the restrictions were extended to require all ships arriving from the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man to undergo a 40-day quarantine. Why? Because Guernsey and the Isle of Man were notorious smuggling centres.
Smuggling was endemic in the 18th-century British Isles. Demand for contraband was buoyed by high taxes on desirable commodities – especially East India goods, tobacco, and foreign spirits – imposed after the Glorious Revolution of 1689 to fund British involvement in European wars. Tea, a staple of smuggling cargoes, was, before the 1784 Commutation Act, taxed at the extraordinary rate of 119 per cent. Guernsey and the Isle of Man, having privileges that exempted them from customs and excise enforcement, were well placed to benefit from this lucrative (albeit illegal) commercial opportunity. They quickly became hubs in wide-ranging smuggling networks. In these islands smugglers could import goods – from suppliers in France, Scandinavia, the West Indies, and further overseas – break them down into easily handled packages, and send cargoes of contraband to be run ashore onto the poorly monitored coastlines of the British Isles. As early as 1712 John Sherwood, the Registrar of Certificates in Guernsey, reported that ‘French merch[ants] are here in great numbers, their boats come in and go very frequently’.
The so-called ‘running trade’ put money into the pockets of the islands’ political and mercantile elite and bread on the tables of the common people: the trade provided work in a myriad of occupations – from porters to coopers, rope-makers, and seafarers. In 1800 there were no fewer than 15 tobacco-processing factories in Guernsey, employing a workforce of above 1,000. It is no surprise, therefore, that Guernsey and Manx officials fiercely resisted (and even sabotaged) the imposition of any restrictions upon maritime traffic – even when the threat of plague loomed large.
In 1733, when plague in Tripoli prompted renewed restrictions, for example, the royal court of Guernsey refused to pay for a boat to enforce the quarantine on the grounds that this would be an ‘intolerable burden’ that would infringe upon the ‘ancient privileges of this Island’. In evident exasperation the secretary of state replied:
It appears pretty extraordinary, that any Words in a Royal Charter, granted for the benefit and advantage of your Island, should be construed to authorise you to neglect the using of those precautions which His Majesty in His great Wisdom & Care of his people ... has judged to be necessary for their preservation, from so dreadfull a Calamity.
Manx officials were no less recalcitrant. In November 1747 Peter Sidebotham, the king’s officer in the Isle of Man, complained that they invested far more effort in trying to identify (and intimidate) the person who was informing him about smuggling activities than they did in preventing a Dutch ship suspected of carrying the plague from landing and potentially infecting the island.
Smugglers, meanwhile, proved adept at getting around quarantine restrictions. Guernésiais smugglers used their long-standing links with communities on the Breton and Norman coasts to obtain false paperwork. In 1721 the privy council reported that ‘it is a growing practice for Smugling Vessels of the Islands of Jersey and Guernzey to ... procure blank Bills of Health which they afterwards fill up themselves and avoid the performing [of] Quarantine by producing them as authentick’. Guernésiais officials were also implicated: in September 1722 the house of Andrew Smith, the lieutenant governor’s clerk, was found to contain a mountain of blank bills of health, signatures, and seals.
Some smugglers even sought to use the threat of plague to assist their activities. In 1721 Captain Pitman of the Royal Navy sloop Swift reported encountering French shallops – a type of small boat – off Beachy Head who pretended to be fishermen without bills of health. Pitman was unable to investigate, however, because if he boarded any of these vessels to search for contraband the Swift would have to undergo quarantine. Thus, he wrote, it was ‘probable a smuggling trade may be Carryed on under that pretence’.
When, in late 1720, ‘dismal accounts’ began to circulate that plague had reached the Isle of Man some suspected that the smugglers themselves might have fabricated the story. In December Joseph Sewell, a customs officer at Chester, reported that a boat carrying brandy from the Isle of Man was prevented from sneaking up the river andforced to turn back out towards the Irish Sea. Sewell noted, however, that the crew was healthy and stated that it ‘looks as if the Acc[oun]t spread of the Plague being there was intended for the Runners to have great opportunities in not having their Ships and Cargoes seized by Officers going on board’.
The threat of plague waned after the crisis of the 1720s, but that of smuggling only waxed. A vicious cycle of increasingly draconian repression and violent reaction created a low-grade fever of conflict. Increasingly large, well-armed Guernésiais and Manx vessels contested the British state’s capacity to enforce control over maritime traffic. While the British government did, eventually, stamp out the smuggling centres in the Isle of Man (in 1765) and Guernsey (in 1807) the problem of preventing illegal trade into the British Isles is one that proves troublesome even today.
Dabeoc Stanley is a PhD researcher at Lancaster University.
