But we may quite easily have a surfeit of these brutal affrays, and it is better to dwell on a lighter note, to contemplate the audacity, and to admire the ingenuity and the resource often displayed by the smugglers in concealing their movements.
To especially single out any particular line of coast for pre-eminence in smuggling would be impossible. When every one smuggled, and every one else—owing to that well-understood human foible of buying in the cheapest market—supported smuggling by purchasing smuggled goods, every foreshore that did not actually present physical difficulties, or that was not exceptionally under excise and customs surveillance, was a free port, in a very special signification. The thickly peopled coast-line of Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire of our own time was then sparsely populated, and those shores that are now but thinly settled were in that age the merest aching wildernesses, where not only towns, but even villages and hamlets, were few and far apart. A coast-line such as that at Brighton would seem to us to present certain obvious difficulties to the smuggler, but close at hand was the low-lying land of Shoreham, with its lagoon-like harbour, a very shy, secretive kind of place, to this day; while away to Worthing, and beyond it, stretched a waste of shingle-beach, running up to solitary pasture-lands that reached to the foot of the noble rampart of the South Downs. On these shores the free-traders landed their illegal imports with little interference, and their shore-going allies received the goods and took them inland, to London or to their intermediate storehouses in the country-side, very much at their leisure. Avoiding the much-travelled high-roads, and traversing the chalk-downs by unfrequented bridle-tracks, they went across the level Weald and past the Surrey border into that still lonely district running east and west for many miles, on the line of Leith Hill, Ewhurst, and Hindhead. There, along those wooded heights, whose solitary ways still astonish, with their remote aspect, the Londoner who by any chance comes to them, although but from thirty to thirty-five miles from the Bank of England in the City of London, you may still track, amid the pine-trees on the shoulders of the gorsy hills, or among the oaks that grow so luxuriantly in the Wealden clay, the “soft roads,” as the country folk call them, along which the smugglers, unmolested, carried their merchandise. On Ewhurst Hill stands a windmill, to which in those times the smugglers’ ways converged; and near by, boldly perched on a height, along the sylvan road that leads from Shere to Ewhurst village, stood the “Windmill,” once the “New” inn, which had a double roof, utilised as a storehouse for clandestine kegs. A “Windmill” inn stands on the spot to-day, but it is a new building, the old house having unfortunately been burned down some two years since. Surveying the country from this spot, you have, on the one hand, almost precipitous hill-peaks, gorsy to their summits, and on the other a lovely dale, deeply embosomed in woods. The sub-soil here is a soft yellow sandstone, streaked with white sand, breaking out along the often hollow paths into miniature cliffs, in which the smugglers and their allies were not slow to scoop caverns and store part of their stock. We have already learnt how terrible these men could be to those who informed against them or made away with any of their property, and by direct consequence the goods thus stored were generally safe, either from the authorities or from the rustics, who had a very wholesome and well-founded dread of the smuggling bands. But they had a way of their own of letting these justly dreaded folk see that their stores were evident to some, and that silence was supposed to have a certain market value. Their way was just a delicate hint, which consisted in marking a tub or two with a chalk cross; and, sure enough, when the stock was removed, those chalk-marked tubs were left behind, with possibly, if the country-folk had been modest and the smugglers were generous, a few others to keep them company.