It is impossible to resist the strong suspicion, in all this and other talk in the autobiography, of buying and building newer and larger vessels, that the Carters were financed by some wealthy and influential person, or persons, as undoubtedly many smugglers were, the profits of the smuggling trade, when conducted on a large scale and attended by a run of luck, being very large and amply recouping the partners for the incidental losses. But the loss of the fine new cutter, on her first voyage, at St. Malo, must have been a very serious business.
After another interval of success with the smaller cutter they had earlier used, with spells ashore, “riding about the country getting freights, collecting money for the company, etc., etc.,” another fifty-ton cutter was purchased, mounting nineteen guns. That venture, too, was highly successful, and “the company accordingly had a new lugger built, mounting twenty guns.” Horrible to relate, Captain Harry, “being exposed to more company and sailors of all descriptions, larned to swear at times.” This is bad hearing.
Obviously in those times there was a good deal of give and take going on between the Customs and those smugglers who smuggled on a large scale, and the Carters’ vessels must in some unofficial way have ranked as privateers. Hence, possibly, the considerable armament they carried. The Customs, and the Admiralty too, were prepared to wink at smuggling when services against the foreign foe could be invoked. Thus we find Captain Harry, in his autobiography, narrating how the Collector of Customs at Penzance sent him a message to the effect that the _Black Prince_ privateer, from Dunkirk, was off the coast, near St. Ives, and desiring him to pursue her. “It was not,” frankly says Captain Harry, “a very agreeable business”; but, being afraid of offending the Collector, he obeyed, and went in pursuit, with two vessels. Coming up with the enemy, after a running fight of three or four hours, the lugger received a shot that obliged her to bear up, in a sinking condition; and so her consort stood by her, and the chase was of necessity abandoned. Presently the lugger sank, fourteen of her crew of thirty-one being drowned.
In January 1788 he went with a cargo of contraband in a forty-five-ton lugger to Cawsand Bay, near Plymouth, and there met with the most serious reverse of his smuggling career, two man-o’-war’s boats boarding the vessel and seizing it and its contents. He was so knocked about over the head with cutlasses that he was felled to the deck, and left there for dead.