He did so, and, as soon as seemed safe, dropped to the ground and crawled to a hackney-coach, hired by his friends, that had been waiting that night and several nights earlier, near by.
Safely away from the neighbourhood of the prison, his friends procured him a post-chaise and four; and thus he travelled post-haste to the Sussex coast at Brighton. On the beach a small sailing-vessel was waiting to convey him across Channel. He landed at Calais and thence made for Flushing, where he was promptly flung into prison by the agents of Napoleon, who was at that time seriously menacing our shores with invasion from Boulogne, where his flotilla for the transport of troops then lay.
Johnson and others were, in the opening years of the nineteenth century, very busily employed in smuggling gold out of the country into France. Ever since the troubles of the Revolution in that country, and all through the wars that had been waged with the rise of Napoleon, gold had been dwindling. People, terrified at the unrest of the times, and nervous of fresh troubles to come, secreted coin, and consequently the premium on gold rose to an extraordinary height, not only on the Continent but in England as well. A guinea would then fetch as much as twenty-seven shillings, and was worth a good deal more on the other side of the Channel. Patriotism was not proof against the prospects of profits to be earned by the export of gold, and not a few otherwise respectable banking-houses embarked in the trade. Finance has no conscience.
[Picture: Johnson putting off from Brighton Beach]
It is obvious that only thoroughly dependable and responsible men could be employed on this business, for shipments of gold varied from £20,000 to £50,000.
Eight and ten-oared galleys were as a rule used for the traffic; the money slung in long leather purses around the oarsmen’s bodies.
Napoleon is said to have offered Johnson a very large reward if he would consent, as pilot, to aid his scheme of invasion, and we are told that Johnson hotly refused.
“I am a smuggler,” said he, “but a true lover of my country, and no traitor.”
Napoleon was no sportsman. He kept Johnson closely confined in a noisome dungeon for nine months. How much longer he proposed to hold him does not appear, for the smuggler, long watching a suitable opportunity, at last broke away, and, ignorant that a pardon was awaiting him in England, escaped to America.