Boats built for speed and cargo
Luggers are best known as fishing boats, worked from Cornwall and Brittany. Along the Channel coasts, however, they had another reputation. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, large, fast luggers were used for smuggling and, in wartime, for privateering. Records of such activity are patchy for obvious reasons, and many of the stories told about them are embellished, so this article sticks to what is generally agreed.
Why smuggling was worth the risk
In Britain, governments depended heavily on customs and excise duties for revenue. In the eighteenth century, high duties applied to tea, spirits, tobacco, wine, lace and other goods, and in some periods there were also controls on exporting wool. This created a profitable illegal trade. Goods were bought cheaply on the continent or in the Channel Islands, shipped across the Channel and landed on quiet stretches of coast in Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall, where local communities often took part or tolerated it.
The scale of smuggling in this period is hard to estimate, and historians are cautious about numbers. It was nonetheless a serious problem for governments, and the trade involved ordinary fishermen and farmers as well as larger organised groups.
What made luggers suitable
A lugger had several qualities that helped such voyages.
- Speed. Large luggers carried a big spread of sail on masts that could be lowered, and they could sail fast, particularly on a reach.
- Handiness. A lugger could tack quickly in a harbour mouth and work close inshore.
- Capacity. A decked or partly decked lugger could carry a substantial cargo of casks and packages.
- Disguise. A lugger looked much like a fishing boat, so it did not attract attention on a coast full of fishing craft.
- Crew. Lugger crews were large relative to the boat’s size, which helped to land cargo quickly and, if necessary, to row away in a calm.
Some smuggling luggers were built or bought for the purpose, with sharper lines and a larger rig than ordinary fishing luggers. Guernsey and Folkestone are among the places commonly associated with the trade, though similar vessels worked along the whole coast.
Privateering
In time of war, governments issued commissions to private vessels, which allowed them to capture enemy merchant ships and keep a share of the value. Such commissions were known as letters of marque. During the wars between Britain and France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, French ports such as Dunkirk, Boulogne and Saint-Malo sent out numerous small privateers, many of them luggers. They crossed the Channel to take British coasters and fishing boats, and they were fast enough to escape larger warships.
British luggers also served as privateers on the other side of the same conflict. The skills and local knowledge of fishermen and smugglers were useful in these ventures, and the boundary between the two activities could be blurred. Privateering boats of this size seldom fought battles; their aim was to capture unarmed or lightly armed merchant vessels and to avoid warships. Their success was real but hard to measure, and it is a limited part of the wider story of pirate vessels and of private warfare at sea.
How the authorities responded
Governments tried several approaches.
- Revenue cutters. Fast, armed, single-masted vessels were stationed along the coast to intercept smugglers. A cutter could sail well to windward and was armed with a few guns, so it could stop and board a smuggling boat.
- Riding officers and land patrols. Officers on horseback watched for landings on shore, though they were few and often outnumbered by the local gangs.
- Naval help. The Royal Navy sometimes used small warships against smugglers, although this was not its main task.
- Organised preventive services. In the early nineteenth century the authorities set up the Preventive Water Guard and, in Kent and Sussex, the Coast Blockade, and in 1822 the Coast Guard was created by combining several earlier services.
The contest between smuggling luggers and cutters was a real arms race. Smugglers fitted their boats with larger rigs, and sometimes with more oars, and the cutters grew in size and sail area in response. Some smuggling boats were captured, some were lost in bad weather, and others never were caught, so the picture is mixed.
Changing the incentive
The most effective measures may well have been economic. In 1784 Parliament passed the Commutation Act, which cut the duty on tea sharply. Smuggling of tea fell afterwards, since the legal product became competitive. Later, the gradual reduction of duties in the nineteenth century, and the move toward freer trade, removed much of the profit from the old trade. Together with better policing, these changes ended large-scale smuggling on the Channel coast by the middle of the century.
Legacy
Smuggling has a strong place in local tradition and in fiction, and it is easy to romanticise. Historically it involved real danger, violence at times, and considerable loss to the public purse. The boats themselves, the luggers and the cutters that chased them, helped to push forward the development of fast, weatherly sailing craft, with effects that reached into yacht design. Many of the features of a fast lugger, such as a good turn of speed and handiness under sail, passed to the pilot boats and yachts that came afterward.