Tea had become England's national drink by 1800 and she was importing an average
of twenty-four million pounds a year, it is said. It is now time for me to admit
that all figures relating to earlier tea consumption in England are merely
official, which is to say, misleading. The English drank vastly more tea than
any John Company records before 1784 reveal, thanks to a nationwide network of
"free traders" or-from the government's viewpoint-smugglers.

About a decade after the Company began importing tea on a regular basis, the
Crown slapped a duty of five shillings on each pound irrespective of quality.
This did not much affect the price of the most expensive teas, but it served to
knock the cheap right out of the market, or rather, to create a black market for
it. The cheapest sort one could legally buy then cost seven shillings a
pound-almost a laborer's whole week's wages-while just across the Channel or
across the North Sea in Holland tea of this same quality could be had for two
shillings. With a 350 percent profit to play with, "free traders" were not long
in multiplying along the whole length of England's coastline. Mr. J.M. Scott, to
whose grand book The Great Tea Venture these pages are much indebted, has
written: "The trouble and talk which resulted publicized tea as nothing else
could have done, and as the illegal industry spread and prospered it carried the
new commodity to every door. It was calculated that at the height of this
illegal campaign two-thirds of the tea drunk in England had been smuggled."
Many a fine old home near the English coast was built on the proceeds of a
venturer, one who put up the smuggling capital but kept well in the background,
leaving the risks to the captain and the lander. The captain purchased his goods
quite legally abroad and then waited for a dark night to run them across to one
of several spots the lander might arrange. The lander arranged with the local
farmhands for transport, with the local parson, perhaps, for storage in the
church, and for eventual sales. Besides the venturer, very often the only
principal in the whole business who could read and write was the quill driver,
the man who kept the accounts. Eternal vigilance is, to be sure, the price of
law breaking if it is to be successful for long, and this is but one of the ways
tea smuggling was carried on from 1680, the year of the tax, until 1784, the
year of its repeal. In 1733, no less than fifty-four thousand pounds of bootleg
tea were seized; present-day American consumption of illegally imported drugs
can give us some idea of how much was not.

The smugglers succeeded mainly because they had the sympathy of the whole
countryside. On the Isle of Man they often un-loaded as much tea and brandy as a
hundred horses could carry, and stored their contraband in large caves no
revenue man ever managed to discover because, as a pious old Manxman said,
"Who'd ever be so wicked as to tell them?" The free traders knew every time a
coast guard craft went into drydock, or when a riding officer had the gout or
planned a raid. The country folks dealt with the smugglers less for the sake of
getting luxuries cheap than of getting them at all. But the larger the band, the
more contra-band, and the more overawed the revenuers and the populace. The day
of the small-scale free trader had passed well before the mid-1700s. And as the
business grew, as rich men found it profit-able to own three or four sloops
engaged in illegal traffic, it be-came the part of wisdom to know nothing of
what went on.
Without regard for secrecy, smugglers boldly stole their car-goes back from
government customs houses more than once. Long cavalcades of horses loaded with
tea were led quite openly through Kent; it is said six tons a week were run from
France through Sussex. "The best that can be said of this period," ob-serves
J.M. Scott, "is that it was the beginning of yacht racing-revenue cutters
chasing smugglers who almost invariably won the cup of tea." There were, of
course, occasional casualties on both sides. One of the famous "Wiltshire
Moonrakers," who used the old church in Kingstone as their hiding place, is
buried in its churchyard under this epitaph:
To the memory of Robert Trotman, late of Rowd, in the county of Wilts, who was
barbarously murdered on the shore near Poole, the 24th of March, 1765:

A little tea; one leaf I did not steal.
For guiltless bloodshed I to God appeal.
Put tea in one scale, human blood in t'other,
And think what 'tis to slay a harmless brother.
Stripped of their glamour, most smuggling gangs must have been rather like the
one Daphne du Maurier depicted in her novel Jamaica Inn: bloodthirsty and wholly
out for themselves. Still, in a time when inland communications were
unimaginably bad, when most roads in England were tracks, dangerous at night and
unusable part of the year, when most of the populace was illiterate, living and
dying within ten or twenty miles of their birthplaces, smugglers undertook a
nationwide sales campaign of an expensive novelty-and succeeded. They were only
put out of business entirely after Waterloo, when the country finally had spare
troops enough to enforce the laws. But the large-scale smuggling of tea had
ended in 1784, when the government finally repealed the tea tax at the behest of
Richard Twining, chairman of the dealers of tea. For most Britishers, it was the
first intelligent act of government in living memory, coming as it did three
years after their American colonists had ended another dispute over tea by
compelling the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown.