Tuesday Talk from pirates to smugglers

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On Thursday, 31st January, my latest book, another non-fiction, Smugglers in Fact and Fiction will be released. I was commissioned to write it after the exciting success of Pirates Truth and Tales. I admit I wasn't quite sure if I could manage another non-fiction book, and did I know enough about smugglers anyway? After all those rogues the pirates are my main interest...

Pen and Sword publishing are introducing a new Paperback* series and wanted Smugglers to be the opening gambit. Quite a responsibility, for the first in the series must show some sort of good impression.
*having literally just received my copies - it is in paperback, not hardback as shown on Amazon) 

It wasn't easy writing it though, as, being the first in a series, I had no template to guide me with what sort of format or how the publisher wanted it. There were quite a few re-writes to get it right, a sort of 'question and answer' style with a 'dip-in-and-out-of ' formula. Fingers crossed that it all works!

One of the things that I really enjoyed about producing this book was discovering new things that I did not know. A big one, as I was informed by a true Maid Of Kent, is that you should not refer to Romney Marsh as The Romney Marsh ... no 'the'. Well, I never knew that!

Romney Marsh 
(© purchased image)

Along with many people, I suspect, I assumed smugglers worked in small groups - seafaring village folk bringing in a few kegs of brandy or packets of tobacco to sell for profit to add to the meagre wages they earned. The scenes in Poldark where Ross does his share of smuggling runs, Moonfleet, and Kipling's poem: 'Brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk...Watch the wall my darling, while the Gentlemen go by...' We have an image, mostly from movies and novels, of a tall ship riding at anchor in a moonlit, secluded bay with the 'Gentleman' cheerfully hauling kegs of contraband ashore, then disappearing silently into the night shadows to hide their ill-gotten gains from the excise men in a dark cave or a secret cellar.

Lyme Bay, Dorset
where many a smuggler smuggled!
(photo © Tony Smith)

But I discovered that smuggling was big business - it still is - that yes, maybe in Cornwall and Devon the Free Trade was confined to quiet coves, brought ashore in fishing boats and dispatched through a few local families - all of it small-scale, local-based. It was very different in Dorset, Sussex and Kent. There the smuggling was organised by the leaders of huge gangs - gangs of maybe up to 100 men. This was Big Business and there was very little that the Excise Men could do to prevent it.

A Smuggler 

(technically, a 'tubman')

Drawing by ©Mia Pelletier

I enjoyed discovering who these derring-do rebels of the past were, why so many people went against paying taxes on the importation of goods - tea, salt, lace... I found it fascinating to discover who purchased the contraband - and what was smuggled. How the smugglers operated and where the most notorious locations were. And was smuggling profitable, or was it an inevitable path to arrest and the hangman's noose?

And I'm delighted to be able to share with you all these things  - and more - for the Life of a Smuggler, the Fact and the Fiction will be as interesting for you to read as it was for me to write it! Well, I hope it will!

(And for those who are wondering: yes, my pirate, Jesamiah Acorne will be involved in smuggling in a future Voyage! ) 

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(now in paperback)

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all the names, from here and Facebook went into the hat
the winner was
Elizabeth Anne Millard