Rist's Description of Hamburg Smuggling

With this may be compared the more informative and certainly quite trustworthy account given by Rist, the representative of Denmark, of the position at Hamburg a year after the period with which we are chiefly concerned here, namely, at the beginning of 1811.

For some time there had developed a peculiar and flourishing contraband traffic which was carried on from Hamburgerberg with varying success in full daylight and under the eyes of the customs officers. About this I wish to speak, because it was not only peculiar in its kind, but also not without influence upon the manners of the people and later events, and even became the subject of a genuinely humorous popular poetry.

The abundance of cheap colonial goods in Altona, which could not be prevented by any prohibitions or other measures from this side of the frontier, and the similarly unpreventable connection with Hamburgerberg, made this last-named place a regular emporium for contraband goods. Speculators in that line of business had at that time hit upon the idea of entrusting to all kinds of low-class people, chiefly women, boys and girls of the rabble, the task of carrying the forbidden goods in small quantities through the customs guard stationed at the town gates. The attempt had been successful and was soon continued on a large scale. The city gate was thronged with all kinds of canaille coming in and going out in a steady stream. Behind some wooden sheds near the city gate one saw the arsenal of this curious army and its equipment, which was at once disgusting and laughable. There women turned up their dresses in order to shake coffee beans down in their stockings and to fasten little bags of coffee everywhere under their clothes; there boys filled their ragged trousers with pepper in the sight of everybody; others poured syrup in their broad boots; some even claimed to have seen women conceal powdered sugar under their caps in their black tangled hair. With these burdens they at once started off, and afterward delivered over their goods in certain warehouses located near the city gate and received their pay. In this way immense quantities of goods were brought in; and agreements with these petty dealers, based solely on good faith, seem seldom to have been broken on either side.

This trickery could not long remain concealed from the customs officers; and there is no doubt but that they could soon have checked it. But this does not seem to have been the intention at all. This 'filtration'—that was the technical term—was regarded as a happy hunting-ground, which was preserved as a means of enabling officers always to cover their requirements from it. If the officials seized every third or fourth 'bearer' (Träger)—that was the people's technical term—and kept his or her load, they derived a fine income from it; but the traffic was not at all disturbed by this, for losses were part of the business, and the customs officials had simply to hold out their hands to get all that they needed. Many of them were also well bribed by the principal participators in the traffic. If an unknown face appeared on duty, recourse was had to strategical measures: a dense column was formed, some heavily armed persons in the van were sacrificed, and the others burst through like a whirlwind, to the great joy of the spectators. The manifold incidents and perils which surrounded this Schuckeln or Tragen, the spirit of good-fellowship with which the trade was carried on, and the gallows humour that it created, inspired a poet, and by no means contemptible poet of his kind, from this or some neighbouring department to indite some 'Schuckeln ditties', which for some time were in everybody's mouth and were highly characteristic. It is certain that this business was for several years in succession a source of good earnings for the poorest elements of the population and considerably diminished mendicity. When the poor law officials asked parents receiving support about their children's means of livelihood, their answer as a rule was: 'Hee [or see] drigt' (he—or she—bears). This offscum of society had suddenly appeared as if sprung out of the soil, and in the same way it afterwards vanished.

All this was by no means peculiar to Hamburg, although the fact that Hamburgerberg and country residences and places of amusement lay on the Holstein side rendered control very difficult and led to the rudest and most repulsive corporeal searchings of both women and men in the middle of the open road. Rist says that it was an especially difficult time for the corpulent, just as seems to have been the case during the recent World War on the shores on the Sound. On the North Sea coast the smuggling was still more systematic in Bremen, which, according to Max Schäfer, the latest describer of its fortunes under the Continental System, was a 'smuggling metropolis'. It derived special advantage from what Vandal has called the amphibious nature of the coast, in that, thanks to Die Watten (the numerous islands lying flush with the water), goods could be smuggled in direct from the British. From English sources we learn how raw sugar was sent when refined sugar was prohibited, and eau sucrée when raw sugar was prohibited; how coffee went in as horse-beans, sugar as starch; and how the names of pepper were legion. The same system flourished, however, from Gothenburg in the northwest around all the coasts of Europe to Saloniki in the southeast, without any great variation in the methods. Probably the most primitive expedients were resorted to on the Balkan peninsula. Here sugar was packed in small boxes weighing at the most 200 kilograms, so that they could be transported on horses and asses; in this way it was conveyed by armed bands through Bosnia, Serbia and Hungary to Vienna. France proper was undoubtedly the most closely guarded country, but even there, according to both English and French witnesses, smuggling flourished to a very large extent. At the very same time when the Berlin decree was flung out, when the new prohibitive customs ordinance was enforced for France herself, the English Monthly Magazine, following the statements of experts, described how British goods of different kinds were exported on French orders to France everywhere along the frontiers and could easily be insured up to the place of their destination, and how immediately after their arrival they were stamped as of French manufacture and made to serve as evidence of the high level attained by French industry. A well-informed and intelligent French-American traveller, Louis Simond, who visited Great Britain in 1810-11, relates how the English goods 'are packed in small packages, fit to be carried by hand, and made to imitate the manufactures of the country to which they are sent, even to the very paper and outward wrapper, and the names of the foreign manufacturers marked on the goods.' On pieces of broadcloth in Leeds, for instance, he observed the mark of Journaux Frères of Sedan.

On the sea the smuggling is said to have started principally from Cowes, in the Isle of Wight. Here the goods were packed into hermetically sealed chests, which were afterward thrown into the water, chained to little buoys, like fishing nets, and safely hauled ashore on the French side by the inhabitants under the very eyes of the patrolling vessels. If we may credit an active French customs officer at the time, Boucher de Perthes, the use of British textile goods came very close to the Emperor's person. According to him, Napoleon learned, in the course of a journey with Josephine, that her trunks were crammed with the forbidden goods, and made the customs authorities mercilessly seize them all.