Smuggling & Smugglers in Sussex - online book

An Account of a notorious Smuggling gang in the early 18th Century

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4                                            PREFACE.
one present! Everyone shuddered when they heard the aggravating circumstances of the murders related, and how barbarously the villains handled their two wretched victims. The judges themselves declared on the bench, that in all their reading they never met with such a continued scene of barbarity, so deliberately carried on and so cruelly executed. The Council, Jury, and all present, were astonished and shocked, to hear proved beyond contradiction, facts of so monstrous a nature as the sufferings were of Mr. Galley and Mr. Chater."
" But how monstrous and unnatural soever the facts here related appear, yet they are certainly true : every­thing is related just in the manner it was acted, without the least aggravation to set it off. I have set down nothing but what the witnesses themselves declared upon their oaths, except in some few circumstances which Steele declared on his first examination, but was not examined upon his trial. And therefore, upon the whole, I affirm that the following account is genuine and authentic."
A reverend writer says: " In order to deter mankind from the perpetration of notorious crimes, nothing can be so effectual as to represent, in the most striking colours, the punishments that naturally attend them. The fear of shame as often preserves a person from the commission of a crime, as the expectation of a reward for his con­tinuing in the paths of virtue." Mr. Pope also says,
" Vice is a Monster of such frightful mien, As, to he hated, needs hut to he seen."
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