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SUSSEX SMUGGLERS. 253 |
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Fairall kept smoking with his friends till he was ordered by his keeper to go to his cell, when he exclaimed : " Why in such a hurry, cannot you let me stay a little longer with my friends ? I shall not be able to drink with them to-morrow night." Kingsmill was only twenty-eight and Fairall only twenty-live years of age, at the time of their trial.
Glover was pardoned; the other three were hung at Tyburn on April 26, 1749, and the body of Fairall was bung in chains on Horsendown Green, and Kingsmills on Goudhurst Gore.
This most formidable gang was thus broken up ; but Horace Walpole's letter of August 5, 1752, and the diary of Walter Gale,* show that to Sussex men, the profits of the illicit trade were too great a temptation to allow it to be given up.
The habit of smuggling, wrecking f and privateering led to perpetration of many other crimes; amongst others, to a revival of those acts of piracy which disgraced the Cinque Ports in the thirteenth century .£
On Aug. 11, 1758, Nicholas Wingfield and Adams Hyde, of Hastings, masters of two privateer cutters, piratically boarded the Danish ship " Der lieisende Jacob," on board of which was the Marquis Pignatelli, Ambassador Extraordinary from his Catholic Majesty to the Court of Denmark; assaulting Jurgan Muller, |
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* "Sussex Archaeological Collections," vol. iv., p. 185; vol. ix., p. 194.
f Congreve, in his Epilogue to " The Mourning Bride," alludes to this habit of the Sussex men. See also " A Descriptive Narrative of the Wreck of the Nympha Americana, near Beachy Head," Nov. 29th, 1747, with the tailpiece by Mi. J. H. Hurdis ; Lewes : Lee and Co., 1840.
t " History of Winchelsea," p. 18. |
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