Among the various means devised by the ingenuity and enterprise of adventurers to elude and overcome the obstacles presented by the decrees of the enemy, one in particular, which was resorted to on an extensive scale, deserves mention. Several vessels laden with sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton-twist, and other valuable commodities were despatched from England at very high rates of freight and insurance to Saloniki, in European Turkey. Refined sugar and other goods were packed in boxes made at a considerable additional expense, so that each package should not exceed about two hundredweight. These, when landed, were conveyed on mules and pack-horses through Servia and Hungary to Vienna, for the purpose of being distributed over Germany, and sometimes even into France. The articles sold at enormously high prices. Sugar fetched 5_s._ to 6_s._ per lb.; coffee 7_s._ per lb.; indigo 18_s._; and cotton 7_s._ and 8_s._ per lb.[282] [Sidenote: Smuggling.] On the 5th September, 1807, the English made themselves masters of the small island of Heligoland (which was confirmed to them by the Treaty of Kiel, January 14th, 1814), and thence enormous quantities of British goods were smuggled into Holstein, and thence again were conveyed at a charge of 33 to 40 per cent. within the French custom-house line. This regular traffic, being well known to the imperial authorities, and sometimes connived at on account of its enormous profits, was alleged as a justification for the sale of licences, especially as Bourrienne, who at that time was resident at Hamburg, had represented to Napoleon that he had much better at once authorize the trade on these terms, and realise for himself this contraband profit. Napoleon adopted the proposal, and in consequence sixty millions of francs (2,400,000_l._) worth of English produce was in one year openly imported into that town alone. The same system was adopted in Prussia; while legions of custom-house officers and coastguards were employed to put down contraband trade with the English. [Sidenote: Licence system in England.] The English government having been unable to resist the importunities of the manufacturing and mercantile interests, could not therefore forbear from following the pernicious example thus set by Napoleon. When the system, though different in many respects, had been fully established in Great Britain, the number of licences issued rose from four thousand nine hundred and ten in 1808, to no fewer than fifteen thousand two hundred and twenty-six in 1809, and eighteen thousand three hundred and fifty-six in the year 1810. Though these licences were professedly regulated upon fixed principles, they were nevertheless a source of jobbery and fraud, and great peculation and corruption prevailed, “a fruitful source,” as Lord Stowell observed, “of simulation and dissimulation from beginning to end.” [Sidenote: Cost of English licences.]