The source of the disturbances, which occurred at Falmouth in the year 1810, is to be found in the suppression of the private trade, of which a description was given in a former chapter of this work. From that suppression the Lisbon Packets had been exempted; and this preferential treatment of that section of the Service which in other ways enjoyed the greatest opportunities of profit, naturally increased the feeling of injustice which rankled in the minds of the men employed on the West India boats. It was long before the sailors could believe that their little opportunities of making profit were at an end. “The Government has been obliged to prohibit trade,” they argued among themselves, “but they will wink at it all the same.” And so the men laid our their savings on boots and cheeses just as before, fancying that the “searcher,” the newly appointed officer who was to examine every Packet before she proceeded to sea, would be conveniently blind, that the whole search was to be a farce, and that all they were asked to do was not to flourish their cheeses in the searcher’s face, but bring them up the side disguised as bedding, or hidden in their sea-chests. At first this answered well enough, for the searcher had to gain his experience, and some time elapsed before he was a match for the seamen in wiliness. At last, however, he gained ground upon them, and the following list of goods turned out of the “Townshend” will be read with admiration of the cunning which could bring so many and such bulky articles on board and secrete them in the face of the officers and in defiance of their commands: eleven loose cheeses; two baskets of cheese; three large bundles of dried ling; four hogsheads of potatoes; six bales of dry goods; three boxes of the same; three bags of shoes; a large quantity of shoes secreted loose in different places. The major part of these articles was turned out of the sailor’s hammocks, some few came out of the boatswain’s cabin; but with one consent all the men professed the greatest astonishment on seeing them. The boatswain was confident that the sailors must have put them in his cabin; the sailors themselves could offer no explanation at all, but were indignant at the mere suspicion of having had any hand in the affair. The searcher was perplexed. The Inspector of Packets wanted to make each man declare on oath whether he had or had not brought the goods on board; but Lord Auckland, with his usual good sense, declined to “place a whole ship’s company in the alternative between worldly ruin and a perjury,” and so the affair remained one of those insoluble mysteries which occur in the experience of every public department.