The Privateer was the “Globe” of Baltimore, Captain Moon. The total loss was not ascertained, but it was known that out of thirty-nine men engaged in the two boarding assaults on the “Montagu” not one had escaped. The crew of the “Montagu” had, therefore, disposed of considerably more than man for man of their number. CHAPTER XIII. THE AMERICAN WAR. It is now necessary to revert briefly to the state of the postal communications with northern Europe, which, when the subject was last mentioned in the ninth chapter of this work, were stated to depend on the chances of a system of smuggling organized from the newly acquired island of Heligoland. Within two years from that time (1807) the contraband trade had increased along the whole coast of the North Sea and the Baltic in an astonishing degree. Bourrienne, who was still at Hamburg, and who did not love the continental system, on which his master relied for striking his “mortal blow” at England, remarks with a half-sympathetic amusement how very little difference that system made in postal and commercial arrangements when once the smugglers had become expert. “The continental system,” he observes, “had made the smuggler’s trade a necessity, so that a great part of the population depended on it for subsistence.” Moreover, not goods alone, but news also circulated pretty freely from England in 1809, and correspondence addressed to merchants in the German towns was posted by agents despatched from Heligoland to Embden, Knipphausen, Varel, and other towns. In truth, the great barricade proved little better than a trellis, penetrable anywhere by those who possessed the necessary courage and audacity. A good supply of those qualities was of course needed, for the trade was risky; and yet the disposition of the country people, which was strongly hostile to the French Customs officers, did much to rob it of its dangers. So determined were the people to obtain the English goods that they did not hesitate to take arms against the over-zealous Customs agents; and at Brinksham, in July, 1809, when the officers had seized no less than eighteen wagons loaded with English goods, the peasantry rose in force, recaptured the wagons, and escorted the goods to their destination. To keep apart, on the one hand, a people so resolute to trade, and, on the other, a nation whose prosperity, if not its existence, depended on maintaining its commercial supremacy, something more was needed than a paper decree and a staff of Customs officers. “The trade with Oldenburgh,” writes Bourrienne, “was carried on as uninterruptedly as in time of peace. English letters and newspapers arrived on the continent, and those of the continent found their way into Great Britain, as if France and England had been united by ties of the firmest friendship.”