On board the “Earl of Leicester” were three Swedish passengers, who were so far from feeling satisfied with Captain Hammond’s conduct on this occasion that they addressed a special letter of complaint to the Postmaster General. In this letter they by no means admit that the prizes were picked up by Captain Hammond as he went along, in the casual way detailed by him, without delay or interruption to his voyage. On the contrary, they assert roundly, that he chased the two little vessels during a whole night, keeping up a continual fire both of cannon and musketry; that the “Earl of Leicester” was far past Schagen when the prizes were first seen, which of itself proved that Captain Hammond put in to Marstrand with no other motive than that of realizing them secure; and they add: “On account of this chase and capture, in which, in our opinion, Packets have no right to engage, our voyage to England was entirely broken off, because, during the above hostile operations, we were in continual anxiety and fear, loaded guns being carried about in the cabin where we lay, and several shots fired from them; and we had reason to fear that the war-like scene might soon be acted again, wherefore we did not venture to pursue our voyage on board the said Packet, but returned to Gothenburg.” Captain Hammond, in reply to these charges, maintained that three gentlemen who, by their own admission, were extremely frightened, and to his knowledge were also lamentably sea-sick, were not the most trustworthy witnesses of what occurred, and with this argument, together with some evidence that the return to Marstrand was really made necessary by the weather, the Postmaster General remained content. The matter was dropped; and Captain Hammond, after waiting some five years, during which time the Admiralty Courts considered his case in their pleasant, leisurely way, received the value of the prize. Smuggling was a practice very frequently charged against the Packet Service by its critics who, towards the end of the last century, raised an outcry loud enough to become heard in Parliament. It may be feared that the charge was by no means groundless. Indeed it would be strange if it were, seeing that throughout the west of England, if not elsewhere, the game of eluding the revenue laws was played with infinite zest and enjoyment by all classes of society. Falmouth itself was a nest of smugglers. The old town was full of hiding-places. The women entered into the sport with audacious ingenuity; and probably there was neither man, woman, nor child in the town, with the possible exception of the revenue officers, who did not regard the success of a smuggler as a triumph for his kind against men who were scarcely to be distinguished from foreign enemies.