Colchester was the scene, on April 16th, 1847, of as bold an act as the breaking open of the custom-house at Poole. At two o’clock in the morning two men arrived at the quay at Hythe, by Colchester, and, with the story that they were revenue officers come to lodge a seizure of captured goods, asked to be shown the way to the custom-house. They had no sooner been shown it than there followed thirty smugglers, well armed with blunderbusses and pistols, who, with a heavy blacksmith’s hammer and a crowbar, broke open the warehouse, in which a large quantity of dutiable goods was stored. They were not molested in their raid, and went off with sixty oil-bags, containing 1514 lb. of tea that had been seized near Woodbridge Haven. No one dared interfere with them, and by six o’clock that morning they had proceeded as far as Hadleigh, from which point all trace of them was lost. Canvey Island, in the estuary of the Thames, off Benfleet, with its quaint old Dutch houses, relics of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Hollanders who settled there and carried on a more than questionable business, was reputedly a nest of smugglers. The “Lobster Smack,” a quaint old weatherboarded inn built just within the old earthen sea-wall for which those Dutchmen were responsible, and standing somewhat below the level of high water, has legends of smuggling that naturally do not lose by age or repetition. The Blackwater estuary, running up from the Essex coast to Maldon, offered peculiar facilities for smuggling; and that, perhaps, is why a coastguard vessel is still stationed at Stansgate, half way along its length, opposite Osea Island. At the mouth of the Blackwater there branch other creeks and estuaries leading past Mersea Island to Colchester; and here, looking out upon a melancholy sea, and greatly resembling a barn, stands the ancient chapel of St. Peter-upon-the-Wall, situated in one of the most lonely spots conceivable, on what were, ages ago, the ramparts of the Roman station of _Othona_. It has long been used as a barn, and was in smuggling times a frequent rendezvous of the night-birds who waged ceaseless war with the Customs. Two miles onward, along sea and river-bank, Bradwell Quay is reached, where the “Green Man” inn in these times turns a hospitable face to the wayfarer, but was in the “once upon a time” apt to distrust the casual stranger, for it was a house “ower sib” with the free-traders, and Pewit Island, just off the quay, a desolate islet almost awash, formed an admirable emergency store. The old stone-floored kitchen of the “Green Man,” nowadays a cool and refreshing place in which to take a modest quencher on a summer’s day, still remains very much what it was of old; and the quaint fireplace round which the sly longshore men of these Essex creeks foregathered on those winter nights when work was before them keeps its old-time pot-racks and hooks. [Picture: Kitchen of the “Green Man”]