Johnson and others were, in the opening years of the nineteenth century, very busily employed in smuggling gold out of the country into France. Ever since the troubles of the Revolution in that country, and all through the wars that had been waged with the rise of Napoleon, gold had been dwindling. People, terrified at the unrest of the times, and nervous of fresh troubles to come, secreted coin, and consequently the premium on gold rose to an extraordinary height, not only on the Continent but in England as well. A guinea would then fetch as much as twenty-seven shillings, and was worth a good deal more on the other side of the Channel. Patriotism was not proof against the prospects of profits to be earned by the export of gold, and not a few otherwise respectable banking-houses embarked in the trade. Finance has no conscience. [Picture: Johnson putting off from Brighton Beach] It is obvious that only thoroughly dependable and responsible men could be employed on this business, for shipments of gold varied from £20,000 to £50,000. Eight and ten-oared galleys were as a rule used for the traffic; the money slung in long leather purses around the oarsmen’s bodies. Napoleon is said to have offered Johnson a very large reward if he would consent, as pilot, to aid his scheme of invasion, and we are told that Johnson hotly refused. “I am a smuggler,” said he, “but a true lover of my country, and no traitor.” Napoleon was no sportsman. He kept Johnson closely confined in a noisome dungeon for nine months. How much longer he proposed to hold him does not appear, for the smuggler, long watching a suitable opportunity, at last broke away, and, ignorant that a pardon was awaiting him in England, escaped to America. Returning from that “land of the brave and the free,” we find him in 1806 with the fleet commanded by Lord St. Vincent, off Brest. Precisely what services, beside the obvious one of acting as pilot, he was then rendering our Navy cannot be said, for the materials toward a life of this somewhat heroic and picturesque figure are very scanty. But that he had some plan for the destruction of the French fleet seems obvious from the correspondence of Lord St. Vincent, who, writing on August 8th, 1806, to Viscount Howick, remarks, “The vigilance of the enemy alone prevented Tom Johnstone [sic] from doing what he professed.” What he professed is, unfortunately, hidden from us. After this mysterious incident we lose sight for a while of our evasive hero, and may readily enough assume that he returned again to his smuggling enterprises; for it is on record that in 1809, when the unhappy Walcheren expedition was about to be despatched, at enormous cost, from England to the malarial shores of Holland, he once more offered his services as pilot, and they were again accepted, with the promise of another pardon for lately-accrued offences.