Smuggling began as soon as attempts were made to enforce the law. It was estimated that the losses to the British revenue through the direct sale of tobacco to the Dutch at Manhattan Island previous to the year 1664 amounted to £10,000 a year. When, in 1665, the king took notice of colonial dereliction, by issuing instructions for a strict enforcement of the laws, the General Court of Massachusetts replied that they were not conscious of having "greatly violated" them. In 1776 Edward Randolph was sent over especially "Impowered" to prevent "Irregular Trade," and the letters he wrote to the "Lords Commissioners of the Council of Trade and Plantations"[1] are full of references to the ways of the smugglers. Other letters of the period, especially those of Governor Bellomont, are similarly interesting. At first the evasions were quite open. It is related that Skipper Clæs Bret loaded the ship _De Sterre_ in the Chesapeake "in the name of an English skipper," and sent her to the Island of Jersey. Virginia officials must have aided this transaction. Weeden quotes from the Massachusetts archives the story of another Dutch skipper whose ship was seized because he "broake his word to the Governor in not clearing his ship to belong to the English." Governor Andros, who tried to enforce the laws, complained because there were "noe Custom houses," and because the "Governor of Massachusetts gives clearings, certificates and passes for every particular thing from thence to New York" without inquiring whether these things had been lawfully imported into Massachusetts. The king's instructions to Governor Dongan tell him how "to prevent the acceptance of forged Cockets (which hath been practiced to our great prejudice)." A cocket is a document given by a customs officer to a merchant as a certificate that the goods have been entered according to law. Randolph reported (April, 1698) that he had asked the Governor of Pennsylvania "to appoint an Attorney Generall to prosecute" certain men who had aided in an evasion of the laws, "but he did nothing in it." In the same year Randolph was arrested in New York by aggrieved merchants because he had, as he alleges, seized a smuggler in Virginia, and although his case seems now to have been according to law, Governor Bellomont had much difficulty in getting him out of jail. No one sympathized with a revenue official.