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Updated: September 22, 2025
The southern coast of Cuba is so formed as to be peculiarly adapted to the business of the contrabandists, who even to-day carry on this adventurous game with more or less impunity, being stimulated by the excessive and unreasonable excise duties imposed upon the necessities of life. When Tacon first arrived in the colony he found the revenue laws in a very lax condition.
I was working to complete my invention, and for the greater privacy I had taken it to the old cave of the contrabandists upon the shore a place haunted by the spirits of the dead so that I was safe from interruption. Or so I thought, till one afternoon she came to me like a goddess from the sea. She had cut her foot among the stones, and I bound it for her and carried her back to Valpré.
The fact is that the ladies' parlor at the hotel had been after dinner no better than a den of smugglers, in which the fair contrabandists had debated the best means of evading the laws of their country. At heart every man is a smuggler, and how much more every woman! She would have no scruple in ruining the silk and woolen interest throughout the United States.
Diplomatists, journalists, bankers, contrabandists, social agitators, spies, incendiaries, assassins and courtesans, willing to offer up their energies and their lives in order to circumvent, despoil or slay the supposed enemies of their race, address themselves each one to his own allotted task and discharge it conscientiously.
The `throwers'' and the `turners'' rooms were also subterranean dungeons. When in full activity all these stinking cellars were full of men, boys, and young women, working close together in a hot twilight. Certain boys were trained contrabandists of beer, and beer came as steadily into the dungeons as though it had been laid on by a main pipe.
It was here in 1845 that the author witnessed a scene which forms the theme of the following chapter. A superior knowledge of all the hidden bays and inlets of the south side gave the contrabandists great advantages over any pursuing vessel, and their lighter draught of water enabled them to navigate their small crafts where it was impossible for a heavy ship to follow.
Since 1805 English trade with the Continent, so far from diminishing, had steadily increased in the hands of contrabandists and neutral carriers, until it had now reached annual dimensions of twenty-five millions sterling. In spite of the Tilsit alliance, even French soldiers occasionally wore English-made shoes and clothing.
The place was next infested by a lawless community of contrabandists and banditti, who made it, for a long period, their headquarters, whence to sally forth and lay the neighboring plains under contribution, on the principle that might makes right.
It is affirmed by contrabandists in Scandinavia who are acting on Germany's behalf, that many of the commissions for the acquisition of raw stuffs for Germany are composed almost exclusively of non-Russian subjects of the Tsar.
When watchfulness prevailed over the strange craft which was brought into conflict with it, Annette knew how to be charming, even to the man who suffered so much at her hands; but when the contrabandists succeeded in running in their supplies there were hours of horror scenes in which rage and accusation were succeeded by storms of tears and tempestuous self-reproach.
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