Nota bene: Here are the previous ten installments — parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 — in my multi-part series on Adam Smith’s day-to-day duties as a commissioner of the Board of Customs of Scotland. Endnotes are below the fold.

Order #127 is dated __ Nov. 1784 (the day is cut off) and is signed by the same three commissioners (and in the same sequence) who signed the previous two orders (#126 and #125): David Reid (top signature), Adam Smith (middle), and James Edgar (bottom). This third Reid-Smith-Edgar order illustrates a certain level of inter-agency cooperation between excise and customs officials and reads as follows:

“Having received your Letter of the 21st of last Month, enclosing Return of Seizure No. 290 by Mr. Alexander Fullarton Supervisor of Excise for Eleven dozen of Bottled Wine—and also Return No. 291 by Mess.rs Robert Anderson Land Surveyor and Archibald Chisholm Landwaiter, for two pipes of Portugal and Wine; — We have ordered the said two Returns to be registered, — a Third only of the latter to be allowed, — and we direct you to inform us whether any Carts or Carriages were employed in the removal of the wine contained in Return No. 290.” [1]

This order thus refers to two separate seizure reports: “Return of Seizure No. 290” (effectuated by an excise officer) and “Return No. 291” (completed by two customs officers). [2] By issuing the directive “We have ordered the said two Returns to be registered”, the board officially authorizes these two seizures of contraband to enter the judicial process in the Court of Exchequer for formal condemnation and forfeiture. These seizures also illustrate two aspects of the operation of 18th-century anti-smuggling laws.

One of the seizures, Return No. 290, consists of 11 dozen bottles of contraband wine. With respect to this seizure, the board orders a follow-up audit (“whether any Carts or Carriages were employed in the removal of the wine”) to determine whether any additional valuable property can be seized for the Crown’s account. Here we see the broad scope of 18th-century anti-smuggling statutes: any horses, carts, or carriages used to transport contraband were subject to forfeiture, along with the illicit goods themselves. [3]

The other seizure, Return No. 291, involves two pipes (large casks) of Port wine. [4] Regarding this seizure, the board explicitly caps the officers’ financial reward from the proceeds of the seizure: “a Third only of the latter to be allowed.” Under 18th-century smuggling laws, [5] the proceeds from forfeited goods were divided between the Crown (or the Exchequer) and the seizing officers and informers, and according to one historian of the Customs service (Hoon 1968), these rewards comprised the main source of income of many revenue officers:

“The emolument which comprised the officers shares of the produce of seizures gave the strongest impetus to activity against violation of customs laws. By 12 Charles II, c. 4, half the produce of a seizure was to go to the Crown and half to the seizing officer; but the amount varied between one third and nine tenths according to the act of Parliament governing the particular kinds of goods seized, or according to the discretion of the Lords of the Treasury or the Customs Commissioners. If an officer was lucky, a seizure might yield him a neat fortune which would amount to more than he could earn in several years of ordinary labor. The jealousy in search and Seizure testifies vividly to the stimulative value of such rewards.” (Hoon 1968, p. 219, footnote omitted)

The one-third cap on the customs officers’ reward in this case doesn’t tell us the whole story, however, for as we shall see in my next two posts, these financial rewards might also tempt some revenue officers to cheat.

[1] This order refers to three different types of revenue officers. A Land Surveyor, for example, was the senior Customs officer at an outport who was responsible for managing and supervising the landing crew (including landwaiters and tidewaiters) stationed at a port’s wharves and quays, while a Landwaiter was a frontline operational officer acting under the supervision of the land surveyor. Landwaiters were stationed directly on the docks to supervise the physical unloading of merchant ships. They ensured that every cask, bale, and crate matched the official ship’s manifest, they weighed and measured goods, and they recorded every transaction line-by-line in their contemporaneous ledgers known as the “blue books”. (See my previous post “Adam Smith, Commissioner (Part 9)”.) A Supervisor of Excise, by contrast, was a mid-level revenue officer who oversaw a specific inland district or division of local excise officers, who in turn audited local merchant stocks, checked distillery/brewery/warehouse accounts, and frequently conducted independent patrols or surprise inspections. (See, e.g., William J. Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England, 1640-1845, Oxford University Press (2003), p. 250.) Although these officials technically belonged to the parallel Excise service rather than Customs, the two revenue boards worked in close coordination, especially regarding high-duty domestic or interior-bound goods like spirits, tea, and tobacco. (See generally Elizabeth E. Hoon, The Organization of the English Customs System, 1696-1786 (1968), especially pp. xx-xxi, pp. 35-36, & p. 40.)

[2] In the context of this order, the word “return” is used in its formal legal or bureaucratic sense to mean an official report, statement, or accounting submitted back to a higher authority (similar to a tax return or an election return). See, e.g., Hoon 1968, p. 280. Cf. Black’s Law Dictionary (1990), available here: “The act of a sheriff, constable, marshall, or other ministerial officer, in delivering back to the court a writ, notice, process or other paper, which he was required to serve or execute, with a brief account of his doings under the mandate, the time and mode of service or execution, or his failure to accomplish it, as the case may be.”

[3] See, e.g., Paul Muskett, English Smuggling in the Eighteenth Century (1997), pp. 46-47, available here.

[4] A pipe (pictured above) refers to a large oak barrel that contains “half a tun, or 105 imperial gallons” of Port or wine; see here (scroll down to “pipe or butt”).

[5] See 12 Geo. 1 c. 28 (1725) and 19 Geo. 2 c. 34 (1745), which established statutory rules governing the condemnation and sale of seized contraband. Cf. Hoon 1968, p. 271: “The shares appropriated to the officers who carried out and prosecuted the seizure generally constituted one third or one half of its value ….”