Hidden along Britain's crumbling southwest Jurassic coast is a cave,
Jack Ratt's cave. So called due to the notorious Smuggler Jack Rattenburg.
Once dubbed 'The Rob Roy of the West' mainly famous due to his personal memoirs which starts with his birth in the fishing village of Beer in 1778, his stories of swashbuckling adventures live on today in popular fiction,
In J. Meade Falkner’s children's classic Moonfleet written in 1898, the smuggler Elzevir Block has a striking resemblance to Jack Rattenbury, Moonfleets most recent adaptation was produced by Sky in 2013
The cave was once connected to the famous Beer Quarry Caves a large prehistoric cave network where the creamy white stone has been quarried since Roman times and since used to build famous monuments across the world including in the UK Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London.
Located along the costal path between the fishing villages of Beer and Branscombe and around 150 foot up the cliff face there sits Jack Rats Cave.
At the extreme East of Devon, Beer was the headquarters of a gang of smugglers led by Jack Rattenbury, his memoirs depict a series of daring escapes from outwitting the French Navy and The Press-gang to escaping from privateers and customs men.
He hid up chimneys, in cellars, in caves, on board small boats and in bushes. In the early days he hadn’t two pennies to rub together but by the age of thirty he had amassed sufficient money to trade in boats. Rattenbury's principal smuggling method in the early years was to buy tubs in the Channel Islands and sink them off the English coast for later collection.
The Beer Quarry Caves were of great use to smugglers as they could be used to store contraband, hidden from the excise officials. One cave that was used was the Adit between Branscombe and Beer Head known as Jack Rats Cave.
I recently came across 'Smuggling is a crime entirely created by Governments.' which details the effect that unfair taxation had at the time;
'During the 18th century, the British government collected a good deal of its income from customs duties - tax paid on the import of goods such as tea, cloth, wine and spirits. The tax was high, up to 30%, so these items became expensive. Smuggled goods were a lot cheaper than goods which had paid the duty. People were ready to buy and smuggling became big business.'
'Smugglers operated all around the coasts of Britain, but were particularly aggressive and well-organised on the south coast, only a night's sail from France. Large gangs formed, often too big for the Customs officials to deal with. Smugglers were prepared to use violence, too.'
'Many ordinary people approved of smuggling, or took part in it. Labourers could earn more in a night's work carrying brandy barrels up from the beach than they could in a month's hard work in the fields. Others left their barns or cellars unlocked and didn't ask questions about what was put in there. Quite respectable people were involved, sometimes for money, sometimes because they didn't regard smuggling as a crime.'
'When Prime Minister William Pitt lowered duties in the 1780s, smuggling became less profitable. Further removal of duties in the 19th century put an end to the kind of smuggling which went on so openly in the 18th century. But wherever governments try to stop, or tax, the movement of goods which people want, smugglers operate.’
Perhaps a good example of how not much changes over time when the system is greedy and ownership is unfairly distributed, people will always find a way to work around limiting situations, smuggling itself seems a symptom of a flawed system.
The Libertarian dream of widely adopted blockchain technology disrupting these old power structures and heralding a new time of freedom, fairness and equality is a dream that, for the first time, could finally become a global reality for us all.
But can this technology really help us nurse and bring forth a new era of human cooperation and equality into existence?
I'm pretty sure Jack Ratt would be wary...I guess only time will tell!
Thank you for posting
thanks!
This is a really nice post, very well cited and well written, and nice photography to illustrate it. That stretch of coast is really beautiful! Very interesting history you relate, and I liked that you tied it all back to Steemit/Blockchain with the discussion of how blockchain technology might finally put an end to the kind of inequalities that lead to smuggling in the first place. Happy to have found you - following!
My only constructive criticism would be to use a blockquote when you quote an extensive passage, as you do when quoting from the article "Smuggling is a crime created entirely by the government". I do realize that you put single quotes around those paragraphs to indicate that they were quoted from the source you listed, but single quotes are pretty easily missed and that is a long section of this post that is a direct quote. You can use HTML to make blockquote by enclosing text in these opening and closing tags:
<blockquote> YOUR QUOTED TEXT HERE </blockquote>or you can use Markdown to make a blockquote by just bracketing your text with single greater than symbols like so
> YOUR QUOTED TEXT HERE >Here is what either of those methods would look like - you can see how the vertical bar to the left of the text and the lighter gray color of the font makes it much more obvious that it is a quote:
Again, great post and super happy to have found you! Following - cheers - Carl
Thank you so much for your reply and positive response! awesome of you and super helpful, I will definitely use <blockquote. Perhaps you could point me in the right direction in regards to learning how to arrange text to be beside an image or is it simply a case of googling basic HTML coding for layouts or something like that, have found it a bit confusing! thanks again!
Steemit uses "markdown" which is quite a bit simpler than HTML, but you can also use (some) HTML. There are a number of good Steemit markdown tutorials I am sure if you just Google "Steemit markdown tutorial" you will see a ton of results. I personally mostly use HTML to format my posts but that is only because I am very proficient in HTML already. Cheers - Carl
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