they received injury during these encounters.  To meet such objections as these the Board resolved to allow the sum of L10 per annum to every mariner employed on board their cruisers who should lose a hand or foot, or receive any greater injury by firearms “or other offensive weapons of the smugglers while in the actual execution of their duty so as to disable them from further service; and we have also resolved to pay the surgeons’ bills for such of the mariners as may receive slighter wounds.”  But it was stipulated that no allowance was to be paid unless certificates were produced from the commanders of these cruisers.

And before we go any further with the progress of these cutters, let us afford actual instances of the kind of treatment which had led the Board to make this allowance to its men.  Three years before the above resolution, that is to say on April 24, 1777, Captain Mitchell was cruising in command of the Revenue cutter Swallow in the North Sea.  Off Robin Hood’s Bay he fell in with a smuggling cutter commanded by a notorious contraband skipper who was known as “Smoker,” or “Smoaker.”  Mitchell was evidently in sufficient awe of him to give him a wide berth, for the cruiser’s commander in his official report actually recorded that “Smoker” “waved us to keep off”!  However, a few days later, the Swallow, when off the Spurn, fell in with another famous smuggler.  This was the schooner Kent, of about two hundred tons, skippered by a man known as “Stoney.”  Again did this gallant Revenue captain send in his report to the effect that “as their guns were in readiness, and at the same time waving us to go to the Northward, we were, by reason of their superior force, obliged to sheer off, but did our best endeavours to spoil his Market.  There [sic] being a large fleet of colliers with him.”

But that was not to be their last meeting, for on May 2, when off Whitby, the Swallow again fell in with the Kent, but (wrote Mitchell) the smuggler “would not let us come near him.”  The following day the two ships again saw each other, and also on May 13, when off Runswick Bay.  On the latter occasion the Kent “fired a gun for us, as we imagined, to keep farther from him.”  The same afternoon the Swallow chased a large lugsail boat, with fourteen hands in her, and supposed to belong to the Kent.  But the Swallow was about as timid as her name, for, according to her commander, she was “obliged to stand out to sea, finding that by the force they had in their boat, and a number of people on shore, we had no chance of attacking them with our boat, as they let us know they were armed, by giving us a volley of small arms.”  None the less the Swallow had also fourteen men as her complement, so one would have thought that this chicken-hearted commander would at least have made an effort to try conclusions.