ess done all along the coast of
Maine in the way of smuggling. Small vessels, lightly built and swift of
sail, would run up into these sylvan fastnesses, and there make their
deposits and transact their business so as entirely to elude the
vigilance of government officers.

It may seem strange that practices of this kind should ever have
obtained a strong foothold in a community peculiar for its rigid
morality and its orderly submission to law; but in this case, as in many
others, contempt of law grew out of weak and unworthy legislation. The
celebrated embargo of Jefferson stopped at once the whole trade of New
England, and condemned her thousand ships to rot at the wharves, and
caused the ruin of thousands of families.

The merchants of the country regarded this as a flagrant, high-handed
piece of injustice, expressly designed to cripple New England commerce,
and evasions of this unjust law found everywhere a degree of sympathy,
even in the breasts of well-disposed and conscientious people. In
resistance to the law, vessels were constantly fitted out which ran upon
trading voyages to the West Indies and other places; and although the
practice was punishable as smuggling, yet it found extensive connivance.
From this beginning smuggling of all kinds gradually grew up in the
community, and gained such a foothold that even after the repeal of the
embargo it still continued to be extensively practiced. Secret
depositories of contraband goods still existed in many of the lonely
haunts of islands off the coast of Maine. Hid in deep forest shadows,
visited only in the darkness of the night, were these illegal stores of
merchandise. And from these secluded resorts they found their way, no
one knew or cared to say how, into houses for miles around.

There was no doubt that the practice, like all other illegal ones, was
demoralizing to the community, and particularly fatal to the character
of that class of bold, enterprising young men who would be most likely
to be drawn into it.

Zephaniah Pennel, who was made of a kind of straight-grained,
uncompromising oaken timber such as built the Mayflower of old, had
always borne his testimony at home and abroad against any violations of
the laws of the land, however veiled under the pretext of righting a
wrong or resisting an injustice, and had done what he could in his
neighborhood to enable government officers to detect and break up these
unlawful depositories. This exposed him pa