Customs and Excise

I you look carefully, some sort of a fighting ship is visible in front of the cargo ship, under its bows. A ship which I thought was perhaps the fighting ship, smaller than a frigate but bigger than a patrol boat or a motor torpedo boat, which belonged to the Customs & Excise, which we once saw in the vicinity of Poole Harbour and which we assumed existed to intercept the boats of people smuggling large amounts of drugs, people who were quite possibly up for fighting themselves.

Google turns up reference 1, which is not right. not least because it was built in the Netherlands. What's wrong with the banks of the Clyde or the Tyne? Anyway, my ship being rather bigger. Maybe HMC Searcher at reference 2. At least that one sports a small gun on the front, like a proper fighting ship. And it comes with a picture taken at Weymouth, not so far from Poole.

But looking more carefully, maybe the difference is more in the angle from which the pictures have been taken, rather than in the boats themselves. In any event, our first sighting was before the UK Border Agency was invented.

I suppose that these cutters have a long and proud history, going back to the days when smuggling brandy and lace from France was all the thing, back in the eighteenth century. When cutters were what would now be called cutter rigged sailing boats, with gaffed main and plural jibs. When excisemen roamed the land at night. See reference 3.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMC_Valiant.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMC_Searcher.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonfleet.

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