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Smuggler Speak

 
In the 18th and 19th centuries, smuggling was one of the county’s most lucrative businesses.  It is reckoned some 80,000 gallons of brandy came ashore on Bournemouth beach each year. In those days gone by, the Dorset smugglers or ‘free traders’ as they liked to call themselves even had their own vocabulary. It was more colourful than most:
Anker - a cask holding around eight & a half gallons.
Bat - a stout pole used by smugglers as a weapon.
Batman - a smuggler armed with a bat.
Carbine - a short firearm.
Caterpillar - a wool smuggler.
Composition - a fine for smuggling.
Creeping - dragging the sea bed to recover smuggled goods.
Crop - a cargo of contraband.
Crown - five shillings.
Darks - moonless nights, ideal for smuggling.
Dry Goods - non-liquid contraband such as tea.
Flasker - smuggler of liquor.
Flint - a smuggler’s warning light.
Free Trader - what a smuggler called himself.
Gentlemen of the night - another name for smugglers..
Glutman - an extra man.
Gobblers, shingle pickers and  preventers - customs officers.
Hogshead - a cask holding fifty-four gallons. 
October - the strongest beer, brewed that month.
Owler - a wool smuggler.
Rhenish - German wine.
Run - a smuggling operation.
Soose - a coin.
Spout lantern - a lantern that could only be seen out at sea. 
Stinkibus - foul-smelling spirits left too long underwater.
Tubman - smuggler in charge of the shore and land-based network.
Turned Off - hanged.
Working the crop - recovering sunken casks.

(Source: Dorset Smugglers [1984] by Roger Guttridge.)
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