Smuggling

The British navigation laws and laws protective to manufactures caused bold and extensive smuggling throughout the colonies during the latter part of the seventeenth and half of the eighteenth centuries. Respectable merchants and prominent public men felt no qualins of conscience in cheating the revenue officers by illicit trade with pirates and with West India merchants, New York was the principal port for smugglers, though Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston were also enriched by smuggled goods. Governor Bellomont, of New York, found in 1700, that a ‘‘lycencious trade with pyrats, Scotland and Curacao” had sprung up and the province of New York ‘‘ grew rich, but the customes, they decreased.’’ All this led to the attempt of the British Government to enforce the Acts of Trade, which did much to precipitate the Revolution.