Page:Reminiscences of Smugglers and Smuggling.pdf/58

32 cutters, piratically boarded the Danish ship Der Reisende Jacob . . . assaulted the master of the vessel, and stole twenty casks of butter. The Lords of the Admiralty offered a reward of £500. Nicholas Wingfield and Adams Hyde, with four others, having been betrayed by some of their accomplices, were arrested ; and on January 15 , 1759, were brought under a strong guard of soldiers and lodged in the Marshalsea. They were tried at the Admiralty Sessions, March 9, 1759, when Nicholas Wingfield and Adams Hyde were found guilty, and , on the 28th of the same month, were hung at Execution Dock. The four others were acquitted. The punishment did not operate as a sufficient warning to the Hastings men. For seven years a gang known as Ruxley's Crew, most of whom lived at Hastings, boarded and robbed several ships coming up the Channel ; and in particular, in 1768, they boarded a Dutch homeward-bound hoy, called the Three Sisters, Peter Bootes commander, about two leagues from Beachy Head, and chopped the master down the back with an axe. In November, 1768, the Government sent a detachment of two hundred of the Inniskilling Dragoons to Hastings, to arrest the men, who had been betrayed by their bragging to one another how the Dutchman wriggled when they had cut him on the back-bone ; and a man-of-war lay off Hastings to receive the men. The soldiers had strict orders not to let their mission be known ; but, the day -