Analysis: These businessmen successfully navigated the grey zones of contraband, clandestine trade and smuggling from Youghal to Havana
What distinguishes smuggling, interloping, contraband and clandestine trade — and why do these illicit practices offer such rich insights into 18th century European and Atlantic commerce? While often used interchangeably and containing significant overlap, these terms reflected distinct practices with varying degrees of legality and visibility. Irish merchants were adept at navigating these grey areas, and their experiences offer a valuable perspective on the realities of trade, empire and everyday commerce.
Smuggling involved the outright evasion of customs duties and legal oversight, always operating outside the law. Contraband referred to goods whose trade was technically prohibited — often due to peacetime monopolies or treaty obligations — but which could still pass through customs under false descriptions, foreign flags or with the help of bribes to port officials. In many cases, though, contraband was simply smuggled outright into secluded bays and coves.
Interloping operated in a similar grey zone, involving unlicensed merchants entering markets or trade routes reserved for privileged groups. Though interlopers might deal in legal goods and pay duties, they violated the commercial privileges that structured imperial economies, often with official knowledge. By contrast, clandestine trade typically took place during wartime and entailed secret commerce with enemy states, using falsified documentation and other ruses to obscure the true origin or destination of goods, even as customs were paid and records kept.
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These shadow economies reveal how merchants adapted to the shifting constraints of empire, war and regulation across Europe and the wider Atlantic world. We know a great deal about these illicit, secretive practices because authorities were consistently active in attempting to suppress them. Newspapers, royal proclamations, customs records, court proceedings, colonial correspondence and governmental investigations all leave behind traces of secretive trade, intercepted cargoes and legal disputes. In some cases, what was hidden from public view at the time now survives more fully in the archive than legal trade itself.
One clear example of smuggling in this period came in response to the Woollen Acts of 1699, which banned the export of Irish wool (except to England), prompting a surge in illicit shipments to the continent. Ships often departed ports carrying regular cargoes, but they were met by small boats ferrying bales of wool from the shore once off secluded bays or islands, such as the Saltees or Lambay. In 1712, for instance, the James of Dublin departed the capital having passed customs. Soon after, however, the ship was boarded by officials and 69 bales of combed wool, valued at £100, were discovered on deck.
The contraband trade was perhaps the most consistent and widespread in the 18th-century Atlantic world. A particularly notorious and profitable example from this period was the British Asiento, a monopoly granted to supply enslaved Africans to Spain's American colonies. Beginning in 1713, it provided the British with their first, long-coveted legal toehold in Spain's colonial trade. Under the cover of supplying slaves and provisions to factories in ports such as Havana and Cartagena, South Sea Company officials conducted contraband trade and corruption on a scale that provoked outrage among Spanish authorities.
Catholics within the Irish diaspora, located throughout British and Spanish territories, became important brokers in this unofficial trade. Ricardo O'Farril (Richard Farrell) of Montserrat, a noted slave trader and the son of Irish parents, rose to become the South Sea Company’s head man in Havana. With the help of his English assistants (and eventual successors), Wargent Nicholson and Hubert Tassel, Farrell carried out an extensive 'private trade’, using the cover of Asiento slavers from Jamaica to introduce large quantities of contraband goods, such as cloth and foodstuffs, into the Cuban market. They were aided by corrupt officials and other Irish diaspora merchants on both sides of the Atlantic, including Ricardo Geraldino (Richard Fitzgerald), Gregorio Valois (Gregory Walsh) and John Collier.
Indeed, evidence from the 1720s shows that such practices were not confined to the Asiento trade. One Waterford-born merchant based in the Canary Islands noted that a regelar (a gift or bribe) by a ship’s captain to Havana’s port officials was customary if contraband goods were to pass inspection. Without this, the captain ran the risk of a discamino or the seizure of his ship and goods. These examples suggest that contraband and bribery were a feature, not a bug, of Spain’s colonial trade system.
Unlike other forms of illicit commerce, clandestine trade typically flourished during wartime and involved secret dealings with enemy states. While smugglers and contrabandists operated in peacetime grey zones, clandestine traders faced greater risk by knowingly engaging in trade with the enemy, using forged documents, false flags and manipulated identities. The risks they took made sense in a world where European powers went to war no fewer than 17 times during the 18th century, in what one historian has called ‘the normal means of intercourse between states.’
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It is perhaps unsurprising that Irish merchants became notorious for their involvement in clandestine trade, using extended family networks and shared Catholicism to do business with Britain’s continental enemies. While merchants across Ireland took part, it was often ports in the south of the island, such as New Ross, Waterford and Youghal, that played a leading role.
An illustrative case emerged in 1704, when the Aylward of Youghal, with Andrew Galwey as master, departed its home port carrying a cargo of beef and butter. The stated recipient was Richard Aylward of Porto but, using a French pass, the ship sailed instead to La Rochelle and Bordeaux, where the cargo was landed and replaced with 38 tons of red wine and brandy worth over £1,000.
At the time, Britain and France were at war as part of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713), and Portugal was a British ally, making any direct trade with French ports illegal. To avoid suspicion on the return voyage, Galwey carried several falsified documents, including bills of lading, cockets (customs receipts) and a forged maritime health certificate from Porto, which survive in British archives.
Another ploy involved disguising French wines in ‘cask[s] being all made Portugal fashion.’ The scale of this trade appears to have been considerable: one English captain noted that the ‘Irish Papists who use this Clandestine Trade’ had even ‘named a place Viana in the River of Burdaux, from which they carry great Quantities of wines for Ireland as Inbred from Viana in Portugall.’ Irish ‘Papists’ or Catholics were indeed heavily involved in this trade, but it is also important to note that Irish Protestants often owned or held an interest in the goods being shipped, as was the case in relation to the Aylward of Youghal voyage in 1704.
Together, these forms of illicit trade reveal not so much a breakdown in state or imperial order as the everyday reality of improvisation and the informal economies that sustained them. Irish merchants were not merely caught between empires. They helped connect them through a web of smuggling, bribery and clandestine trade, showing that empire was not just a matter of flags and laws, but of routes, risks and relationships, both seen and unseen.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
