Author: Willem Geelhoed
Date: 01.06.2025
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the coasts of England saw a significant amount of smuggling, which was supported by a large part of the local population.[1] Perhaps strongly stimulated by high import tariffs on spirits and tea, coastal populations managed to increase their income by engaging in smuggling practices, concealing the smuggled goods and transporting it further inland for sale. These practices took pace in a context in which formal government authority was challenged, often in a violent manner, in order to maintain control over smuggling routes and operations.
In some coastal communities, slightly different but somewhat related practices emerged, such as salvaging goods that washed ashore if lost at sea. These practices escalated into what is called ‘wrecking’: the looting of a shipwreck right after the ship ran ashore or was broken apart on the rocks. Sometimes this included violence against survivors, and, in extreme situations, luring a ship into the coast deliberately by lighting fires that imitated legitimate lighthouses. This inevitably brought about the loss of the ship and many lives of the ship’s company.[2]
This practice of ‘wrecking’, as it took place in Cornwall, is the object of Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel Jamaica Inn.[3] The story is set in the early 1800s and mainly takes place in and around the inn, located on the sparsely populated moor. The protagonist, Mary Yellan, slowly finds out while she is staying in the inn, that her uncle, Joss Merlyn, is involved in wrecking. In the end, the wrecking party appears to have a substantial size and is very engrained in the local community. The attempts by the government to stop the wrecking result in in-fighting and bring the wrecking party to a violent end.
In the period in which Mary is staying with her aunt and uncle at the inn, and before she realizes that her uncle’s income is the result of wrecking, she does suspect that illicit activities are going on almost from the moment she arrives at Jamaica Inn. However, at first she suspects that her uncle is involved in a smuggling ring. This does bothers her, not only because Mary is well aware that even more serious things are possibly going on, being warned about this by her aunt Patience. The thought of involvement in smuggling also bothers her because, as she reflects, ‘Smuggling was dangerous; it was fraught with dishonesty; it was forbidden strictly by the law of the land’.[4] In Mary’s mind, there are some aspects of smuggling that are particularly worrisome: being involved in it may bring a person into possibly violent conflict with law enforcement officers and eventually in prison. That being a rather practical disadvantage, there are also legal and moral questions. Of course, smuggling is dishonest, as smugglers by necessity do not operate in the open and try to deceit anyone who checks on them in an official capacity. It also is clear that is forbidden by law. Whereas, by introducing tariffs and excises, laws and regulations in effect create the economic incentive for smuggling, it is also made a criminal offence by separate laws that criminalize the circumvention of these regulations.
All of this leads Mary to a moral dilemma: ‘but was it evil? Mary could not decide.’[5] How does she come out of this dilemma? Or better: dilemmas, because they are twofold. There can be a moral question about the permissibility of smuggling itself, but it is a different question whether one who is confronted with it has to intervene or not. Her considerations here are telling: ‘She needed advice, and there was no one she could ask. She was alone in a grim and rather hateful world, with little prospect of changing it for the better.’[6] Following these reflections, Mary investigates and finds out that much more serious things are going on, including murder. Then, she resolves to expose her uncle and the group. ‘She would have shrugged her shoulders at smuggling alone, though the flagrant dishonesty of the trade disgusted her, but all that she had seen so far went to prove that Joss Merlyn and his friends were not content with this only; they were desperate men, afraid of nothing and no one, and did not stop at murder’.[7]
The narrative contrasts two forms of wrong. One involves violence and murder, which is described as being evil without any reservation. The other, smuggling, is much more difficult to characterize. On one hand, it is forbidden by law. On the other hand, nobody is directly hurt and the only damage is done to the state, by avoiding to pay import tariffs and excises. The story thus presents a classic Euthyphro dilemma:[8] is smuggling wrong because it is forbidden, or is it forbidden because it is wrong? This is a question that can be posed for forms of criminal activity that are sometimes labeled as mala prohibita, in contrasts to forms of criminal activity that involve actions that are clearly wrong in itself, the mala in se. This contradistinction is however not that clear. Already according to Aquinas, it may be better to view even an unjust law as being binding upon one’s conscience, because abiding by it will avoid scandal and disturbance.[9] So even if the legislator chose to prohibit activities that are morally irrelevant or purely innocent in themselves, the fact of criminalization alone will impact the moral value of the relevant action.
Interestingly, in the narrative we see Mary changing her attitude on the basis of her moral considerations about the activities of her uncle’s group. As soon as she realizes that the group is involved in violent and murderous action, her mind is set. But before that, the sole suspicion of smuggling leaves her with a moral dilemma. She cannot decide whether smuggling is evil or not. From the multiple ways that a person might approach such a dilemma, she initially considers that another person might give her advice about what to do in her situation. In the story, there is regrettably nobody who could offer such moral advice, but the choice of approaching someone else is evident of a particular preference for how to solve a moral dilemma. If Mary would have been a utilitarian, she would have made a calculation of benefits and drawbacks of various courses of action, and chosen the one that leads to the best outcome. Would she have been a deontologist, she would probably have regarded the prohibition of smuggling as being a rule that simply has to be followed, perhaps also because allowing oneself to engage in it can never be universalized. The choice to approach another person for advice is however evident of another moral philosophy: virtue ethics. According to Rosalind Hursthouse, a prominent virtue ethicist, moral dilemmas should be solved by either trying to imagine what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances, or by consulting another virtuous person.[10] Unfortunately, Mary Yellan cannot consult anyone in order to resolve her moral dilemma, and we never find out how she solves it. After all, at the moment she finds out about the murderous activities of her uncle, the moral dilemma on how to respond to the smuggling ceases to exist.
With much skill, Du Maurier invites us to reflect on the immorality of smuggling, without presenting us with a clear answer. Mary of course not only needs guidance on whether or not smuggling is bad, but also on how to respond, as an outsider, to something that may or not be immoral, even if it is illegal. Such a complicated moral dilemma may be best approached in exactly the way that Mary is inclined to approach it: consult someone else, a virtuous person that can inform the decision-making. The narrative in Jamaica Inn leaves the question about the morality of smuggling unanswered, but it does provide a way out – one that perhaps may be followed in many moral dilemmas.
[1] Muskett, P (1997). English smuggling in the eighteenth century. PhD thesis The Open University.
[2] Pearce, CJ (2010). Cornish Wrecking, 1700-1860. Reality and Popular Myth. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press.
[3] Du Maurier, D (1936). Jamaica Inn. London: Gollancz. I have used the 1976 edition by Pan Books, London. Page references are to this edition.
[4] p. 48.
[5] p. 48.
[6] p. 48.
[7] p. 58.
[8] Plato (2019). Defence of Socrates; Euthyphro; Crito. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[9] Aquinas. Summa Theologiae I.II, Q 96, 4.
[10] Hursthouse, R (1999). On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
