A traditional sport: Smuggling among South Funen sailors,1950-1990

Sources

Smuggling has an obvious source problem. As Lance Grahn explains: ‘The history of illegal activity will always be an incomplete narrative. After all, the secrecy of an illicit act is one of its principal measures of success.’ ¹³ Grahn has written about eighteenth-century smuggling in northern South America, but the same challenge applies to South Funen smuggling. The data used for this article are preserved smuggling cases from the Royal Danish customs from the customs offices of Svendborg, Marstal, Ærøskøbing, Rudkøbing and Faaborg in the current municipalities of Svendborg, Faaborg-Midtfyn, Ærø and Langeland. Customs was centralised in Odense around 1990, which marks the end of the period under concern here.

Smugglers do not produce conventional sources. As part of the study, six former sailors, who worked on South Funen ships in the period 1960–1990, were interviewed in 2019 and 2020. In the article they are referred to by capital letters: AA, JH, DV, KH, JS, CB and MM. Their accounts supplement the archival sources and put the state assessment of maritime smuggling into perspective. Three customs agents have been interviewed for this project as well: BB, FC and SA.

The development of smuggling, 1950–1990

After the Second World War, the commercial Danish fleet was war-torn and in dire need of renewal. With Marshall Aid and increasing economic activity in the West, the small ships fleet (under 500 bruto registered tons [BRT]) expanded from the 1950s onwards. ¹⁴ As shipping slowly grew and new ships entered the water from local shipyards in Marstal and Svendborg, the first signs of the resumption of smuggling appeared. In the early 1950s, imports of German and American goods via Germany began to appear in the customs controls. Cigarettes, spirits, finer spirits and cigarette paper were among the most frequently discovered items and, at the same time, those charged with the highest taxes. The charges continually climbed upwards, especially after the 1960 Customs Act. ¹⁵

Local coasters and smaller ships are abundant in the Customs material. In 1958, the local newspaper Ærø Avis noted that ‘the last three years, the authorities have dealt with about 400 smuggling cases against the captains of small ships . . . primarily in connection with sailing between North German and South Funen ports’. ¹⁶ One branch of the trade which drew special attention from the customs service was the coal and coke trade between Svendborg and Flensburg. Due to the regular visits, captains and sailors formed relationships ashore. A local motorship made 40 calls from Flensborg to Denmark from 14 January 1952 to 16 December 1953. The captain ‘forgot’ to inform the customs of his shopping in Germany, which totalled 214 bottles of liquor, 38,110 cigarettes, 1,400 cigars and 100,000 sheets of cigarette paper. Other vessels made up to 60 trips and smuggled large quantities of alcohol and tobacco into Denmark.

Not only captains were involved. Sailor memoirs from the period emphasise the same situation when it comes to undetected smuggling. Radio telegraph operator Mogens Falk describes in his memoirs his first time at sea in the early 1950s: ‘. . .like others on board, I had hidden several cartons of cigarettes for sale on land. . .’. ¹⁷ Falk explains that it was not only the cabins that were used as hiding places: ‘. . .the machines were diesel engines, which were connected via screw shafts to the ship’s two screws. These screw shafts were a favourite hideaway for smuggling cigarettes.’ ¹⁸ Poul Larsen, who was a coastal sailor and especially sailed to the Faroe Islands, says: ‘. . .another thing, which also yielded good coin, was smuggling spirits to the islands. We bought liquor legally at regular retail price from the ship’s dealer in Denmark. We could then sell it on the islands with up to 200% profit.’ ¹⁹ Larsen was not afraid of the customs – they were often the first customers.

According to JS, who started sailing on South Funen coasters in the 1960s, smuggling was quite common among Danish sailors. The smuggled goods were mainly cigarettes or alcohol destined for export or bought cheaply by the steward. Much tobacco was bought legally as provisions. The Customs Search Service (TEA), established in 1955, ²⁰ kept tobacco lists (11,000) in an effort to keep track of the legal tobacco. According to information from the TEA, in 1965, 3,500 reports were received of over-provisioned ships suspected of carrying cigarettes for re-sale.

The goods smuggled aboard coasters and small ships were primarily for own consumption, but it was also normal practice to resell small portions in port, where the profits could finance a night out. ²¹ Kaj Nykjær Jensen talks about his experiences as a boy aboard Adriana in the summer of 1964. On this ship, whose owners were from Marstal and whose captain was from Svendborg, Nykjær saw how the captain, upon arriving in Svendborg, hid a bag of goods by hanging it on a nail in the bulwark. When the Customs were gone, the captain’s wife picked up the bag. ²²

The professional smuggling of cigarettes escalated in the late 1960s. It mainly took place on speedboats roaring from Poland or Eastern Germany to Denmark. In 1968, over 12 million cigarettes were confiscated by customs – an estimated 15 per cent of the total amount smuggled into the country. ²³ The speedboat smuggling, as it was locally called, is not part of the scope of this article, but as we will see later, the sailors were familiar with this method and delineated their own smuggling from that of the professionals.

However, professional smuggling happened on commercial vessels too. In August 1971, the Oversight Inspectorate circulated a list of well known commercial vessels smuggling cigarettes and spirits into the country. Ships from Spain, Greece, Germany and Finland stored goods in engine rooms, car tyres and cable rooms. ²⁴ Quantities ranged from those likely for the crew’s consumption (17 bottles of liquor in the MS Henriette Retzlaff of Hamburg) to resale (12,200 cigarettes, 2,150kg of tobacco and five bottles of liquor in the SS Argonaut of Piraeus). ²⁵ MS Finnlandia had, according to a statement from the German customs, provisioned with almost a million cigarettes (526,600 Prince and 464,000 Cecil) in 1974, most likely with illegal distribution in mind. ²⁶

According to the informant JH, who owned his own coaster on Ærø from the mid-1980s to 2013, by far the most local smuggling on the Ærø coaster fleet was of a completely different nature. The Ærø coaster fleet, which numbered 60 ships in the 1980s, made sure that the island was provided with cheap spirits: ‘There was no one with respect for themselves who bought spirits,’ says JH. It was institutionalised to a degree that ‘It was expected that if you were on a coaster, then you smuggled for pocket money’. ²⁷

By far the majority of contraband was liquor and cigarettes, but if the gain was particularly substantial, food might be smuggled – for example, sausages imported illicitly into Norway. It was rare for small-scale smugglers to get caught. An exception was the revelation that the coaster A. Fabricius of Marstal was behind the semi-professional import of cigarettes and spirits to the islanders of Ærø in 1978. ²⁸ The commercial ports were the places where smugglers were concentrated. An anonymous informant worked from 1972–1982 in a company at Svendborg Harbour. He says that ‘all ships that came in had goods in addition to what they had to deliver’. The dock workers established contact with the sailors and traded with them: ‘. . .you saw the ships coming in, and then it just happened.’ ²⁹

The small custom houses were centralised in Svendborg District Customs Office in 1969, which regulated seaborne trade throughout the archipelago from then until 1990. The preserved smuggling reports show that smuggling on coasters was quite stable compared to smuggling on ferries and yachts, which made up the majority of the seizures. On the other hand, the average quantity of goods found on commercial vessels was much larger than on the ferries. This is depicted in Figure 1, which is based on an analysis of 2,585 smuggling cases. After 1974, the freight market for small vessels became increasingly challenging, which could explain part of the rise in smuggling during the 1980s.

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Figure 1.

Svendborg District Customs’ smuggling reports, 1969–1989.

Sailors working aboard coasters engaged in regular smuggling as well as exploiting windows in the customs regulations to purchase large batches of beer and spirits for fictional crew members and fictitious destinations. ³⁰ JH reiterates several times that ‘.. of the many captains I know, I do not know anyone who has not participated’. JH states this as a captain, but also believes that the sailors were smuggling. According to JH, the majority of the maritime service environment (charterers and shipbrokers) were involved in landings and distribution, while a shipbroker (MM) talked about the participation of individuals on land in organised smuggling. OB recalled that the first colour televisions came to Ærø illegally, having been bought and installed in a local ship to avoid Danish taxation, and then taken down and distributed on Ærø instead.

The globalisation of maritime transport was particularly visible in the development of smuggling. In the 1980s, several South Funen shipping companies were the centre of high-profile arms smuggling. In the early 1980s, coaster shipping companies from Svendborg, Marstal (Jørs) and Ærøskøbing (Jespergaard) were accused of breaking the arms embargo on South Africa’s apartheid regime. ³¹ The most notable case began in 1985 when a local captain, Kai Narup, admitted that he had been involved in arms smuggling. Narup said that he merely expressed ‘What everyone down here knows’. ³² In a major interview, Narup claimed that 11 Danish shipping companies had carried arms, and at least half were from the South Funen Archipelago. The shipper Jørgen Vesta admitted to a national newspaper that one of his ships carried weapons from France to South Africa five times in 1981. ³³ The shipowner was using offshore companies to cover the freight. ³⁴ This kind of smuggling was not based on the individual sailor, but rather on the owner’s choices – it was about entire cargoes, not hidden goods.

According to several informants, small-scale smuggling on commercial vessels allegedly continued well into the 1990s as customs control at the ports became more sporadic. ³⁵ The nature of the goods changed, but the activity remained.

The legitimacy of smuggling

This section examines smugglers’ own perception of legitimacy. To those interviewed, smuggling for personal consumption was considered legitimate, but large-scale smuggling with professionalised distribution for profit was illegal. The smugglers legitimised their trade by distancing themselves from the professional smugglers and devising moral hierarchies for smuggling. As former navigator JS from Svendborg says, ‘You closed your eyes if it wasn’t too much . . . we’re talking 3-4 bottles, it wasn’t like the big smuggling from Poland’. ³⁶ For JS, it was crucial that his or his colleagues’ smuggling did not happen for the sake of big sales, but that they had little extra for drinking trips or drought periods.

The scale of the smuggling gave legitimacy in itself. JH, a former shipowner from Marstal, who was quite outspoken and claimed that no-one with self-respect buys legal alcohol, pointed out that smuggling was expected. According to JH, smuggling was a tradition that had to be managed on a specific scale. For JH, this distinction between small and large smuggling was also reflected in the term. Small-scale smuggling was not smuggling, as real smuggling was for resale. For example, what JH did in landing 50–100 boxes of beer was a bypass, not smuggling. On that scale, smuggling ‘..was considered to be quite a harmless hobby that everyone had. Everyone knew someone’. ³⁷

Captain KH, who bought his first ship in the 1960s and was the informant who had been active for the longest time, had an interesting conceptual application. He was not so ‘serious’, claiming: ‘I have not bothered to do this for sale. It was mostly for your own consumption and perhaps some orders from family and friends.’ ³⁸ Smuggling was not something people frowned upon; instead, they sought out sailors in ports and asked if they had anything they could sell. The sailors were used by families and friends to access lucrative goods. As a captain, KH did not mind the sailors smuggling; however, it should not be too much nor should it discredit the ship, but basically he ‘..didn’t care if they were caught with a bottle of booze or something like that’. Captain DV from Marstal emphasised his point by cursing: ‘For the seamen I have known, smuggling has always been for pocket money to go ashore. That’s all it bloody was.’ Rather than money, the sailors emphasised the excitement and sport of smuggling as a direct motivation for smuggling. DV called the smuggling a sport that, like other sports, has a competitive element: ‘The fun stopped when they closed the customs – it was not fun without resistance.’

A weighty argument for several of those interviewed was that smuggling was something everyone did. AA called smuggling a right. The maritime culture entailed simply expecting (and teaching) smuggling. MM, who trained as a navigator and later worked in his family’s brokers company, tried smuggling as a student when he was studying at a local navigation school. The attempt failed miserably and the school’s principal wanted a meeting with MM and his accomplice. MM immediately apologised for their actions. The principal allegedly replied: ‘Smuggling is not a crime, MM, it is almost an honour.’ Smuggling was considered something of a historical tradition and a part of the local identity adding legitimacy to the trade. As psychologist Jerome Bruner comments in his work on narratives: ‘. . .rituals are beyond debate.’ ³⁹

The legitimacy of the smuggling rested not only on quantity, as the product itself had a great significance in terms of what was deemed acceptable. A very clear demarcation in relation to the smuggling of drugs or narcotics was present: where the volume of goods was not discussed, the product itself caused distaste. Part of the demarcation was probably that drug smuggling was rarely for personal consumption, but often for resale. Drug smuggling thereby broke the moral code of self-consumption while, at the same time, the goods themselves were deemed immoral. JH recounted a local ship that sailed in Columbian waters and was regularly approached to smuggle drugs out of the country, but the captain said no every time. JH emphasised that ‘I do not know anyone who has touched drugs. It was far too dangerous and obscene.. Amoral.. I know of no examples of someone who smuggled drugs. But many have been offered.’

Drugs were smuggled in Danish ships, so the rejection was not uniform. KH has had the drug smuggling closer than the others interviewed. At one point, KH hired a seaman, who was fired after a row: ‘. . .then there was one of the other sailors who told me the fired sailor had smuggled a whole plate of hashish. Had I known, I would have reported him. To put such a thing in the ship.’ Some captains did report their sailors if they smuggled drugs, but not if they smuggled cigarettes. ⁴⁰ There are other product groups that caused the same distaste. Arms smuggling aboard Danish coasters in the 1980s created much public outrage. The sailor Poul Erik Larsen thus described in his memoirs how the arms smugglers tampered with the public perception of the sailors. If he tried to impress ladies, he should not mention his profession if he wanted to avoid being accused of weapons smuggling. ⁴¹

Storytelling

Smuggling remains a good story for the informants, they have no trouble sharing their past. When informants retell their smuggling stories, it is often evident that they have done so before. Where the rest of the interview can take the form of dialogue, the smuggling stories become more coherent narratives in which the informant speaks for a longer time. The informants are not defensive, and the joy of storytelling points back to the notions of legitimacy – smuggling is not something you hide, it is something you boast about. Narratives certainly communicate behaviour and moral norms. ⁴² Smuggling tales are no different. The stories that the informants share contain statements about what in smuggling is good and what is bad, and the qualities of a skilled smuggler.

For the sailors, smuggling stories were something that served as entertainment when they had free time on board. When JS started as a boy on the Annette S of Svendborg in the 1960s, he heard a lot of stories from a sailor who had worked a lot in coasters: ‘Many stories were told. It was a game. Everyone knew there were smugglers on the coasters, the customs knew as well.’ ⁴³ DV told what he himself called ‘A fairly good smuggling story from Iceland’ starting with a batch of herring and ending with cognac. Many Icelandic crowns were earned. They were not worth much, but the story was shareable because it dealt with self-experienced smuggling for DV’s own consumption while at the same time, it was colourful and full of ingenious details. Storytelling was a means of boasting. Several pointed out that their social standing improved by having been ‘part of something naughty’, as JS put it. As JH said: ‘Yes, when we were with the others, there were no limits to how much we had cheated the customs.’

Smuggling tales pay homage to creativity. For example, JH proudly told us his favourite hiding place. His coaster had an ‘..old-fashioned system for lifting the lantern onto the mast. I could have 20 cartons of cigarettes in a black plastic bag up there. The customs never climbed the mast.’ Particularly innovative methods were among those being shared. JH went on to tell about someone who baked cigarettes into bread and froze them, or hid things in cola bottles or camouflaged sausages. JH’s favourite strategy, however, was not hiding his contraband, but camouflaging them: ‘I just put the shit on the dock next to the walkway. It was totally unthinkable. Nobody looks in empty cardboard boxes.’

The positive valorisation of cunning was linked to caution. JH emphasised several times how the coastal sailors who engaged in pseudo-professional smuggling became so bold that they anchored outside Marstal and dispatched motorboats filled with smuggled goods into the harbour, directly in front of customs: ‘. . .insanely careless, the customs man was sitting with his binoculars. . .’ The hubris led to fines for customers and several others in Marstal when the customs seized the meticulously-kept order book. For JH, caution prevented the smuggler from detection, for if you kept the standard and did not get too bold, you could continue unimpeded. The mantra of caution is closely related to the moral economy of self-consumption.

Humour is an indispensable part of the smuggling narratives. JH joyfully narrated a story in which the plot was built round how close he was to ruin. He had stored a large number of bottles in a load of fishmeal. When JH slept, the unloading began and when he woke up, he feared the bottles had been crushed and destroyed the cargo at his expense. Fortunately, the dock workers had seen the goods and nicked them. For JH, there is comedy in relaying the minutes when he thought everything was lost. The point is the same: the small-scale smuggler made mistakes because he was not a professional and he now laughs at them (and himself) to underline that he was harmless.

Historian David Hopkin has investigated maritime communities in Brittany where, through their stories, young sailors portrayed the sea as a place for them to prove their manhood. Water was their platform to influence their own lives; become a captain, make a fortune or marry well. ⁴⁴ The stories about smuggling underline the same dynamics. The storytelling highlights agency – the sailors are plotting their own course.

The sailor and the customs officer

Smuggling has been interpreted as either a social protest, political consumption, a pseudo-revolutionary event or a valve for free trade. At the centre of most of these interpretations is an assumption that smuggling is a political statement. The state is an abstract phenomenon rarely visible in sailor memoirs or interviews, whereas the main antagonist, the customs agent, takes centre stage. The customs agent personifies the abstract state and, through a study of the sailor’s relationship with the customs agent, we can get closer to the smugglers’ view of the customs and their place in the local community. Historian Clive Emsley has argued that the uniformed official stood out in the local community by virtue of his uniform and office. He was a man of the state, not the local community. ⁴⁵ Does this also apply to South Funen?

The custom agents were largely viewed as adversaries. Several of the interviewed smugglers portrayed smuggling as a sport in which customs were necessary as an opponent to maintain the excitement. MM referred to a case from Søby where the temp at the customs office was a good friend of MM: ‘He called our office and said in a whispering voice: “I am the customs this week if you want something”.’ MM allegedly refused to take advantage of the situation because there was no sport in smuggling without an opponent. DV described how the sporting situation was experienced: ‘The custom agents sailed round in camouflaged cruisers and could frighten us greatly when we brought five bottles of booze and some cigarettes.’ When they were withdrawn, so was the fun.

As we have seen, the legitimacy of smuggling was closely linked to the motive. The sporting motive, and thus the legality, changes character if the opponent is missing – then you no longer smuggle for sport, but for profit. In this way, state control is defining for smuggling. Most interactions between sailor and customs officer went by the book, but both interviews and archival sources report on the customs officer as an institutionalised opponent. This view of the customs officer has a high degree of continuity throughout the investigation period, and further back, but does not necessarily include a basic politicisation of the relationship between smugglers and customs agents. On a certain level, the customs officer is expected to be perceived as an opponent.

Some were opponents more than others. The stereotypically bad custom agent was rigid, shrewd and relentless. Several of the informants referred to a customs agent known as Gestapo-Larsen. It was a victory to sneak something past him. The local customs agent in Marstal, who the sailors knew and liked, were on the contrary somewhat spared. The ideal customs agent was pragmatic. Regarding political expressions, it was the rigid customs agent that provoked criticism.

Downright corruption in the customs was very rare. More often, the interactions between sailors and agents took place in a grey zone. The customs would have a drink after searching the vessels and friendships were established on this account. The customs were expected to ignore small-scale smuggling of the legitimate kind and focus on professional smuggling. This position was shared to a certain extent by interviewed customs agents. ⁴⁶

The local officials were placed in an intermediate position between state and locals. Officials, in Emsley’s case gendarmes, tried to find a comfortable middle ground without too much conflict, which could involve turning a blind eye to crime, especially if the local population in general accepted it. Emsley calls the strategy live-and-let-live. ⁴⁷ Alan Karras identified the same pragmatism among colonial law enforcers in the Caribbean: ‘In a perverse kind of way, the state actually gained respect and legitimacy from the local population when it did not enforce the letter of the law and, instead, overlooked an amount of illegal activity that could not be waived as completely insignificant.’ ⁴⁸ The same strategy is visible in the Archipelago.

Smuggling was widely perceived as a crime without a victim. The smuggler knew full well that the state was being cheated of income, but it was believed that the scale was reasonably small and the state’s victimhood so abstract that it was legitimate to smuggle. As Høy notes in his history of Marstal: ‘It was not considered fraud to cheat customs as it did not hurt individuals, but rather the state. To “fool” the Customs Service was considered a heroic act that was boasted about by people who did not want to scam their neighbors for a single penny.’ ⁴⁹ The quotation refers to the beginning of the nineteenth century, but there is good reason to assume that it can be used to describe smuggling in the archipelago from 1950 to 1990. As JS explained: ‘You couldn’t see it hurting anyone, the quantities were relatively small.’ When discussing the structural causes of smuggling, it is the taxes and tax burden that are highlighted by the informers. ⁵⁰ The smuggling is mostly justified by saving money, which emphasises that the conflict between customs and smugglers was politically implicit rather than explicit. It was not an act directed at the state, it was a form of cheating in which the state suffered collateral damage.

The vessel as a community

Sailor identity and political culture have been the subject of debate. Crime historian Johan Heinsen has argued that an oppositional culture prevailed among sailors in the early modern period. Heinsen contends that sailors, and especially the long-distance sailors, must be studied as a special class, as their lives differed markedly from urban residents and farmers by being strongly globalised. In Heinsen’s view, sailors have a ‘culture of crime’ that was expressed in collective and anti-authoritarian acts, among other things through mutiny, theft, violence, drunkenness and neglect. ⁵¹ It is tempting to add smuggling to the list of the sailors’ grievances – as an expression of collective opposition to hierarchy. How was the smuggler’s relationship with the vessel as a community?

A crew of a commercial vessel is a community with a hierarchy, at the apex of which was the captain, who wielded great power. This hierarchy played an important role when it comes to smuggling. Numerous cases show how several crew members aboard the same ship smuggled together without the captain’s knowledge or with his silent acceptance. According to customs, the captains could not deny responsibility for their ships and their crew. A circular concerning secret rooms indicated that the crew was considered responsible for hiding the contraband and devising the secret rooms, but the captain remained responsible for knowing his ship if it was less than 300 BRT. ⁵²

It was different when the captain was a protagonist and demanded the participation of the crew. In the case of a Svendborg ship, this became quite clear. The sailors were not allowed to disembark because the captain suspected that they would inform customs about the captain’s smuggling activities. ⁵³ In other cases, the captain demanded the participation of his crew. When customs caught the crew red-handed, everyone was fined. Thus, the crew did not get impunity by referring to orders. ⁵⁴ At the same time, there are several examples of older crew members training young people and new sailors in the arts of smuggling as part of their initiation into the ship’s community.

Maritime identity has been interpreted as rooted in ships’ communities, ⁵⁵ with the vessel as a temporary organisation in which the social dynamics on board are independent fields of research. ⁵⁶ The sailing community is situational and defined by the ship’s sides. Vessels create a distinction between those on board and those who are not, and in particular those who search for illegal goods. This difference between in and out was probably greatest if the sailors were in a foreign port where they would spend more time on the ship, which, of course, was also their home.

The interviewed sailors claimed their actions were motivated by their need for pocket money, good stories or social recognition – dynamics mostly internal to the ship. The frequent participation of the captains indicates that it is not the internal hierarchies of the ship that motivated the small-scale smuggling by sailors. Smuggling in this context was not oppositional. Rather, the community of practice is a community in which the occupants, or parts thereof, jointly engage in smuggling as opposed to the world on the other side of the railing. The vessel becomes a situational centre where customs belong to the periphery – the outside world. Sailors’ smuggling is probably to be understood as a conflict between ship and non-ship, rather than a political act.

Conclusion

From 1950 to 1990, smuggling was a legitimate activity for South Funen sailors aboard the region’s many smaller vessels. The development of smuggling was dependent on state regulations and taxes, as it defined the price differences and holes in legislation that could be exploited. It would, however, be reductionistic to perceive smuggling as monocausal ‘free trade’ motivated by profit. The perception of sailors’ smuggling was interwoven in social context and moral hierarchies. Smuggling for widespread distribution outside the local community was seen as immoral, but providing the local community with contraband was widely acceptable, even praised. Scale, the character of goods, harmlessness and creativity delineated the acceptable smuggling from the unacceptable. Smuggling among sailors was to a large degree perceived as a traditional sport, taught to new sailors through stories and deeds. In short, smuggling gave sailors social capital on the vessel. Through the stories, the sailors played with a taboo and proved themselves to be worthy members of the onboard community.

The customs, whose job it was to collect the taxes, were perceived as adversaries, and repeatedly found themselves in a middle position between the state and the local community into which they were fully integrated. The customs knew the crew on regular visiting vessels and relationships were formed – sometimes ethically dubious – but mostly it worked as a regulating dynamic, that kept smuggling within acceptable limits.

Crossing borders is part of the transnational nature of sailing and so are the temptations of illegal trading. As shown above, smuggling was expected among South Funen sailors as the expression of a traditional maritime sport. Smuggling should be seen as a part of the transnational life at sea, a deep structure in the maritime community where borders are invisible and regularly crossed.

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