Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 1.djvu/232

 removal of seven of these casks, each weighing between thirty and forty hundred weight.

The light horsemen also plunder during the night, but principally those vessels coming from the West Indies. This species of robbery arises from a concerted plan between some of the crew and the receivers, who buy the scrapings, that is, the samples of sugar, the refuse of the coffee, or the drippings of the spirits, and which remain in the hold when the cargo has been discharged. It is an easy matter to encrease these by piercing the sacks, and loosening the hoops of the barrels. This, a Canadian merchant, who sent a great deal of oil annually, discovered to his great astonishment. Always finding a deficit much greater than could arise from common leakage, and unable to get, on this head, a satisfactory solution from his correspondents, he determined on making a voyage to London, to penetrate the mystery. Resolved to pursue his investigations with the most minute research, he was in the quay waiting with much impatience for a lighter laden the previous evening, and whose delay seemed very extraordinary. At length it appeared, and the merchant saw a pack of fellows of very bad appearance jump on board with as much eagerness as a crew of corsairs into a prize. He also went down into the hold, and was completely stupified on seeing the barrels placed with their bungs downwards. When they begun to unload the lighter, he found as much oil left floating in the hold as would fill nine barrels. The proprietor having had a few planks taken up, there was found as much more as filled five casks, so that the load of one lighter had made a diminution of fourteen barrels. It would be scarcely credited, that the crew, far from being ashamed of this, had the impudence to assert that they had a right to this as a profit that belonged to them.

Not content with these thefts, the light horsemen, united with the lightermen, opened, during the night, barrels of sugar, which they entirely emptied, carrying them off in black bags which they call "black straps"