Opium smuggling

SYDNEY: The successful attempt, in the small hours of a recent day, to bring a large quantity of opium ashore through a cordon of waiting police — the smugglers dashing through in a motor car amid a hail of bullets — has set old police and Customs officers ‘‘reminiscing’’, and some good stories of defeated smugglers have been told. So many foreign ships come to Sydney that attempts to evade the Customs are continually being made. Customs officers one day searched a suspected ship from end to end for opium, and failed. As they were leaving, an officer

suddenly thought of some carcases of mutton he had seen innocently hanging. He went back and looked. They were full of opium. A police patrol on Circular Quay was puzzled one night by a faint noise like hail falling on iron. The bridge of a German steamer was level with the roof of a shed. The police cautiously investigated. They found that handfuls of opium pellets, wrapped in sausageskin, were being thrown on to the adjoining shelter shed from the steamer. The silent workers on the ship were trapped and arrested. The port health officer, when boarding a ship inside the Heads suddenly noticed an oil drum floating where, before, there had been nothing. He directed the attention of his launch officer to it, and when others appeared, all with opium in the bottom of them, a search was made and the smugglers caught lowering them through a porthole on the other side of the ship. A boat, manned by Chinese, which had been hovering

around, left the locality in a great hurry.