William Tribe (Primus), the Founder of the Race Born 1760 to 1770 -- Died 1813 to 1820

In writing this History of our family I am unable to go farther back in the dim and distant past than the time of my great-grandfather, the head and founder of our race, and of him I am able to give very few particulars. Unfortunately the little I know of him is hardly to his credit, and, indeed in the bulk greatly the reverse; however, I give it frankly, for if this history is to be truthful and in any way reliable, the dark side must be recorded faithfully as the bright and honourable. I intimated in my preface that our family had never turned out a rogue, and, should the reader incline, after reading this page, to the opinion that our ancestor was certainly near akin a rogue, if not actually one, let me hasten to say that my meaning was that no member of our family, since I can remember, no member that I have known, has led any but the most straightforward of lives.

In a few words, then, our paternal ancestor was a smuggler! It is not a fact to be proud of; yet time has robbed it of the sharpness of its sting, and a recollection which might well be regarded with shame and a certain amount of ignominy, if it related to our parent, or even to our grandparent, loses its power of reproach and ability to humiliate when it concerns one so far removed as a parent's grandparent, and a period of over a hundred years ago; or, at least eighty, since he died.

The shame dies, and in its place is left only a kind of romantic interest which attaches to the 'glamour of the past' as when one reads the tales of the old smuggling days, and (unmindful of the fact that the smugglers' life was one continual career of crime, and the smuggler probably worth not one single grain of pity or consideration) thinks kindly of them as [relics]of the past, and with fancy's ardour paints them in all kinds of manly attitudes, and invests them with corresponding attributes and virtues.