Of all the great capitals, London has least the appearance of
antiquity, and the Thames has a peculiarly modern aspect. It is no
longer the “silent highway,” for its silence is continually broken by
the clatter of steamboats. This change has materially affected the
position and diminished the number of the London watermen, into whose
condition and earnings I am now about to examine.
The character of the transit on the river has, moreover, undergone
a great change, apart from the alteration produced by the use of
steam-power. Until the more general use of coaches, in the reign of
Charles II., the Thames supplied the only mode of conveyance, except
horseback, by which men could avoid the fatigue of walking; and that
it was made largely available, all our older London chroniclers show.
From the termination of the wars of the Roses, until the end of the
17th century, for about 200 years, all the magnates of the metropolis,
the king, the members of the royal family, the great officers of
state, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the noblemen whose mansions had
sprung up amidst trees and gardens on the north bank of the Thames,
the Lord Mayor, the City authorities, the City Companies, and the Inns
of Court, all kept their own or their state barges, rowed by their
own servants, attired in their respective liveries. In addition to
the river conveyances of these functionaries, private boats or barges
were maintained by all whose wealth permitted, or whose convenience
required their use, in the same way as carriages and horses are kept
by them in our day. The Thames, too, was then the principal arena for
the display of pageants. These pageants, however, are now reduced to
one--the Lord Mayor’s show. The remaining state barges are but a few,
viz. the Queen’s, the Lord Mayor’s, and such as are maintained by the
City Companies, and even some of these are rotting to decay.
Mr. Charles Knight says in his “London:”--“In the time of Elizabeth
and the first James, and onward to very recent days, the north bank
of the Thames was studded with the palaces of the nobles; and each
palace had its landing-place, and its private retinue of barges and
wherries; and many a freight of the brave and beautiful has been borne,
amidst song and merriment, from house to house, to join the masque
and the dance; and many a wily statesman, muffled in his cloak, has
glided along unseen in his boat, to some dark conference with his
ambitious neighbour. Upon the river itself, busy as it was, fleets
of swans were ever sailing; and they ventured unmolested into that
channel which is now narrowed by vessels from every region. Paulus
Jovius, who died in 1552, describing the Thames, says: ‘This river
abounds in swans, swimming in flocks, the sight of whom, and their
noise, are vastly agreeable to the fleets that meet them in their
course.’ The only relics of the palatial ‘landing-places’ above alluded
to, which is now to be seen, is the fine arch, or water-gate, the
work of Inigo Jones, at the foot of Buckingham-street. This was an
adornment of the landing-place from York House, once the town abode of
the arch-bishops of that see, but afterwards the property of George
Villiers, duke of Buckingham. In front of this gate, or nearly so,
the Hungerford steam-boat piers are now stationed; and in place of
stately barges, directed by half-a-dozen robust oarsmen, in gorgeous
liveries, approaching the palace, or lying silently in wait there,
we have halfpenny, penny, twopenny, and other steam-boats, hissing,
spluttering, panting, and smoking.”
Moreover, in addition to the state and private barges of the olden
times, there were multitudes of boats and watermen always on hire.
Stow, who was born in 1525, and died at eighty years of age, says
that in his time 40,000 watermen were employed on the Thames. This,
however, is a manifest exaggeration, when we consider the population
of London at that time; still it is an over-estimate common to old
chroniclers, by whom precise statistical knowledge was unattainable.
That Stow represents the number of these men at 40,000, shows plainly
that they were very numerous; and one proof of their great number, down
to the middle of the last century, is, that until one hundred years
ago, the cities of London and Westminster had but one bridge--the old
London-bridge--which was commenced in 1176, completed in thirty-one
years, and after standing 625 years, was pulled down in 1832. The want
of bridges to keep pace with the increase of the population caused the
establishment of numerous ferries. It has been computed, that in 1760
the ferries across the Thames, taking in its course from Richmond to
Greenwich, were twenty-five times as numerous as they are at present.
Westminster-bridge was not finished until 1750; Blackfriars was built
in 1769; Battersea in 1771; Vauxhall in 1816; Waterloo in 1817;
Southwark in 1819; the present London-bridge in 1831; and Hungerford in
1844.