Now, imagine the acreage of several dock-basins crammed, gunwale to
gunwale, with brown and umber and ochre and rust-red steam-trawlers,
tugs, harbour-boats, and yachts once clean and respectable, now dirty
and happy. Throw in fish-steamers, surprise-packets of unknown lines
and indescribable junks, sampans, lorchas, catamarans, and General
Service stink-pontoons filled with indescribable apparatus, manned by
men no dozen of whom seem to talk the same dialect or wear the same
clothes. The mustard-coloured jersey who is cleaning a six-pounder on
a Hull boat clips his words between his teeth and would be happier in
Gaelic. The whitish singlet and grey trousers held up by what is
obviously his soldier brother's spare regimental belt is pure
Lowestoft. The complete blue-serge-and-soot suit passing a wire down a
hatch is Glasgow as far as you can hear him, which is a fair distance,
because he wants something done to the other end of the wire, and the
flat-faced boy who should be attending to it hails from the remoter
Hebrides, and is looking at a girl on the dock-edge. The bow-legged
man in the ulster and green-worsted comforter is a warm Grimsby
skipper, worth several thousands. He and his crew, who are mostly his
own relations, keep themselves to themselves, and save their money.
The pirate with the red beard, barking over the rail at a friend with
gold earrings, comes from Skye. The friend is West Country. The
noticeably insignificant man with the soft and deprecating eye is
skipper and part-owner of the big slashing Iceland trawler on which he
droops like a flower. She is built to almost Western Ocean lines,
carries a little boat-deck aft with tremendous stanchions, has a nose
cocked high against ice and sweeping seas, and resembles a hawk-moth
at rest. The small, sniffing man is reported to be a "holy terror at
sea."