yellow light gives magnitude and a vagueness of outline to the leagues
of water-side structures, and an obscurity to the horizon in which the
monuments of industry fade with a simulation of immensity that cheats
the senses into a belief of immeasurable remoteness. The great ships are
in the docks far down the river; but though the steamers which lie in
tiers upon tiers in the Pool, and far beyond the limits of that reach,
are for the most part but of middle size, yet the mind loses all sense
of their individual dimensions in the overwhelming impression produced
by their collective tonnage. One journey through this magnificent
stretch of stream is a large education. The flags of a score of
nationalities colour the sombre heavens with their green and blue and
yellow and white folds. All the countries in the world appear to pass in
a kind of review as the ear catches the hundred tongues, and the eye the
hundred faces, and the nostrils the hundred scents wafted from the holds
of ships whose greyish spars seem yet to retain the heat of the
equatorial sun, and whose sides are fretted with the wash of the surges
of the great oceans.
I once took fourpennyworth of travel aboard a Woolwich steamer, for the
sake of renewing some old recollections. I will not say that a better
kind of steamer would not have made the voyage more comfortable. The
dexterous and watchful skipper, who stood upon the bridge carrying his
freight of human lives through the intricacies of blundering barges and
the bewilderment of swinging ships and capricious tugs, by light motions
of his arm and soft asides to the boy, who furnished them with
ear-piercing echoes, seemed to me to deserve a stouter ship. The
funnel-casing had much the appearance of an aged saucepan whose bottom
has been burnt to the thinness of a sailor’s shirt. I thought to myself,
“Suppose we should tip some of these old barges our stem by mistake?
Assuredly we should crumple up forward like a sponge-cake; and how
should we manage to save our lives?”
I looked everywhere, but there was not so much as an old cork to pitch
overboard in case of accident. Even the seats, rotten as the hinges
were, were not likely to come away in a hurry. But there was too much to
be seen to permit me to bother over the crazy, quivering, admirably
handled, and most dangerous old machine that was running us from pier to
pier against a strong flood tide. Once clear of London Bridge we were in
a complete lane formed by moored or anchored steamers. They were very
much alike--little beauty amongst them; some of them well-decked, with
their gangways out, showing the covering-board close to the water, and
making the structures, with their tall afterdecks and topgallant
forecastles, look as if they were in course of being built, instead of
newly arrived from voyages long and short. But all such characteristics
were lost in the thoughts of the immense mass of tonnage here submitted.
Where did it end? where would the last of these steamers be lying? To
right and left they stretched, with lighters alongside, steam winches
rattling, the vapour of donkey engines blowing out in volumes, some in
semi-discharged state, with a heavy list to port or starboard, with
frequent alternations of the flags of Denmark, Sweden, France, the
Netherlands--I know not what other bunting--amid which our own red
ensign counted as twenty to one.
The whole commerce of the world seemed to be here, but in truth the
Thames’ show of it was only just begun. On either hand, trembling in the
distance, in the vacant places between the buildings, could be caught
the hairlike outlines of the masts and rigging of ships, with their
house-flags twinkling in tiny spots of colour; and still as the fleets
of steamers held us in their interminable lane, did there heave up out
of the remote sky more lines and threads and tapering tremulous heights
of shipping. But the wealth of industry and the prodigious achievements
of British commerce were not more noticeable in the vast assemblage of
steam and sailing vessels than in such minute particulars as the little
panting screw-tug with a chain of deeply-laden coal barges in her wake,
every ebony mound embellished with a recumbent figure in shirt-sleeves,
a sooty pipe in his mouth, and his face to the sky. The familiar Thames
wherry was also here to add its touch of interest to the wonderful
scene--the old waterman resting on his oars, and squinting over his
shoulder at the passing tug, in whose tumble, as she goes by, the little
boat begins to flounder, while the tall hat of the rower shortens and
enlarges with the reeling of the wherry like an optical illusion.
As the lines of steamers dwindle the river widens; and when we come to
the bend of a long reach, it opens into a metal-coloured surface of
gleaming water trembling with the speeding of its own rushing, though it
retains polish enough to serve as a mirror, and to hold under each
vessel the dark, inverted shadow of a phantom ship. Here we come across
a long, low, iron four-masted craft, with painted ports. Even a sailor
who has never been shipmate with more than three masts at a time might
gaze with something of astonishment at the complex tracery that crowds
the air over that immensely long and narrow hull, and wonder how long
it would take a man to find out where all those ropes lead. It is not
enough that there are four masts; there must be double topgallant yards
too, making eight sets of braces where in former times three were found
enough. But these are progressive days in ship-building. By-and-by we
shall have five-masted full-rigged sailing ships, no doubt, with new
Board of Trade rules for the examination of candidates in
square-rigging. Let us hope that there will be also rules for the proper
manning of such craft; for it struck me, as I looked at that big
four-masted ship, that if her complement is assessed on the basis of her
tonnage, without reference to the number of cloths she spreads, it must
go desperately hard with the cook and the butcher’s mate in a gale of
wind.
Father Thames, once a god, might more fitly be termed a goddess, under
the title of Commerce; for this assuredly is the presiding spirit. It
quickens with life the smallest and craziest structure by the
water-side; the very ebb and flow of the noble stream seem obedient to
its laws, and its shadow is in the air and upon the face of the waters.
I cannot imagine any one of those skippers of the Woolwich and Greenwich
steamboats, who pass up and down the river some scores of times in the
course of a week, so intimately acquainted with the wharves and
warehouses and the uncountable features of industry which crowd the bank
for miles and miles as not to behold something new, something he has
never taken close notice of before, every time he directs his gaze with
attention to the shore on either hand. The billy-boys and barges
squattering like mudbanks hard against the slimy piles; the giant cranes
poising tons’ weight of burden in the air; the vast warehouses, with the
long and powerful steamships snugged securely alongside them; the
endless procession of wharfage teeming with hurrying figures full of
business--these and countless other features of the scene furnish the
apparently limitless lines of steamers and other craft with such a
background as completes the deep and stirring significance of their
multifarious aspect. It is a vast picture of motion--of great vessels
coming, of great vessels going, of lighters swirling up swiftly with the
tide broadside on, of tugs speeding in quest of towage jobs, of
passenger steamers driving through the steel-coloured current with a
glancing of silver at their keen stems and a whirl of snow sluicing in a
broad torrent from under their counters. Now it is a big ocean
steamship, of some three or four thousand tons, leisurely making for
Gravesend, as trim as a man-of-war to the eye, her sides and funnel
spotless, her scuttles twinkling like diamonds in her black length as
they catch the sparkle of the passing water; whilst in vivid contrast
there comes towing past her a full-rigged ship fresh from some
Antipodean port, her brave hull covered with the scars of the conflicts
she has waged with distant seas, her canvas carelessly rolled up on the
yards, her rigging slack, and a crowd of men forward and aft engaged in
pointing out one to another the familiar scenes ashore.
Ay, pathos is not wanting even amid so prosaic a scene of commerce as
the reaches of our noble river exhibit. You find it to a degree
proportioned to your powers of perception and realization in some such
an object, for instance, as that ship yonder, newly warped out from one
of the docks and all ready to begin her voyage. The hearty shouts which
rise from her decks, the active little figures aloft, the bustle and
business in her, cannot impair the pregnant suggestiveness of her
leave-taking. You think of the people aboard who have said “Good-bye”
to their friends, perhaps for ever. Poor Jack, sitting astride on the
fore-topgallant yardarm, catches hold of the lift, whilst he turns his
head in the direction of where he reckons Stepney or Poplar lies, and,
as he thinks of his wife or sweetheart and the perplexities of the new
allotment notes, he discharges a stream of tobacco juice into the air,
and, with a melancholy countenance, wipes his mouth with the back of his
hand and goes on with his job. There may be plenty of bustle and loud
calls, but there is bound to be a share of sorrow too. It is not long
since the skipper took his wife to his heart, and his head is full of
her and the youngsters as he paces the quarter-deck, sometimes pausing
to peep over the side at the cluster of boats round the gangway ladder,
and sometimes singing out to the mate, who has his hands full forward.
Indeed, it is impossible to look at an outward-bound ship without
sympathy and a kind of respect that comes near to being reverence in
some minds. What will be her fortune? you think. She holds herself
bravely on the bosom of the calm river; the current wrinkles itself
sharply against her solid bows, and breaks away along her side in a
cadence like the tinkling of bells. Who can doubt that tears are being
shed in her darksome interior? It is hard to leave the old home. The
glimpse of the church spire through the open scuttle brings up memories
which tighten the throat. When shall the next meeting be? and when time
brings it about, will not absent faces and a change in the spirit of old
associations make it sadder than this going is? Pray God that no harm
befall the stout ship! As you sweep past her your hearty hope is that
prosperous winds may attend her, and that in the new country fortune and
happiness await those whose sad eyes dwell fixedly on the land that will
be far astern of them before the sun has thrice sunk beyond the deep.
It may be that thoughts of this kind are suggested more by sailing than
by steam ships, because the existence of the propeller does to a large
extent mitigate the bitterness of the contemplation of distance. But let
no in-shore dweller flatter himself that the sailing vessel is very
nearly extinct. She may have one leg in the grave, but the other seems
to me still to possess an astonishing amount of animation. The hulls of
the vessels in the docks on the Blackwall side of the river are not, for
the most past, visible from the water; but, unhappily for steamers,
there is not the least difficulty in telling, by the look of spars
bristling out of a hidden dock, which are steamships there and which are
sailing vessels. Some of these days, perhaps, when the right kind of
moral shall have been drawn from broken propeller shafts and twisted
rudder-heads, the difficulty of distinguishing between the rig of a
sailing ship and the rig of a steamer may prove very much more
considerable than it now is; but, as this matter is at present ordered,
the towering masts, the immensely square yards, should leave even a
ploughman in no doubt as to the character of the vessels to which they
belong.
The number of sailing ships which crowd the docks on either side the
river must prove a real surprise to people who believe that it is all
steam nowadays. Let ancient mariners be consoled by this assurance:
there is plenty of steam indeed, but there is a deal of canvas too, so
that all Jack’s work does not lie in the bunkers yet, and there must
still be a large demand for seamanship of the old sort.
I am not sure that the wonder of the river does not owe quite as much to
the sailing ships as the steamers. The tall spars, the magnificent
spread of yards, the black lines of shrouds, the beautiful tracery of
intersecting running gear, added to the shapely hulls which support
these towering fabrics of hemp and steel and wood, make a most noble and
impressive sight, and give, so to speak, a final touch to the teeming,
opulent, commercial inspirations of the great river. Lower and lower yet
down the grand old stream the spirit of enterprise is settling, and the
day is not far distant when the projected dockyards at Tilbury will
veritably transform the quaint old town of Gravesend into the sea-gate
of London. It is almost startling to contemplate that time. One thinks
of Gravesend now as a mere break in the departure from the Thames. Will
the chain of docks end at Tilbury? At Gravesend, apparently, they are
thinking otherwise! and reckoning--somewhat against their own
hopes--that if the Tilbury Docks people play at leapfrog with the Albert
Dock proprietors, the latter company will repay the compliment and land
themselves some distance lower down yet. The limits of the Port of
London, however, will, I believe, be reached by within a quarter of a
mile by the promoters of the Tilbury Dock undertaking,[D] so that one
cannot say in this case that there is room enough for all.
Unquestionably the docks which are nearest the sea will be the docks
best liked; and owners will profit at the expense of tug-masters and
pilots.
Meanwhile Gravesend may be complimented on its prospects. But what do
the watermen think? They are loud just now in their complaints of the
steam ferries. They say that they are not allowed to board the ocean
steamers, even to put Gravesend passengers ashore. Everybody must go to
Tilbury first. How much of their vocation will be left when the new
docks are opened? But assuredly if some old interests vanish, many new
interests will start into life under the magic wand of the harlequin
Progress. One may look for a complete transformation of the low, flat,
treeless shore of Tilbury Ness and an ever-increasing clustering of
industries along the banks of those reaches whose skirts now mainly
consist of mud. Our fourpenny voyage will have to be extended if we are
to compass all the wonders of our river below bridges. The New Zealander
who is to muse over the ruins of St. Paul’s may come as soon as he
likes, only it is quite certain that his meditations will not be excited
by any spectacle of decay. Life and industry were never more active on
the Thames than now--enterprise never more bold, speculation never more
prophetic. The time is not remote when Gravesend, which I may say for
centuries has been thought of as a port of call, will be connected with
London by lines of edifices and piers and wharfs, as Blackwall is
connected, and future passengers by the little Thames steamboats--which,
it is to be earnestly hoped, in the good time coming will be
considerably more river-worthy than they now appear to be--will be
conveyed past a continuous panorama of commercial life and marine
interests to limits which will make Gravesend and the opposite shore the
actual sea-gate of the Port of London; in other words, the entrance to a
scene of civilization comparable to nothing that we can imagine even by
the building up of fancy from the wondrous facts at present submitted to
any man bold enough to adventure upon a fourpenny voyage down the
Thames.
_POOR JACK._
I climbed the steep hill that runs from the Belvedere railway-station,
pausing now and again for breath and to glance at the summer beauty of
the distant green land through which the river toiled, like a stream of
quicksilver sluggishly rolling, and presently, passing through a
gateway, found myself in a fine park-like stretch of grounds, shaded by
a multitude of tall far-branching trees, in the midst of which, and upon
the highest point of the billowy soil, stood a spacious and exceedingly
handsome mansion. There were circular seats affixed to many of the
trees, and upon them I noticed several bent and aged figures leaning
their breasts upon stout walking-sticks, and holding themselves in very
quiet postures. Here and there, walking to and fro near the house or
upon the grass under the trees, were similar figures, all of them bowed
by old age, though some of them paced the turf with a certain nimbleness
of tread. They were dressed in pilot-cloth trousers and sleeved
waistcoats, with brass buttons, and ancient as these men were, yet it
was wonderful to observe, even where decrepitude was at its height, how
the old sea-swing and lurching gait of the sailor lived in their
hobbling and determined their calling, as though the word “seaman” had
been branded upon every man’s forehead. I stood looking at them, and at
the house and at the great trees, beyond which the distant prospect was
shining under the high sun, for many minutes before advancing. The sense
of repose conveyed to me by the shadows of the trees, the restful shapes
of cattle upon the slopes beyond the mansion, the motionless postures of
the old men seated, and the movements of the few figures who were
walking, cannot be expressed in words. I listened. There was no note of
human life in the air; no sound broke the fragrant summer stillness but
the piping of birds in the trees, the humming of bees and flies, the
silken rustling of leaves. The landscape was like a painted picture,
save where here and there, upon the far-off shining silver of the river,
a vessel slowly gliding broke the still scene with a fugitive interest.
I walked to the house and entered the spacious hall, and as I did so, a
single stroke on a bell to denote that it was half an hour after noon
resounded through the building. A number of ancient men hung about this
entrance, and I examined them curiously, for of all the transformations
which old age works in the human countenance I never beheld stranger
examples than were submitted by many of these venerable seamen. Let me
own to a feeling of positive awe in my inspection, for there was no face
but that time had invested it with a kind of sanctity. “How old are you,
my man?” I said to one of them. He turned his lustreless eyes upon me
and bent his ear to my mouth. I repeated the question, and he answered
that he was ninety-three. Years had so honeycombed his face that such
likeness of humanity as there was in it appealed to the eye rather as a
fantasy than as a real thing. A sailor is usually an old man at fifty,
thanks to exposure, to hardship, and to the food he has to live on. Many
of these men had used the sea for above half a century; some of them
were drawing near to a hundred years of age; little wonder, therefore,
that they should be mere dim and feeble vestiges of creation, and that
vitality in conformations so decayed should excite the awe and reverence
of those who explore the vague and crumbling features, and behold the
immortal spirit struggling amid lineaments which have the formlessness
of the face of a statue dug from the sand which entombs an ancient city.
I turned my eyes from these old men to the hall in which I stood. Pretty
columns of malachite supported the roof; woodwork and ceiling were
lavishly decorated; marine hints helpful to the prejudices of the
decayed mariners were not wanting in the shape of models of full-rigged
ships--men-of-war and East Indiamen of the olden time; through the door
I could see the green grass sloping away into a spacious lawn; and the
warm air, full of sunshine, gushed in sweet with the smell of clover and
wild flowers.
In a few minutes I was joined by the house-governor, himself a skipper,
and fresh from the command of a sailing-ship-a genial, hearty gentleman,
and the fittest person in the world for the command of such a
quarter-deck as this.
“The old men will be going to dinner at one o’clock,” he said; would I
like to see them at their meal? I answered “Yes;” so we stood in the
door of a long, handsome room, fitted with tables and benches, and
watched the aged seamen come in one by one, hobbling on their sticks,
many of them talking to themselves.
“Have you any shipmasters among these men?” I inquired. “Several,”
answered the house-governor; and he instantly called out a name. An old
man approached us slowly; he was bald, with a very finely-shaped head
and a long grey beard, and stood deferentially before us, his hands
clasped, waiting to be addressed.
“This man had command of vessels for many years,” said the
house-governor.
I looked at the poor old creature, and received one of the gentlest,
saddest smiles I ever saw on a man’s face. I asked him how it was that
he came to need the charity of this institution in his old age.
“I was in the General Steam Navigation Company’s service, sir, for many
years, and had charge of vessels running to Boulogne. But my memory
began to fail me; I was attacked with dizziness, and had to give up. I
had saved some money, and took a little hotel at Boulogne, on the Quay.
I could not make it answer, and, being ruined and an old man, sir, I had
to come here.”
He broke down at this, his eyes filled with tears, and he turned his
back upon me. I waited a little, and then, taking his arm, I asked him
if he was happy in this house. Yes, he said, he was quite happy.
“You may talk to me without fear,” I continued; “I am here to learn the
truth and to speak it. Do they feed you well?”
“Very well, sir.”
“Have you no complaints to make?”
“None, sir.”
“You think this institution a good and honest charity?”
“God knows what we should do without it,” he exclaimed, looking round at
the old men who were taking their seats at the dinner-tables. Here the
house-governor brought up some other aged men, whom he introduced as
shipmasters. One of them was a North Shields captain, eighty years of
age; he supported himself on two sticks, was a little, white-faced,
ancient creature, with strange silver hair, and he spoke with a wistful
expression of countenance. He had been seized with paralysis by “farling
doon” the main hatch of his vessel. He told me in his rich, plaintive,
North-country brogue, how the doctor had measured his leg and thigh with
a tape--for some purpose I could not clearly understand--and how the
accident had flung him upon the world, a beggar, and forced him to take
a refuge in this institution. Was he happy? Ay, it was a man’s own fault
if he wasn’t happy here. He was grateful to God for the care taken of
him. At eighty a man was “na’ langer a laddie,” and with a bright old
laugh he hobbled hungrily towards one of the dinner-tables.
In a few moments two bells were struck, signifying one o’clock, and all
hands being seated, I followed the house-governor to the bottom of the
room to have a look at the tables before the old men fell-to. The dinner
consisted of salt fish, butter, potatoes, and plain suet pudding.
“This is Tuesday’s fare,” said the house-governor. “On Sundays they get
boiled beef, potatoes, and plum pudding; on Mondays, vegetable soup,
boiled mutton, and vegetables at discretion; on Tuesdays, what you see;
on Wednesdays, soup, boiled beef, and potatoes; on Thursdays, roast
mutton, vegetables, and bread and cheese; on Fridays, salt pork, pea
soup, and calavances; and on Saturdays, soup and boulli--not soap and
bullion, as Jack says, one onion to a gallon of water--but a very good
preserved soup, with potatoes or rice and bread-and-cheese. Taste this
fish.”