‘Dulcedo loci nos attinet.’
The primitive explorers who came up the Thames in their rough craft
examined the site of what was afterwards to be London, and saw that it
was good. London is where it is because of the river. It is strange
that Londoners should know so little, below bridges, of the river that
made them. The reason, of course, is that the means of seeing it are
very poor. How many Londoners could say how to come upon even a peep
of the lower river within a distance of five miles of London Bridge?
The common impression is that the river is impenetrably walled up by
warehouses, wharfs, docks, and other forbidden ground. A simple way is
to go by steamer when steamers are plying, but the best way is to be
taken on board a sailing barge.
Taine said that the only proper approach to London was by the Thames,
as in no other way could a stranger conceive the meaning of London.
And from the water only is it possible to see properly one of the most
beautiful architectural visions in the world--the magnificent front
of Greenwich Hospital, rising out of the water, as noble a palace as
ever Venice imagined.
If this is the most splendid spectacle of the lower Thames, the most
characteristic sight is that of the sailing barges, of which you may
pass hundreds between London Bridge and the Nore. These are vessels of
which Londoners ought to be very proud indeed; they ought to boast of
them, and take foreigners to see them. But, alas! the very word
‘barge’ is a symbol of ungainliness and sordidness. What beauty of
line these barges really have, from the head of the towering topsail
to the tiny mizzen that lightens the work of steering! There is no
detail that is weak or mean; a barge thriddling (as they say in Essex)
among the shipping of the winding river in a stiff breeze is boldness
perfectly embodied in a human design. The Thames sailing barges are
one of the best schools of seamanship that remain to a world conquered
by steam.
The Thames barge is worthy to be studied for three reasons: her
history, her beauty, and her handiness. She is the largest sailing
craft in the world handled by two men--often by a man and his wife, or
a boy--and that in the busiest water in the world.
One hundred to one hundred and twenty tons is the size of an average
barge nowadays. Seventy-five to eighty feet long by eighteen feet beam
are her measurements. With leeboards up she draws about three feet
when light and six when loaded; when she is loaded, with her
leeboards down, she draws fourteen feet.
For going through the bridges in London or at Rochester, or when
navigating very narrow creeks, she will pick up a third hand known as
a ‘huffler’ (which is no doubt the same word as ‘hoveller’)[1] to lend
a hand.
[1] A hoveller is an unlicensed pilot or boatman, particularly
on the Kentish coast. The word is said to be derived from the
shelters or hovels in which the men lived, but such an easy
derivation is to be mistrusted.
Some explanation must be given of how it is possible for two men to
handle such a craft. In the first place, the largest sail of all, the
mainsail, is set on a sprit, and is never hoisted or lowered, but
remains permanently up. When the barge is not under way this sail is
brailed or gathered up to the mast by ropes, much as the double
curtain at a theatre is drawn and bunched up to each side. The topsail
also remains aloft, and is attached to the topmast by masthoops, and
has an inhaul and a downhaul, as well as sheet and halyard. Thus it
can be controlled from the deck without becoming unmanageable in heavy
weather. It is an especially large sail, and so far from being the
mere auxiliary which a topsail is in yachts, it is one of the most
important parts of the sail plan, and is the best-drawing sail in the
vessel. It requires none of the coaxing and trimming which the
yachtsman practises before he is satisfied with the set of the
little sail which stands in so different a proportion and relation to
his other sails. Often in a strong wind you may see a barge scudding
under topsail and headsails only. The truth is that when a barge
cannot carry her topsail it is not possible to handle her properly.
The foresail, like the mainsail, works on a horse. These and several
other things too technical to be mentioned here enable the barge to be
worked short-handed.
[Illustration: THE SWALE RIVER]
From Land’s End to Ymuiden the Thames barge strays, but her home is
from the Foreland to Orfordness. Between these points, up every tidal
creek of the Medway, Thames, Roach, Crouch, Blackwater, Colne, Hamford
Water, Stour, Orwell, Deben, and Alde, wherever ‘there is water enough
to wet your boots,’ as the barge skipper puts it, one will find a
barge.
She is the genius of that maze of sands and mudbanks and curious tides
which is the Thames Estuary. Among the shoals, swatchways, and
channels, she can get about her business as no other craft can. The
sandbanks, the dread of other vessels, have no terror for her; rather,
she turns them to her use. In heavy weather, when loaded deep, she
finds good shelter behind them; when light, she anchors on their backs
for safety, and there, when the tide has left her, she sits as upright
as a church. Then, too, she is consummate in cheating the tides and
making short cuts, or ‘a short spit of it,’ as bargees say. In this
the sands help her, for the tide is far slacker over the banks than in
the fairway, where her deep-draught sisters remain. While these are
waiting for water she scoots along out of the tide and makes a good
passage in a shoal sea.
What do all the barges carry? What do they not carry? were easier to
answer. They generally start life--a life of at least fifty years if
faithfully built and kept up--with freights of cement and grain, and
such cargoes as would be spoilt in a leaky vessel. From grain and
cement they descend by stages, carrying every conceivable cargo, until
they reach the ultimate indignity of being entrusted only with what is
not seriously damaged by bilge water.
Barges even carry big unwieldy engineering gear, and when the hatches
are not large enough, the long pieces, such as fifty-foot turnable
girders, are placed on deck. The sluices and lock-gates for the great
Nile dam at Assuan were sent gradually by barge from Ipswich to London
for transhipment.
Hay and straw--for carrying which more barges are used than for any
other cargo except cement--must be mentioned separately. After the
holds are full the trusses of hay or straw are piled up on deck lo a
height of twelve to fifteen feet. At a distance the vessel looks like
a haystack adrift on the sea. The deck cargo, secured by special gear,
often weighs as much as forty tons, and stretches almost from one end
of the ship to the other. There is no way from bow to stern except
over the stack by ladders; the mainsail and foresail have to be reefed
up, and a jib is set on a bowsprit; and the mate at the wheel, unable
to see ahead, has to steer from the orders of the skipper, who
‘courses’ the vessel from the top of the stack. To see a ‘stackie’
blindly but accurately turning up a crowded reach of London River
makes one respect the race of bargees for ever. How a ‘stackie’ works
to windward as she does, with the enormous windage presented by the
stack, and with only the reduced canvas above it, is a mystery, and is
admitted to be a mystery by the bargemen themselves. One of them, when
asked for an explanation, made the mystery more profound by these
ingenuous words: ‘Well, sir, I reckon the eddy draught off the
mainsail gits under the lee of the stack and shoves she up to
wind’ard.’
The Thames barge is a direct descendant of the flat-bottomed Dutch
craft, and her prototype is seen in the pictures of the Dutch marine
school of the seventeenth century. Both her sprit and her leeboards
are Dutch; the vangs controlling the sprit are the vangs of the
sixteenth-century Dutch ships; and until 1830 she had still the Dutch
overhanging bow, as may be seen in the drawings of E. W. Cooke. The
development of her--the practical nautical knowledge applied to her
rigging and gear--is British, like the invincible nautical aplomb of
her crew.
Those who have watched the annual race of the Thames barges in a
strong breeze have seen the perfection of motion and colour in the
smaller vessels of commerce. The writer, when first he saw this race
and beheld a brand-new barge heeling over in a wind which was as much
as she could stand, glistening blackly from stem to stern except where
the line of vivid green ran round her bulwark (a touch of genius, that
green), with her red-brown sails as smooth and taut as a new dogskin
glove, and her crew in red woollen caps in honour of the occasion,
exclaimed that this was not a barge, but a yacht.
A barge never is, or could be, anything but graceful. The sheer of her
hull, her spars and rigging, the many shades of red in her great
tanned sails, the splendid curves of them when, full of wind, they
belly out as she bowls along, entrance the eye. Whatever changes come,
we shall have a record of the Thames barge of to-day in the accurate
pictures of Mr. W. L. Wyllie. He has caught her drifting in a calm,
the reflection of her ruddy sails rippling from her; snugged down to a
gale, her sails taut and full, and wet and shining with spray; running
before the wind; thrashing to windward with topsail rucked to meet a
squall; at anchor; berthed. Loaded deep or sailing light; with
towering stacks of hay; creeping up a gut; sailing on blue seas
beneath blue skies; or shaving the countless craft as she tacks
through the haze and smoke of a London reach, she is always beautiful.
Of course the bargees pay their toll of lives like other sailors. They
are not always in the quiet waters of liquid reflections that seem to
make their vessels meet subjects for a Vandevelde picture. Many
stories of wreck, suffering, and endurance might be told, but one will
suffice--a true narrative of events. The barge _The Sisters_, laden
with barley screenings, left Felixstowe dock for the Medway one Friday
morning. She called at Burnham-on-Crouch, and on the following Friday
afternoon was between the Maplin Sands and the Mouse Lightship, when a
south-west gale arose with extraordinary suddenness. Before sail could
be shortened the topsail and jib were blown away. The foresail sheet
broke, and the sail slatted itself into several pieces before a
remnant could be secured. Under the mainsail and the remaining portion
of the foresail the skipper and his mate steered for Whitstable. Then
the steering-chain broke, and nothing could be done but let go the
anchor. They were then in the four-fathom channel, about
three-quarters of a mile inside the West Oaze Buoy.
The seas swept the barge from end to end. Darkness fell, and for an
hour the skipper burnt flares, while his mate stood by the boat ready
to cast it off from the cleat in an emergency. The emergency came
before there was a sign of approaching rescue. The barge suddenly
plunged head first and disappeared. The mate, with the instinct of
experience, cast off the painter of the boat as the deck went down
beneath his feet. Both men went under water, but the boat was jerked
forwards from her position astern as the painter released itself, and
the men came up to find the dinghy between them. It was a miracle, but
so it happened. They grabbed hold of her before she could be swept
away, climbed in, and began to bail out the water. With one oar over
the leeside and the other in the sculling-hole they made for the Mouse
Lightship. ‘If we miss that,’ said the skipper, ‘God knows where we
shall go!’ For four hours they struggled towards the Mouse light,
although they could not always see it, and eventually came within
hailing distance. They shouted again and again, but the crew of the
lightship, though they heard them, could not at first see them. At
last the boat came near enough for a line to be thrown across it. The
boat was hauled alongside and the men were drawn up into safety,
‘eaten up with cramp,’ as the skipper said, and numb with exhaustion
and exposure. At the same moment the boat, which was half-full of
water, broke away and disappeared.
Perhaps the best time to see a barge is while deep laden, she beats
to windward up Sea Reach, on a day when large clouds career across the
sky, sweeping the water with shadows, as the squalls boom down the
reach, and the wind, fighting the tide, kicks up a fierce short sea.
Then, as the fishermen say, the tideway is ‘all of a paffle.’ As the
barge comes towards you, heeling slightly (for barges never heel far),
you can see her bluff bows crashing through the seas and flinging the
spray far up the streaming foresail. It bursts with the rattle of shot
on the canvas. You can see the anchor on the dripping bows dip and
appear as sea after sea thuds over it, and the lee rigging dragging
through the smother of foam that races along the decks and cascades
off aft to join the frothy tumult astern. You can see the weather
rigging as taut as fiddle-strings against the sky. Now she is coming
about! The wheel spins round as the skipper puts the helm down, and
the vessel shoots into the wind. She straightens up as a sprinter
relaxes after an effort. The sails slat furiously; the air is filled
with a sound as of the cracking of great whips; the sprit, swayed by
the flacking sails, swings giddily from side to side; the mainsheet
blocks rage on the horse. Then the foresail fills, the head of the
barge pays off, and as the mate lets go the bowline the stay-sail
slams to leeward with the report of a gun. The mainsail and topsail
give a last shake, then fill with wind and fall asleep as the vessel
steadies on her course and points for the Kentish shore. As she heels
to port she lifts her gleaming side and trails her free leeboard as a
bird might stretch a tired wing. She means to fetch the Chapman light
next tack.
[Illustration: IN SEA REACH]
A fleet of barges shaking out their sails at the turn of the tide and
moving off in unison like a flock of sea-birds is a picture that never
leaves the mind. And darkness does not stop the bargeman even in the
most crowded reaches so long as the tide serves. Every yachtsman
accustomed to sail in the mouth of the Thames has in memory the
spectral passing of a barge at night. She grows gradually out of the
blackness. There is the gleam of her side light, the trickling sound
of the wave under her forefoot, the towering mass of sombre canvas
against the sky, the faint gleam of the binnacle lamp on the dark
figure by the wheel, the little mizzen sail right aft blotting out for
a moment the lights on the far shore, and the splash-splash of the
dinghy towing astern. There she goes, and if the fair wind holds she
will be in London by daybreak.