‘Ships are but boards, sailors but men; there be land-rats and
water-rats, land-thieves and water-thieves.’
The next thing that happened was that we received an offer of £375 for
our cottage. After an attempt to ‘raise the buyer one’--an attempt
that would have been more persistent had our desire to become
barge-owners been less ardent--we accepted the offer. We ought to have
got more, but as the barge market was flat we salved our consciences
on the principle that what you lose on the swings you gain on the
roundabouts.
We entered the barge market as buyers. It is impossible to ‘recapture
the first fine careless rapture’ of those days. In every 90-ton barge
we looked on we saw the possible outer walls of our future home. The
arrival of the post had a new significance, for we had made known far
and wide the fact that we were serious buyers. We turned over our
letters on the breakfast-table every morning like merchants who should
say, ‘What news from the Rialto?’
The first barges we heard of were, according to the advertisement, the
‘three sound and well-found sailing barges, the _Susan_, the _Ethel_,
and the _Providence_, of 44 tons net register.’ Each of these was
about 90 tons gross register, and at that moment of optimism the
chances seemed at least three to one that one of them would suit us.
Let it be said here that the net registered tonnage of barges is a
conventional symbol. Whether a barge carries 100 or 120 tons, the net
tonnage is always 44 and so many hundredths--often over ninety
hundredths. If by any miscalculation in building she works out at 45
tons or more, a sail-locker or some other locker is enlarged to reduce
her tonnage, for vessels of 45 tons net register and upwards have to
pay port dues in London.
It is, of course, the ambition of every owner, whether of a 5-ton
yacht or the _Leviathan_, to get his net registered tonnage as low as
possible, so as to minimize his port and light dues. One well-known
yachtsman who was having his yacht registered kindly assisted the
surveyor by holding one end of the measuring tape. In dark corners the
yachtsman could hold the tape as he pleased, but in more open places
the surveyor’s eye was upon him. The result was curious; the yacht
turned out to have more beam right aft than amidships. ‘She’s a varra
funny shaped boat,’ said the surveyor doubtfully. Luckily his dinner
was waiting for him, and he did not care to remeasure a yacht about
the precise tonnage of which no one would ever trouble himself.
We hurried off to consult Elijah Wadely about the _Susan_, the
_Ethel_, and the _Providence_.
‘Not a one o’ they ’on’t suit yaou, sir,’ said Lijah. ‘That little
ould _Susan_ was most tore out years ago--donkeys years ago. And that
ould _Ethel_--- well, she’s only got one fault.’
‘What’s that?’
‘She were built too soon,’ chuckled Lijah. ‘And that ould _Providence_
is abaout the slowest bit o’ wood ever put on the water. No, no, sir;
none o’ they ’on’t do.’
We were disappointed, of course, but not long afterwards we heard of
another barge laid up near a neighbouring town, and went to see her.
She had been tarred recently and looked fairly well, but we did not
trust the owner. Not long before he had tried to sell us an old punt
(also freshly done up) for twenty-five shillings--a punt which we
discovered had been given to him for a pint of beer. We looked over
the barge accompanied by the owner, who rather elaborately pointed out
defects, which he knew, and we knew, were unimportant, in a breezy and
open manner, as one trying to impress us with his candour.
When the Mate was out of hearing he used endearing and obscene
language about the barge, as one who should say, ‘Now you know the
worst of her and of me.’ However, the memory of the punt, and what
Falstaff describes in Prince Hal’s eyes as ‘a certain hang-dog look,’
convinced us that the barge would never stand a survey, and we learned
afterwards that she was as rotten as a pear below the water-line.
We had hardly returned from this inspection when we heard of three
more barges to be sold. They were engaged in carrying cement to London
and bringing back anything they could get, and at that moment were
lying off Southwark.
We went at once to London. The next day we visited the _Elizabeth_,
one of the barges, and were invited into the cabin by the skipper and
his wife--not any of our Essex folk, worse luck. I began to make use
of some of the knowledge I had acquired. In this I was checked by the
lady of the barge, who said, ‘It seems to me, mister, yer wants to
know something, and if yer wants us to speak yer ought to pay yer
footing.’
I sent for a bottle of gin, already painfully recognizing that looking
at barges in our country was one thing, and in London another. The
skipper and his wife appeared to be thirsty souls, for soundings in
the bottle fell rapidly. We discussed the weather and things generally
while I took stock of these people, who were to me a new and
disagreeable type. I wondered whether they would be more likely to
speak the truth before they finished the gin--which they seemed likely
to do--or afterwards. Meanwhile I looked round me.
The _Elizabeth_ had a small cabin and no ventilation worth mentioning,
and as the atmosphere grew thicker, in self-defence I lit my pipe.
Then I tried again.
‘Well, yer see, mister, it’s this ’ere way. You wants to buy the
barge, and if I says she’s all right you buys ’er, and I lose my job;
and if I says she ain’t all right I gits into trouble with my guvnor.’
‘Quite so,’ I said, ‘but the survey will show whether she is sound or
not, and I want to save the expense of having a survey at all if she
isn’t sound. If I do have her surveyed and she is sound your owner
will sell her anyhow. So you may just as well tell me.’
‘D’yer mind saying all that over again?’ remarked the skipper.
I did so, and the pair helped themselves to gin once more. ‘What I
says is this,’ said the lady, ‘this is very fine gin and a very fine
barge.’
‘Yus, the gin’s all right, and so’s the barge,’ said the skipper,
adopting the brilliant formula. ‘I can’t say fairer’n that, can I?’
The situation was becoming hopeless and my anger was rising, so I said
curtly, dropping diplomacy, ‘What I want to know is, does she leak, is
she sound, what has she been carrying, where has she been trading
to?’
“Can’t say, mister. This’s our first trip in ’er,” said the skipper.
“Fine gin and fine barge,” repeated the woman.
We fled.
The second barge we visited was a good-looking craft, built for some
special work, but she lacked the depth in her hold which we required
for our furniture.
The third barge, the _Will Arding_, lay off deep-loaded in the fairway
waiting for the tide to berth. The skipper was not on board, but a
longshoreman in search of a drink gave me a list of public-houses
where he might be found.
At the first three public-houses knots of grimy mariners had either
just seen George or were expecting him every minute, and if I would
wait one of them would find him. At the fourth public-house the same
offer was made, and in despair I accepted it.
It required more moral courage than I possessed to wait with thirsty
sailors, their mugs ostentatiously empty, without ordering drinks all
round; yet, as I expected, the huntsman returned in a few minutes
puffing and blowing--which physical distress was instantaneously cured
by sixpence--to say that George was nowhere to be found.
With a gambler’s throw, I tried one public-house not on my list, and
George was not there; but as usual there were those who knew where to
find him if the gentleman would wait.
I never met George, and, judging by his friends, I did not want to;
though, to be just, he might have been blamelessly at home all this
time with his family. And there, as a matter of fact, he very likely
was, for I learned later, what everyone else knew and I might have
suspected, that he had been paid off, as this was the _Will Arding’s_
last trip before being sold.
We wandered back to the waterside and stood gazing at the slimy
foreshore, the barges and lighters driving up on the muddy tide, the
tugs fussing up and down, their bow-waves making the only specks of
white in the gloomy scene, the bleak sooty warehouses, and the wharfs
with their cranes like long black arms waving against the sky. We were
declining rapidly into depression, when I saw emerging from the shadow
of the bridge a stackie in charge of a tug.
How clean and dainty she looked, like a fresh country maid marketing
in a slum! Her fragrant stack of hay brought to us a whiff of the
country whence she had come, and a vision of great stretches of
marshland dotted with cattle, and hayricks sheltered behind sea-walls
waiting for red-sailed barges to take them away.
The tug slackened speed; the stack-barge was being dropped. She seemed
familiar, and as she came nearer I saw her name, the _Annie_. Joe
Applegate, the skipper, a trusted friend of ours, was at the wheel.
How pleased I was now that I had spent those fruitless half-hours
looking for George!
“Ain’t that a fair masterpiece a seein’ yaou here, sir!” shouted Joe
in good Essex that raised our spirits like a bar of cheerful music.
“And haow’s them little ould booeys?”
He had come with 70 tons of hay for the London County Council horses.
We were doubly glad to look on his honest face when he came on shore
and told us that he knew the _Will Arding_ well and had traded to this
wharf for years.
“Yes, yes, sir; knaowed her these twenty years. She belongs to a
friend of my guvnor’s, and were built by ’is father at Sittingbourne,
and ’as allus been well kep’ up by ’is son. She’d be gettin’ on for
forty, I reckon, and a course she ain’t same as a new barge, but
she’ll last your lifetime if you’re on’y goin’ to live in she and goo
a pugglin’ abaout on her same as summer-time and that. She’ll ’ave a
cargo of cement aboard naow--90 to 95 tons she mostly carry, and I
ain’t never heard of ’er spoiling a bag yet. She’s got a good
constitution, she ’as, but none the more for that yaou can watch she
unloaded to-morrer if yaou’ve a mind to, and ef she suits yaour
purpose ave ’er surveyed arterwards.”
The Mate asked about her character.
“She ain’t never bin in trouble but once, that I knaows on, and
then she were run into by a ketch and got three timbers bruk on ’er
port bow. No, no, sir; there ain’t nawthen agin that little ould
thing.”
[Illustration: HAULING A BARGE TO HER BERTH]
We seemed to be on the right tack at last. Having learned what more we
could, we prepared to come to grips with the owner.