With the sensation that I had survived into a strange and a hostile era
that had nothing to do with me, for its affairs were not mine, I was
inside a submarine, during the War, talking to her commander. He was
unravelling for me the shining complexity of his "box of tricks," as he
called his ship. He was sardonic (there was no doubt he was master of
the brute he so lightly villified), and he was blithe, and he
illustrated his scientific monologue with stories of his own
experiences in the Heligoland Bight. These, to me, were like the
bedevilments of those dreams from which we groan to awake, but cannot.
The curious doings of this new age, I thought as I listened to him,
would have just the same interest for me as the relics of an extinct
race of men, except for the urgent remembrance that one of the
monstrous accidents this child knows of might happen now. That made an
acute difference. This was not nightmare, nor ridiculous romance, but
actuality. And as I looked at this mocking youngster, I saw he was
like the men of that group on the _Queen Mary_ who were similarly
mocking, for my benefit, but a few weeks before, their expert share in
forwarding the work we had given them in this new age; and then where
were they? Ships I knew, but not such ships as these, nor such work.
Another officer joined us, an older man, and said this to him was
strange navigation. He was a merchant seaman. He had served his time
in sailing ships. I asked him to name some of them, having the feeling
that I could get back to the time I knew if I could but hail the ghost,
with another survivor from the past, of one of those forgotten ships.
"Well," he replied, "there was the _Cutty Sark_."
If he had said the _Golden Hind_ I should not have been more
astonished. In a sense, it was the same thing. The _Cutty Sark_ was
in the direct line with the Elizabethan ships, but at the end. That
era, though it closed so recently, was already as far as a vague
memory. The new sea engines had come, and here we were with them,
puzzled and embarrassed, having lost our reasonable friends. I told
him I had known the _Cutty Sark_, and had seen that master of hers--a
character who went about Poplar in a Glengarry cap--who gave one of her
masts (the mizzen, I think) a golden rooster, after he had driven her
from Sydney Heads to the Channel to break the record--Captain Woodget.
His men said it was like living in a glass house.
I recalled to him that once, when my business was concerned with bills
of lading and freight accounts, I was advised to ship four hundred
cases to Sydney, New South Wales; and one-half of that consignment, my
instructions ran, was to arrive a month before the other. The first
lot went in a modern steel barque, the _Cairnbulg_. ("I have seen
her," said this submarine officer). More than a fortnight later, being
too young to remember that the little _Cutty Sark_ had been one of the
China tea clippers, I shipped the last half of the consignment in her.
But she disordered all the careful plans of the consignees. She got in
a fortnight ahead of the _Cairnbulg_.
The effect of that casual recollection on the submarine officer was
distinctly unwarlike. This memory, and not his present work, might
have been the real thing. He knew Woodget, the man in the Glengarry.
He wanted to know more; ever so much more. He mentioned other ships
and masters, to induce me. I got the idea that he would let his mind,
at least, escape into that time, if only I would help him to let it go.
But there was that potent and silent enigma about us. . . .
No such escape for him. We have fashioned other ships, and must use
them. What we have conjured up compels us to live with it. But when
you do not go to sea you may have what ships you like. There is some
but not much interest in the reappearance in the newspapers of the
sailing lists; a few of the old names appear again, though new ships
bear them. But late at night, when a westerly wind with rain turns for
me a neighbouring yew tree into an invisible surge, then it is the
fortune of one who remembers such as the _Cutty Sark_ to choose
different ships and other times. Why not choose them? They were
comely ships, and now their time seems fair. Who would care to
remember the power and grey threat of a modern warship, or the exotic
luxury of a liner of this new era? Nobody who remembers the
graciousness of the clippers, nor the pride and content of the seamen
who worked them. To aid the illusion of the yew, I have one of those
books which are not books, a _Lloyd's Register of Shipping_ for 1880,
that by some unknown circuitous route found its way from its first
owner in Madras to my suburb. It goes very well with the surge of yew,
when westerly weather comes to unite them.
I should like to know how that book got to London. Somewhere in it is
the name of the ship which carried it. Anyhow, I think I can make out
in it the houseflag of that ship. It, was, I believe, one of J. H.
Allan's teak-built craft, a forgotten line--the _Rajah of Cochin_, the
_Copenhagen_, the _Lincelles_,--though only just before the War, in the
South-West India Dock, I met a stranger, a seaman looking for work, who
regretted its disappearance, and the new company-owned steamers; for he
said they were good ships, "but more than that," he told me, "Allan was
an old gentleman who knew his own ships, and knew his men." This
stranger said you forget a ship now as soon as you are paid off, "and
glad to," and "you don't ever know who owns her, even if there's a
strike. Parsons and old maids and Cardiff sharks, I reckon."
Very likely. But what sharks once were in it have all disappeared from
my Register. It belongs to those days when, if you went to New
Zealand, you had to go by sailer; when the East India Dock had an
arcade of jib-booms and bowsprits, with sometimes a varnished shark's
tail terminal--the _Euterpe_, _Jessie Readman_, _Wanganui_, _Wazmea_,
_Waimate_, _Opawa_, _Margaret Galbraith_, _Helen Denny_, _Lutterworth_,
and _Hermione_. There were others. What is in these names? But how
can we tell? There were personal figureheads, there were shapely
forms, each with its own narrative of adventure, there was the
undiscovered sea, and there was youth; and these have gone.
It is all very well to say that the names and mere words in this old
Register have no more meaning today than a railway time-table of the
same date. Hardly to be distinguished in the shadows in some corners
of St. Paul's Cathedral from which night never quite goes, there are
certain friendless regimental colours. Few of us know now who bore
them, and where, and why; but imagine the deserved fate of one who
would allow a brutal word to disturb their dust! They mean nothing,
except that men, in a world where it is easy to lose faith, treasure
the few tokens of faithfulness, courage, and enterprise proved in their
fellows; and so those old staffs, to which cling faded and dusty rags,
in a real sense support the Cathedral. Poplar once was a parish whose
name was more familiar in Eastern seas and on the coasts of the
Americans, and stood for something greater and of more value, than the
names of some veritable capital cities. That vista down the East India
Dock Road from North Street, past the plane trees which support on a
cloud the cupola of Green's Chapel, to the gateway of the dock which
was built for John Company, was what many would remember as essential
London who would pass the Mansion House as though it were a dingy and
nameless tavern. At the back of that road today, and opposite a church
which was a chapel-of-ease to save the crews of the East Indiamen lying
off Blackwall the long walk to Stebonhythe Church, is the public
library; and within that building are stored, as are the regimental
colours in the Cathedral, the houseflags of those very ships my
Register helps me to remember--the tokens of fidelity and courage, of a
service that was native, and a skill in that service which was
traditional to the parish. Tokens that now are dusty and in their
night, understood only by the few who also belong to the past.
There is the houseflag of the _Cutty Sark_, and her sister ships the
_Dharwar_, _Blackadder_, _Coldstream_--but one must be careful, and
refuse to allow these names to carry one-way. There are so many of
them. They are all good. Each can conjure up a picture and a memory.
They are like those names one reads in spring in a seed-merchant's
catalogue. They call to be written down, to be sung aloud, to be
shared with a friend. But I know the quick jealousy of some old
sailor, his pride wounded here by an unjustifiable omission of the ship
that was the one above all others for him, is bound to be moved by
anything less than a complete reprint here of the Register. How, for
example, could I give every name in the fleet of the White Star of
Aberdeen? Yet was not each ship, with her green hull and white spars,
as moving as a lyric? Is there in London River today a ship as
beautiful as the old _Thermopylae_? There is not. It is impossible.
There was the _Samuel Plimsoll_ of that line--now a coal hulk at
Gibraltar--which must be named, for she was Captain Simpson's ship (he
was commodore afterwards), the "merry blue-eyed skipper" of Froude's
_Oceana_, but much more than that, a sage and masterful Scot whose talk
was worth a long journey to hear.
The houseflag of Messrs. R. and H. Green, in any reference to the ships
of Blackwall, should have been mentioned first. There is a sense in
which it is right to say that the founder of that firm, at a time when
American craft like the Boston clippers of Donald McKay were in a fair
way to leave the Red Ensign far astern, declared that Blackwall had to
beat those American flyers, and did it. But that was long before the
eighties, and when steam was still ridiculed by those who could not see
it equalling clippers that had logged fourteen knots, or made a day's
run of over three hundred miles. Yet some of Green's ships came down
to the end of the era, like the _Highflyer_ and the _Melbourne_. The
latter was renamed the _Macquarie_, and was one of the last of the
clippers to come home to Poplar, and for that reason, and because of
her noble proportions, her picture is kept, as a reminder, by many who
wish to think of ships and the sea as they were. It is likely that
most who live in Poplar now, and see next to its railway station the
curious statue of a man and a dog, wonder who on earth Richard Green,
Esq., used to be; though there are a few oldsters left still who
remember Blackwall when its shipwrights, riggers, sailmakers, and
caulkers were men of renown and substance, and who can recall, not only
Richard Green, but that dog of his, for it knew the road to the dock
probably better than most of those who use it today. Poplar was the
nursery of the Clyde. The flags which Poplar knew well would puzzle
London now--Devitt and Moore's, Money Wigram's, Duthie's, Willis's,
Carmichael's, Duncan Dunbar's, Scrutton's, and Elder's. But when
lately our merchant seamen surprised us with a mastery of their craft
and a fortitude which most of us had forgotten were ever ours, what
those flags represented, a regard for a tradition as ancient and as
rigorous as that of any royal port, was beneath it all.
But if it were asked what was this tradition, it would not be easy to
say. Its authority is voiceless, but it is understood. Then what is
it one knows of it? I remember, on a day just before the War, the
flood beginning to move the shipping of the Pool. Eastward the black
cliffs lowered till they sank under the white tower of Limehouse
Church; and the church, looking to the sunset, seemed baseless, shining
with a lunar radiance. Upriver, the small craft were uncertain, moving
like phantoms over a pit of bottomless fire. But downstream every ship
was as salient as though lighted with the rays of a great lantern. And
there in that light was a laden barque, outward bound, waiting at the
buoys. She headed downstream. Her row of white ports diminished along
the length of her green hull. The lines of her bulwarks, her sheer,
fell to her waist, then airily rose again, came up and round to merge
in one fine line at the jibboom. The lines sweeping down and airily
rising again were light as the swoop of a swallow. The symmetry of her
laden hull set in a plane of dancing sun-points, and her soaring amber
masts, cross-sparred, caught in a mesh of delicate cordage, and shining
till they almost vanished where they rose above the buildings and stood
against the sky, made her seem as noble and haughty as a burst of great
music. One of ours, that ship. Part of our parish.