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 newinterests 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.
I climbedthe 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 wasshining 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 stooddeferentially 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.”
I did so, and found it excellent; so, likewise, was the suet pudding. The potatoes were new. The beer was the only doubtful feature of the repast; it was thin, insipid, and flat. I made haste to taste and approve,for I could see that the old fellows were very hungry. The governor left me, and went to the top of the room, where, in a loud and impressive voice, he said grace, bidding the ancient mariners be thankful for what they were about to receive; they all half rose, and in one feeble, rustling old pipe, sung out “Amen,” and then, like schoolboys, made snatches at the dishes, and in a minute were eating with avidity. It warmed my heart to see them. It made me feel that there must yet be plenty of goodness left in this world, when—through the benevolence of strangers and their large-hearted concern for poor Jack—ninety-three old, very old seamen, tottering on the verge of the grave, so poor and so destitute, so feeble and so friendless that but for the benevolence of those whom Providence had brought to their succour, they must have miserably starved and died, were clothed, and fed, and sheltered, and tenderly watched over. I know not that I have ever been so moved as I was in my passage through that dining-room. It was not only the pathos that lies in the helplessness of old age; I could not but think of the great compass of time these men’s experiences embraced, of the changes they had witnessed, of the sorrows and struggles which had made up the sum of their long lives, and how eighty and ninety years of privation, endurance, and such pleasures as sailors take, and such ambitions as sailors have, had ended in these bowed and toothless shapes, clutching at their plain repast with child-like selfishness, indifferent as death itself to the great machine of life that was whirring with its thousand interests outside the silent sphere of their present existence, and dependent for the bread their trembling hands raised to their poor old mouths upon the bounty of those who love the noble profession of the sea, and who will not let the old andbruised and worn-out seaman want for such help as they can send him. Here and there were men too infirm to feed themselves; and I took notice how thoughtfully their aged messmates prepared their meal for them. Some of those thus occupied were more aged than the men they assisted.
“Bless your honour, he’s but a child tome,” said one of them, in answer to my questions; “he’s but three and seventy, and I shall be eighty-nine come next September.”
One pitiful sight deeply affected me. It was an old man stone deaf and stone blind. How is the helplessness in his face to be conveyed?
“He’s losing his appetite fast,” said a seaman of about eighty who sat near him. “His senses is all locked up. Ye never hear him speak.”
There were sadder sights even than this; but I dare not trust myself to write of them.
I followed the house-governor out of the dining-rooms into a large apartment, well stored with books, magazines, etc., the gifts of friends of the charity. This I was told was the reading-room. It looked on to the green grounds, and was a most cheerful and delightful chamber. Further on was another room furnished with bagatelle boards and side tables for cribbage, etc. There was a particular cleanness and neatness everywhere visible, and I asked who did the work of the house. The house-governor answered, “The inmates. The more active among them are put to washing down and dusting at ten o’clock, and they finish at twelve. This is all the work required of them. Throughout the rest of the day they have nothing to do but to lounge about the grounds and amuse themselves as they please in the bagatelle or reading rooms, or in the smoking-room,which is a large apartment in the basement.” Mounting the wide stone staircase, and admiring as I went the singularly handsome and lavishly-embellished interior of the very fine building, I found myself on a floor devoted to the sleeping-rooms. These consist of rows of bulkheads partitioning off little cabins, each with a door and a number, and furnished with a comfortable bed, and some of them were movingly decorated by photographs of a mother, a sister, a child, with humble memorials saved from the wreck of the past; such relics of the old home as a few china chimneypiece ornaments, a coloured picture, and the like, with here and there a sea-chest, though, as a rule, these little cabins, as they are called, were conspicuously empty of all suggestions of marine life. Now and again the opening of a door would disclose an old man seated on his bed, darning a sock or mending a shirt. It might have been that they were used to the visits of strangers; but I could not help observing in all these old seamen an utter indifference to our presence and inspection, a look of deep abstraction, as if their minds were leagues astern of them or far ahead, and existence were an obligation with which they had no sympathy, and of which they never took notice unless their attention was compelled to it.
“Here,” said the governor, taking me into a room in which three or four old men were assembled—for dinner had been finished some time, and the seamen had quitted the tables—“is a veteran who has taught himself how to write. Show us your copy-book, my man,” said he, giving him his name.
The old fellow produced his book with a great air of pride, and I was struck by the excellence of the writing.
“Is this all your own doing?” I asked.
“Ay, sir, every stroke. It’s been a bit of a job; for,you see, when a man’s nearing eighty ye can’t say that his brain’s like a young ’un’s.”
“This would shame many a youngster, nevertheless,” said I.
“I’d be prouder if I could read it, though,” he exclaimed, with the anxious and yet gentle expression that seemed a characteristic of the faces in this institution.
“Ah, I see,” said I. “You can copy, but cannot read what you copy. Never mind! that will come too, presently.”
“I’m afeard not,” said he, shaking his head. “Writin’s one thing, readin’s another. I have learned to write, but dunno as ever I shall be able to read it.”
The governor, with an encouraging smile, told him to persevere, and then led the way to one of the sick wards, where I found a very aged man in bed, and two others seated at a table.
“That poor old fellow,” said he, pointing to the bed, “begged to be allowed to attend the funeral of a man who died in the institution a short time since; he was so much affected that he was struck with paralysis, and had to be carried back here. He was for years a shipmaster, had command of several fine ships, and is a man of excellent education. He has been in this institution some years.” And then, addressing him, “Well, and how do you feel yourself now?”
“Mending, sir, mending,” answered the old man. “It’s death to me to be lying here. Why, for seventy-nine years I never had a day’s illness, never took a ha’porth of physic.”
“You must have patience,” said the governor; “you’ll be up and doing presently.”
“Ay, the power of forereaching is not taken out of me yet,” he answered, breaking into a laugh, the heartiness of which somehow pained me more to hear than had he burst into sobs.
There were more “cabins” upstairs, and in one of them we found an old Irishman standing, lost in thought, looking out of the window. I addressed him, and he answered me in a rich brogue. I never remember meeting a more winning old face, nor being won by a voice more cordial and pleasant to hear. He told me he had been in theKent, East Indiaman, when she was burnt. This was so long ago as 1825, and he was then a hearty, able-bodied man. It was like turning back the pages of the history of England to hear him talk of that famous and dreadful disaster.
“There’s another man in the institution who was along with me in theKent,” said he.
I thought of the description given of theKentby the master of theCarolineas I looked at this ancient man. “Her appearance was that of an immense cauldron or cage of buoyant basketwork, formed of the charred and blackened ribs, naked, and stripped of every plank, encircling an uninterrupted mass of flame.” Again and again had I read the story of that terrible fire at sea, thinking of it always as something deep-buried in history, and infinitely remote; and now here was a man who had been an actor in it, talking of it as if it had been but of yesterday, quavering out his “says I’s” and “says he’s,” and eager to let me know that if he liked he could tell me something about the behaviour of certain responsible persons on board that would not redound to their credit. It was pantaloon with harlequin’s wand in his hand; the faded old picture was touched, and became a live thing, the seas rolling, the ship burning, the terror and anguish of nearly sixty years since growing quick again under the magic of thisancient man’s memory, and in the presence of a living witness of that long-decayed night of horror.
Of such a charity as this of the Royal Alfred Aged Merchant Seamen’s Institution how can any man who honours the English sailor and values his calling hope to speak in such terms of praise as shall not seem hyperbolical? Not for one instant will I say that as a charity it is superior to others which deal with the sick, with the destitute, with the infirm, with little children. “There is misery enough in every corner of the world as well as within our convent,” Sterne’s monk is made to imply by his cordial wave of the hand. But I do claim for this institution the possession of a peculiar element of pathos such as no man who has not beheld the aged, the stricken, the helpless, the broken-down men congregated within its walls can form any idea of. As you survey them their past arises; you think of the black and stormy night, the frost and snow, the famine and the shipwreck—all the perils which sailors encounter in their quest or carriage of that which makes us great and prosperous as a nation; and then reflections on the dire ending which must have befallen these tempest-beaten, time-laden men but for the charity that provides them with a refuge break in upon you, and you feel that no words of praise can be too high for such an institution, and that no money dedicated by generous hearts to the alleviation of human suffering can be better directed than to the exchequer of this aged seamen’s home. Ninety-three old sailors are at present lodged in the institution. The house is big enough to accommodate two hundred, but the funds of the charity are already stretched to their last limits, and many an old and broken-down seaman whom this home would otherwise receive, andwhose closing days would be rendered happy by all that tender ministration, by all that pious kindness can effect, must die in the cold and cheerless silence of the Union unless the charity that is prayerfully entreated for him is given.
Ona fine, calm day from the height of the cliffs betwixt Ramsgate and Broadstairs you may spy at low-water time a yellow vein, like a thin winding of pale gold, a hand’s breath this side of the horizon—the famous and fatal Goodwin Sands. I suppose there is no shoal in the whole world that a man whose sympathies are with sailors can view with more interest. Starting from the North Sand Head, which is almost abreast of Ramsgate, and looking east, the eye follows the south-westerly sweep of the Goodwins until the Downs are embraced with all their dim tracery of spars and rigging and faint sinuous lines of steamers’ smoke beyond, whilst the giant South Foreland acclivity stares down upon the lightship abreast of St. Margaret’s Bay, marking the extreme limits in the south and west of the deadliest stretch of sands upon the face of the globe.
“Who can view the Goodwins without thinking of the treasures which lie buried in their heart, of the hundreds of ships which have gone to pieces upon them, of the thousands of human corpses which have floated out of their flashing surf to be stranded upon some distant beach, or to drift, maybe for days, upon the bosom of the tides, looking up with blind faces to heaven through the green transparent lid of their sea coffin? There isno spot that has ever been the theatre of wilder human suffering. Again and again as you sail past you see forking up out of them some black gibbet-like relic of a wreck a week, a fortnight, a month old. Something of the kind is always visible, as though even on the tenderest of summer days, when the blue water sleeps around, and the heavens are a violet hollow, with a rayless sun making gold of the sea in the west, the deadly suggestiveness of that long sweep of yellow sand should be as plain as when its presence is denoted amid the black tempestuous night by the ghastly gleam of boiling white waters.
I remember once passing these Goodwins and seeing a number of little black figures running about them. A pleasure vessel from one of the adjacent ports was lying at anchor a short distance off, and her boat was against the slope of the shoal. It was a very calm day indeed, the sea just blurred here and there with small draughts of air that gave the water in those places a look of ice, with a pallid streak of the French coast beyond the white mainsail of the pleasure-cutter, hove up by the refraction of the light above the sea-line. I brought a small pocket telescope to bear, and observed that those little black figures running about like the savages Robinson Crusoe saw were Cockney excursionists, engaged in playing cricket. They played as if they wanted to be able to talk of having played rather than as if they enjoyed the game. Talk of contrasts! A man may be rendered pensive by watching children sporting in a graveyard, by mingling in a festivity held upon a space of ground where once a famous battle was fought, and where the feet of the merrymakers are separated from the bones and skulls of warriors by a couple of spades’ length of earth. But to see those little black-coated creaturesrunning about after a ball on top of such an ocean burial-place that the like of it for the horror of its annals and for the number of those it has sepulchred is not to be found in this habitable world, might well have made the gayest heart sad and thoughtful for a spell.
As I leaned over the rail, looking at those happy pigmies—those lords of creation who, viewed half a mile further away, might have passed for a handful of black crabs crawling about—the scene in imagination changed, the darkness came rushing out of the east with a moan of approaching storm, the three lanterns winked like stars beyond the North Sand Head, and there was a sound of weltering waters and the seething and hissing of surf rising up through the gloom out from the whole length of the shoals. The wind rose fresh and eagerly, with a raw edge in it; the ebony of the swelling water was broken by the glimmer of the froth of breaking seas. I could hear the muffled thunder of the confused play to windward of the surf, with the shrieking of the blast overhead, whilst a deeper shadow yet gathered in the air. Then, with a blinking of my eyes, back would come the facts of the thing again, and yonder were the little figures merrily chasing the ball, the sea spreading like a sheet of silk to the yellow rim of the hard sand, and the blue sky bright overhead. Yet another touch of the magician Fancy’s wand, and it was all howling storm and flying blackness and the steam of hurling spume again, with a sudden glare of lightning between, flinging out the shapes of the piles of whirling clouds like monstrous brandished wings going to pieces in the hurricane, and throwing up the black fabric of a big ship on her beam ends, her masts gone, and a fury of white water veiling her.
There are lifeboat coxswains who need but close theireyes to see fearfuller things. Just where those little creatures are brandishing their tiny bats and flourishing their shrimp-like legs, the great ship struck, and four hundred men and women shrieked out to God for mercy in one breath. A man’s fancy must be feeble even on the softest of summer days not to hear the crash of her timbers, the thunder-shocks of the smiting seas, the rending noises of hemp and wire and spar torn by the tempest from their strong fastenings; not to see the ghastly picture she makes in the wild gleam of the signal flare whose tongues of fire are blown horizontal, like streaming flags, by the furious breath of the storm, illuminating with a dull horrible crimson light the throngs of human beings who cry and struggle upon her decks, or hang, like streaming suits of clothes, in what remains of her rigging.
Is this an exaggerated picture? Alas! the pen never yet was wielded that could pourtray, in the barest form, any one of the countless horrible scenes which have taken place on that stretch of sands where one summer day I watched, leaning over the rail of a vessel, a number of light-hearted excursionists playing cricket.
Among the things which never can be known may be placed the thoughts which possess a man in the moment of shipwreck. Of the hundreds of published narratives none satisfies the reader; and of those who relate their experiences, how infinitely remote from the truth do their statements strike them as being when they put what they have written side by side with what they remember having felt! The reason is, I take it, because in no other situation is death more awful than upon the sea. It is commonly slow—at least, it gives time for anguish to become full-blown—and the hope of rescue must be very strong indeed, and well founded,to qualify that agony of expectation, sinking into paralyzing despair, which confounds and in a manner stuns a person stranded far out upon the water in a black night, seeing nothing but the glare of lightning or the spectral flashing of froth flying past, hearing nothing but the grinding and trembling and dislocating noises of the hull upon the ground.
It is supposed because sailors cannot or do not describe the horrors they pass through that they lack the capacity of expression. But you may put the most eloquent writer now living, call him by what name you please, on board a ship foundering amid a tempest or going to pieces in a storm on such a shoal as the Goodwins or the Sunk Sand, and when he has been long enough rescued and ashore to recover the use of his brains, you may defy him to write such a narrative of the disaster as will come, to his own conscience and memory, one jot nearer to the truth than the newspaper paragraph of five lines in which the wreck was chronicled. A man can describe what he has suffered in a railway collision, in a house on fire, down in a mine where there has been an explosion, in a theatre where there has been a panic; but put him aboard a ship and let him clearly understand that he is going to be drowned, and when succoured he can tell you little more than that the waves ran mountains high, that some people were brave, and that some people shrieked, and that what he best remembers is catching hold of something, and hearing the water in his ears, and being dragged into a boat.
Very true is the old saying, “If you want to learn how to pray, you must go to sea.” So distracting, so paralyzing, so utterly despairful are all the conditions of shipwreck in its worst forms, that I cannot but think,when a man is known to act bravely and coolly in that situation, unmindful of himself, thinking of others, encouraging and heartening them, the heroism he exhibits is of a kind not to be matched by any kind of courage a man may show in a position that lacks the overwhelming features which distinguish the foundering or the stranding of a ship.
Some days ago I met a seaman who had made one of the crew of a brig that a few months since was stranded on the Goodwin Sands, and went to pieces there. The circumstances of the wreck were so recent that I was sure it could not but be a very sharp, clear memory in this sailor; and, wanting to hear what sort of thoughts come into a man’s head at such a time, and how he will act, what kind of impulses govern him, and the like, I carried this mariner to where a seat and a glass of beer were to be had, and conversed with him.
“She was a wessel,” said he, “of 220 ton, and we was in ballast, bound from Can (Caen) to Seaham. All went well, nothen particular happening, I mean, till we comes abreast o’ the South Foreland. It might then be twelve o’clock in the middle o’ the night. The weather was as thick as mud, plenty of rain driving along, and the wind west, blowin’ a fresh breeze. We was under upper and lower main-tops’l, lower fore-tops’l, and foresail.”
Here he took a drink.
“And the weather as thick as mud, you say?”
“Ay, thick as mud in a wine-glass. The Sou’ San’head light was on our starboard beam, and ye may guess how clear it was when I tell you that that light took a deal of peering at to make out. As to the East Good’in, why, all that way was black as my boot: not the merestglimmer to betoken a lightwesselthere. I was at the side, heavin’ the lead, getting nine fathom, and then seven, and then eight, and then seven again. Eight fair betwixt the Callipers and the Deal coast I’ll allow ye’ll get eleven and twelve fathom good till you come on to past the Downs—headin’ up, I mean—and then it shoals down to height and seven and five and a ’arf. So in a night as black as a dead wall, when there’s no moon, who’s to know, when the last light seen has drawed out of view, and there’s ne’er another to be sighted, where you are in that water? We was going along tidy fast, when a squall of rain drives right up over our starn in a wild smother, and I had just made seven fathom by the lead when the wessel took the ground, chucking me off the rail on to the deck. The skipper begins to bawl out like mad, ‘Let go the main-torps’l halliards! Haul up the foresail! Let go the ——’ Wash at that moment comes a lump of sea right over the port quarter, cantin’ our starn to the south’ard and smotherin’ the decks. You didn’t want to see—you could feel that the brig was hard and fast, though as the sea thumped her she’d kinder sway on her keel.”
Here he took another drink.
“Well?” said I.
“Well,” he continued, “what was to do now, master? Everything being let go aloft, the canvas was slatting like thunder up there, and though I’m not goin’ to tell you it was blowing a gale of wind, yet it seemed to come twice as hard the moment we took the ground, and the seas to rise as if our falling helpless on a sudden had swelled ’em up with joy. We lay with our head about nor’-nor’-east, and over the starboard bow you could see the white water jumping. But that was all that was visible. The wind seemed to blow up the thickness allround us, there was not a light to be seen, and looking around anywhere away from the white water was like putting your head in a pitch-kettle. Cold! master, that was the worst part of it. I’ll allow that in all sitivations of this kind the cold’s the part that’s hardest to bear. Somehow clanger ain’t so frightful when it’s warm. Can’t explain it, I’m sure; matter o’ constitootion, perhaps: but I doubt if ye’d find much bravery among the Hesquimos and the Roosians up near the pole, and the likes o’ them. Can’t see how it’s possible; but it’s only my ’pinion.”
Another drink.
“Well,” he continued, holding up the fresh glass of ale I had ordered for him to the light, with a look of pensiveness in the one bloodshot eye he kept open, “we tarns to and makes a flare—a sort o’ bonfire. But if we couldn’t see anything, who was to see us? However, we kept all on burning flares, whilst first the fore-top-gall’nmast came down with a run, causing us all to jump aft out of the road, and then the main-topmast carries away at the cap and falls with a roar over the side, and set us all running forrard. I for one made up my mind we was all to be drownded. I couldn’t see no help for it. The noise of them spars cracking and tumbling away in the blackness overhead, and the shindy set up by the slatting canvas, along with the creaking of the hull and the washing of the water that came as white as milk over the starboard rail, was enough, I reckon, to make any man suppose his time had come, and that his ghost was to be turned out of him. However, we took heart after a spell, by noticing that the seas burst with less weight as the tide left us, though every butt in her must have yawed open after she had been grinding awhile, for she was full of water and a few hours more of such dusting was boundto have made staves of her. Well, at about half-past four o’clock in the morning, we being by that time pretty near froze to death, the weather thinned down, and we caught sight of the Gull Light shining—about three mile off, I dare say. What was to be seen of our wessel was just a fearful muddle; masts overboard washing alongside, the lower masts working in her like loose teeth with every heave, decks full of raffle, and the water every now and again flying over us as though detarmined if it couldn’t wash us overboard it would keep us streamin’ wet. When we spied the Gull Light we turned to and made another flare, and presently they sent up a rocket, and to cut this yarn short,” continued he, having by this time emptied his second tumbler, and finding me slow in offering him a third, “just as the light was abreakin’ in the east one of us sings out that there was a steamer headin’ for us, and when the mornin’ grew stronger we spied a tug makin’ for us with a lifeboat in tow. Well, by this time there was little enough sea, and the lifeboat, letting go off the tug, came alongside, but two of our men was so badly froze up that they had to be lifted into her, and such had been our sufferings, though I’m not going to say they equalled what others have gone through on those cussed sands, that we couldn’t have looked worse, with salt in our eyes and our faces washed into the appearance of tallow, had we been spendin’ forty-eight hours on that shoal. We lost all our clothes, every bloomin’ thing we had with us; and that same forenoon, just afore twelve o’clock, half a gale of wind sprung up, and by two o’clock there was nothing to be seen of the brig.”
“And that’s the story,” said I.
“That’s it,” he answered; “every word gospel true.”
“How did the others behave,” said I, “in this awful situation? Pretty well?”
“It was too dark to see,” he answered.
“Did you encourage one another?”
“Well,” he replied, “the cook at first kept on singin’ out, ‘We’re all drownded men! Lord have mercy upon me!’ and the like of that, until the cold took away his voice. I don’t know that there was any other sort o’ encouragement.”
“And what were your feelings,” said I, “when the brig took the ground and the water washed over her?”
“My feelings?” he replied. “Why, that we was in a bloomin’ mess. That was my feelings.”
“How did the prospect of death affect you—I mean the idea of being swept into the black water and strangling there?”
“Are you chaffin’ me, sir?” he asked.
“Certainly not,” said I.
“Well,” he said, “I’m blessed if I was asked such a question as that afore,” grinning. “It’s like a meetin’-house question.”
“Didn’t you think at all?” said I.
“Yes,” he answered; “I thought what a jolly fool I was to be ashore on the Good’ens on a winter’s night, gradually dyin’ of frost, instead of bein’ in a warm bed ashore, with a parlour to take breakfast in when I woke up. That’s about it, sir.”
A plainred-brick building stands in the West India Dock Road, with the following lengthy name or description written along the front of it:—“The Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans, and South Sea Islanders.” On the day I visited this house there were three or four people standing on the doorsteps, with faces which did more in an instant to express the character of the place than could have been effected by reams of reports of annual meetings and descriptive pamphlets. They were, it is needless to say, persons of colour, and of very decided colour too: one as black as a hat, another of a muddy yellow, a third a gloomy brown. They were dressed in European clothes: they might have belonged to nations which were in a high state of civilization when the Thames was clean water, and rolled its silver stream through a land whose scanty population hung loose and unclothed among the trees; but for all that, they had the look of wild men in breeches, and the very black person needed little more than a boomerang or a bow and arrows to give him the aspect at least of an unsafe object. I had, however, but little time to inspect these men, for a commotion in the hall of the building, coupled with an assemblage of some dozen or twenty people on the street pavement, called my attention toa spectacle of real interest. This consisted of the starting of a troupe of Javanese musicians for the place of entertainment where they were then performing. There were a number of men and four women—at least, I think there were four women; yet it is possible that I may have mistaken a man for one of the other sex, for some of the men and women were very much alike, especially the men. They streamed out in a great hurry, their bright black eyes sparkling in their brown faces, the men smoking short pipes of a decidedly West India Dock Road pattern, and the women bundling along in such queer raiment that it would be as hopeless to attempt to describe its colours and cut as to catalogue the stock of a rag-and-bottle merchant. A kind of large private omnibus stood at the door, into which these strange people got, some of them climbing upon the roof; and striking indeed was the appearance of the windows of the vehicle, framing, as they did, every one of them, a dark, contented face, whilst the roof of the omnibus was crowded with blacks and whites, like the keys of a pianoforte.
“Who are those people?” said I to a Chinaman, as the omnibus rolled away.
“Hey?” answered John.
“Those people,” I said, pointing towards the retreating vehicle, “they are not sailors, are they? There are women among them.”
“No, no, not sailor, no, no,” cried the Chinaman with great earnestness, and wagging his head so violently that he nearly shook his hat off. “Music-man, not sailor; play tic-a-tic, tic-a-tic;” and here he screwed an imaginary fiddle into his throat and fell to sawing the air with his elbow.
At this moment I was joined by the secretary—agentleman, let me say at once, who, after spending many years of his life in India, is now gratuitously devoting his services to the poor Asiatic who finds himself homeless in this great wilderness of London, often penniless, and speaking a tongue with which he may journey from Mile End Gate to Hammersmith without finding an ear capable of comprehending a word he says. This gentleman told me who those queer-looking people were, how they were in charge of a Dutchentrepreneur, and how they were “putting-up” at the Strangers’ Home because there, and at no other place in London, they were likely to meet people who, even if they did not speak their language, would impart a sense of home.
We now proceeded to inspect the building. As at the Well Street Sailors’ Home, so here, the common room, if I may so term it, is the central hall, a large place furnished with seats and tables and heated by an immense stove. Here of an evening, when it is cold or damp out of doors, the inmates of the home assemble, and the bright lamps shed their light upon as many diverse countenances and costumes as there are nationalities to the eastward of Russia and in the great oceans which wash the Capes of Africa and South America. Strange, indeed, is the admixture to a European eye: the Hindoo sitting cross-legged on a bench listening, with dusky eyes rolling in his black attenuated features, to the pigeon-English of a round-faced Chinaman; a Malay endeavouring by gestures to make himself understood by a Kanaka; a native of Ceylon smiling over the porcine gutturals of a couple of Zulus; with here an Arab reis pacing the floor in lonely dignity, or a red man of a paternity indistinguishable in his features, which seem compounded of the Nubian, the last of the Mohicans, a dash of Polynesia, with a hint of Liverpool or Bristol,spelling over a volume full of murky and eye-confounding hieroglyphs.
“When this hall is full the sight is a remarkable one,” said the secretary. “What with the hum of the strange languages—perhaps as many as twenty all going at once—together with the various faces and clothes, I assure you it needs no small effort of mind to convince one’s self that one is still in London, and that just out of doors omnibuses are rolling, small boys calling out the evening papers, and policemen standing at the corners.”
I felt the force of this, thinly peopled as the hall was, when I stood in it gazing around. Was it the strange haunting Eastern smells—vague fumes, as of a hubble-bubble recently smoked out; a lingering whiff as of curry; a thin, ghostly odour of bamboos, chillies, oil, nutmeg, and cedar-wood? or was it the turban, the pigtail, the almond-shaped eye, the black, bronze, and yellow skins of the few Asiatics who were seated in a body on a central bench, that carried my imagination out of the West India Dock Road into the tangled forests, the hot, blue heavens, the joss-houses, the sampans and junks, the rushing rivers, the jackalls, the dusky figures, the blue gowns and red or yellow shoes of the distant, spacious provinces of the sun? Hark to the sing-song chatter babbling from that Mongolian visage! What is the magic of it, that this hall, gloomy with the smoke of the great city blowing riverwards, should be transformed into a shining Eastern city, whose shores, rich with the green of tropical vegetation, are washed by a sea whose breast reflects a heaven of sapphire? The voice ceases; the spell is broken; the muffled roar of the toiling world outside breaks in and establishes one of the very sharpest contrasts in life—that of the condition of an Asiatic, fresh from the hot suns and thick jungles of his own country, plunged amid the smoke, the turmoil, the unspeakable odours of the east end of London, incapable of making his wants known, languishing in misery and cold in the gloom of railway arches or some unfrequented court, feeling what solitude is in a sense never imagined by Byron. For the Asiatic’s loneliness is that of the dumb brute; he has a language, but he might as well be voiceless, and, worst of all, he is the victim of the unnatural, ignorant, and wicked prejudice which finds in the coloured skin nothing but what is fit for derision, contempt, and cruel neglect. This was the lot of the Eastern stranger before a number of humane Englishmen banded themselves together to furnish him with a refuge. I own that the fine humanity of this institution affected me strongly as I stood looking at the knot of dark-visaged, strangely apparelled men, and considered what would be their fate if this Home were not at hand to help them, to receive them, to interpret their wants, and to assist them to return to their native countries. Time was when few tragedies were commoner than that of the finding the body of some coloured man who had made his way as a sailor or stoker to London, been robbed by the beasts of prey who wander hungrily round the dockyard gates, and had lain himself down in some corner of this opulent city to die of cold and hunger. Such horrors are things of the past, and honoured be those and the memory of those who have made them so. No Asiatic stranger need perish for the want of a friend in London now. The Home will receive him, and for a very moderate sum—which he may easily pay either from the wages due to him from the ship he leaves, or by the note advanced by the owners whose ship he joins—feed and lodge him, and spare no trouble to restore him to his own country. Hence, to a large extent, the institution contributes to its own support. But the charges it makes are so small, the losses it incurs through the new allotment or bonus notes are so frequent, and the cases of absolute destitution it deals with so numerous, that it is bound to continue to be dependent upon outside help to a certain extent; and I believe that no one who has any knowledge of the work it is doing, no one with sympathy for the helpless of his own species, but will admit that there is not an institution in existence that better deserves the gifts of the charitable than this Home for Asiatic Strangers.
But all this time I am leaving the obliging and kind-hearted secretary waiting to show me over the premises. We pass out first of all into a space of open ground at the back of the building, of which a substantial piece has been converted into a flower garden. This the superintendent of the Home, who has joined us, contemplates for a while with silent satisfaction, and then, with considerable pride, draws my attention to it.
“It has all been done within the last two or three years,” he says. “The Asiatics lend a hand, find old seeds knocking about the bottom of their chests, and plant them, but they never come to anything. They won’t grow, you know, in this climate. Here’s a sample,” he says, pointing to a row of shoots which look like the first buddings of that patriotic vegetable the leek; “they were planted three days ago by those Javanese women you saw, and this is what they’ve already come to. But I suspect they’ll end at that.”
A balcony runs at the back of the house, and along it there was stumping a John Canoe, smoking something strange, whether a pipe or cigar or cigarette or pieceof cane I could not tell. He vanished through a door when we mounted the steps, which I regretted, as I should like to have examined the thing he had in his mouth.
“This,” said the secretary on our re-entering the building, “is what we call the firemen’s dormitory.” It was a large room with a bulkhead dividing it, and on either hand of the bulkhead went a row of narrow beds furnished with coarse coverlets and mattresses stuffed with fibre. There was no carpet, and I ventured to ask the reason, as the bare boards had but a cheerless look.
“Carpet!” exclaimed the secretary; “my dear sir, these Asiatics wouldn’t know what to do with such a thing. They’d pull it up and make trousers of it. You cannot conceive the strangeness of their habits and customs. For instance, to give them a table-cloth would be like ill treating them. Nothing bothers them more than a fork; and you may see them eating eggs with clasp-knives, which they pull out of their pockets.” Then seeing me eyeing the beds, he continued, “It would hardly do to give the firemen fine linen to lie in. Sir, they arrive here thick with grime, they foul whatever they touch, and it takes several days of hard bathing to clean them.”
There were several of these dormitories, each of them divided by bulkheads, uncarpeted, and containing the same kind of bedsteads, every one bearing a number at its head. The Javanese troupe occupied one of these dormitories, the men sleeping on one side of the bulkhead and the women on the other. I looked for their luggage, but could find nothing but a fiddle and an old sword. I think, if the public had seen where these musicians sleep, they would reckon the sight stranger than any other part of the performance these Eastern peoplewere giving. There is one dormitory, however, upstairs filled with cabins similar to what they have at the old Sailors’ Home at Belvedere. These are occupied, I was told, by the better class of Asiatics.
“And who might they be?” I asked.
“Why,” I was told, “Japanese officers, stewards, Chinese carpenters, native doctors, and the like.”
These are the “dignity men.” They have a little room in which they may dine apart from the Lascars, Kanakas, John Chinamen, and the others; but, somehow, they don’t seem to value exclusiveness, for most of them will quit their table to join the pigtails and half-castes in the big eating-room downstairs, where they find a relish in their rice and fish which appears to be wanting in the dishes in the other apartment. In one of the dormitories we came across a Javanese—one of the troupe—sitting cross-legged on his bed, ill with a cold in the head. His unsmoked pipe lay by his side, and he was listlessly handling some pieces of printed calico, though the use he meant to put them to I could not divine. There is a no more melancholy object than a coloured man suffering from a bad cold in the head. I saw him shiver, and then roll his eyes—black as ebony set in orange—upon the window, and I thought to myself, “How this harmless, coloured man, who speaks nothing but Javanese, and who belongs to a country where the air is radiant with beautiful birds and fragrant with delicious fruits, must enjoy the climate of the West India Dock Road!”
We struggled to impart sympathy by several kinds of gestures and motions, but it would not do; we could not get further than alarming him, and so we left him. In another dormitory we found a Ceylon man, a Madrassee Lascar, and a Japanese. The Ceylon man wasa very handsome fellow, his hair parted down the middle, and he had as fine a pair of eyes as ever I saw in the human countenance, regular features, and a wonderfully good figure. He was reading an English book, and spoke English so well that, what with his correct utterance, the colour of his skin, and his striking face, a misgiving seized me.
“Are you a pure Cingalese?” I asked.
“No, no,” cried he, with much anxiety in his manner; “my father was an English sailor!”
But the Madrassee man, in a measure, atoned for this disappointment. He was the real thing—just the sort of conformation to tumble about in a surf-boat, very black, very lean, with snow-white teeth, and a high long nose as thin as a hatchet. The secretary conversed with him in his native lingo, and it seemed to do the poor fellow good to talk. The Japanese had a wooden face, and had very little to say. Indeed, I always think that the people of his race and the Chinese view us and our works with a good deal of contempt. What a mean opinion they must have of our toys, of our paintings, in which the literal is sacrificed to the poetical; of our clothes, tea, head-dresses, coiffures, and a thousand other matters! They have a Chinese porter at the Home, who is dressed in a black coat and wears a hat. I did not speak to him, but I should judge, from observing the expression on his face when in a state of repose, that he has but a poor opinion of Great Britain. In another dormitory were a couple of Arabs mending shirts; and downstairs, in the scullery, I met a Zulu, who told me that he was a subject of Cetewayo, and had called at that King’s lodgings when he was in London, but had not managed to see his Majesty. One of the suite promised to write and appoint an hour for an interview; but no letter ever reached the youth, and thenext thing he heard of Cetewayo was that he had sailed for Africa. This scullery led into a large kitchen, very well appointed, and in spick and span condition. Adjoining was the provision room, containing one large sack of rice, a quantity of smoked herrings, a jar of chillies, another jar of curry powder, and other Eastern relishes.
“The mackerel is the favourite dish with our inmates, be they of whatever nationality they will,” said the secretary. “They consider it the finest fish that is caught in European waters, and lament when the season for catching them is over.”
I asked what food they were supplied with in the Home.
“We have,” he replied, “what we call three messes. The first-class mess is sixteen shillings a week—this includes a separate cabin; the second, without a cabin, is fourteen shillings; and the third, which we term the curry and rice mess, is ten shillings. The first two messes comprise, for breakfast, fish or eggs, coffee, bread and butter; for dinner we give beef or mutton, with vegetables, and curry and rice always; tea, the same as breakfast.”
“The charge is small enough,” said I.
“But they have other privileges,” said he. “For instance, there are hot and cold water baths downstairs, for the use of which no charge is made. We also receive and take care of their money and valuables—for some of the people who come here bring real valuables, such as jewels, with them, I assure you. Since last January the amount deposited in money with us has amounted to £2,285, of which I do not scruple to say that, but for the existence of this home, the greater portion would have been stolen from its owners by the crimps and boarding-house people who haunt our neighbourhood. That room you see there is our shipping-office; captainscome to us and select men for their vessels, and when the choice has been made we accompany the men to the marine offices, see them sign articles and that the advance is duly made. Indeed, we do all that we possibly can to help and protect these poor strangers.”
“What I have seen assures me of that,” said I.
“This,” he continued, as we went upstairs and entered a large cheerful dormitory, “is what we call the ayahs’ room. It is meant for native women who are brought home as nurses and discharged. Sad cases of destitution are often occurring. Not long ago a City missionary found a native woman in an empty house in Shepherd’s Bush. He brought her here, and, having learnt the name of her mistress, we went to her, and were told that the ayah was insane, that she had been kept as long as possible, had at last refused to go, and was accordingly turned out. We took charge of her for awhile, but her madness increased, and we were forced at last to send her to a county asylum, where she now remains.”
The inspection of this room exhausted all that was to be seen; so, bidding the cordial secretary farewell, and taking a lingering look at a knot of dusky men who were talking in the hall, I quitted this hospitable and most valuable institution, resolving to record all that I had heard and viewed, in the earnest hope that of those by whom this record of my visit will be read some may be induced to help an excellent charity by sending donations to the manager of the Strangers’ Home, West India Dock Road, London.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.