“‘But,’ said I, ‘d’ye mean to tell me that there’s no Act of Parliament, no statute, no sort of general understanding, no kind of provision—call it by what nameyou will—to protect a man from suffering heavily in his pocket because he goes out of his way to save fourteen human lives?’
“‘No,’ says he.
“‘And must I,’ says I, ‘be compelled to pay off my crew—which I’ve done—and ship another—also done—and accept a twopenny freight to the West Indies to enable me to reprovision my ship—all which I’ve had to do—with never a living being in this whole wide world made responsible, either as the manager of a fund set apart for such cases, or as the owner of the wrecked vessel, or as the British Government itself, whose business it should be to encourage acts of humanity shown to those sailors it’s always bragging about and leisurely looking after, for the loss I’ve been put to?’
“‘Well,’ says he, ‘on reflection I think ye might drop a line to the “authorities”’—you know who he meant, sir: ‘there’s a fund called the Mercantile Marine Fund, out of which, I think—mind, I only think—the “authorities” may, if they think fit, pay a certain sum, whatever it be, in satisfaction of salvage where nothing more valuable has been saved than fourteen human lives.’
“‘Well,’ says I, ‘I’ll write to them;’ and so I did. And what do you think was the result?”
“I cannot imagine,” I replied.
“I got no answer,” said he. “I got no answer,” he repeated, passionately; “and there’s no more chance of my getting an answer than there is of——” he paused, and added, “I was going to say than there is of my stopping to pick up more shipwrecked mariners—but God forgive me for the fancy! It’s not in my head, sir. But, putting all sentiment aside, wouldn’t you consider mine a hard case? And is my loss made the lighter tome because I am asked to reflect whether Ioughtto expect the authorities, or the owners, or anybody else to pay me for saving fourteen men from a dreadful death? Here, sir, you have one of the difficulties—one of the hundred difficulties—master-mariners have to contend with, as little known to or understood by landsmen as Jack comprehends the business of an attorney. It’s not for me to suggest what should be done. But when next you hear of shipwrecked sailors being abandoned by a passing ship, don’t be too quick to condemn the captain as a coward and a villain for leaving his fellow-beings to perish miserably, but say to yourself, ‘His heart was with them, and he’d have saved them if he had dared; but British civilization said, “Whatever you do you do at your own risk. If no harm befalls you, good and well; you shall pass by and nothing more be said or heard of your act; but if you lose money, don’t look tome,” says British civilization, “for the only answer you’ll get will be that you’re an impudent fellow to expect to recover any loss you incur in the service of humanity;”’and so the skipper, knowing this to be true, sails away, holding that his wife and children at home must not be beggared that a perishing crew may be rescued.”
Thus speaking, my friend the shipmaster rose abruptly from his chair, pulled his hat down to his ears, and impetuously wishing me good day, left me to lapse into a very brown, I may almost say a very black, study.
“I don’tknow what country he hailed from, I’m sure; but, thank the Lord, he wasn’t an Englishman,” said a smacksman, in the most fervent manner, to me the other day, speaking of Osmond Otto Brand, who was executed on the 23rd of May for the murder of an apprentice named William Papper or Pepper. At any other time than this I believe the story of that miscreant’s barbarity would have deeply stirred the public mind; but of late days[C]murder has become a common thing, much talked of and freely practised. People’s capacity of being horrified gets dulled by iteration of shocking news, and the significance of any one item in a blood-red catalogue loses value as a particular impression. Whatever effect, however, may have been produced by Brand’s crime on the lay mind outside the district where the murderer and his victim were known, there can be no doubt of the impression it has made upon smack-owners and smacksman all round the coast. There is scarcely a fisherman who has not the horrible story off by heart, who does not view the atrocious cruelties practised by the foreign smack-master as a foul disgrace to the fishing industries, and who does not indignantly lament that the men who helped Brand to slowly kill the miserable apprentice were not hangedalong with their skipper. One result of Brand’s crime was to cause some questions to be asked in the House of Commons. There was also some talk about the whole subject of fishing apprentices being considered by Government. If it is to be dealt with it will be as well, perhaps, first to give the Hull murder time to drop out of memory. To adopt it as a text for legislation would assuredly be to mislead honourable members who vote without looking very deep into the matters on which their opinions are challenged. If the condition of the smack apprentice is an improvable feature of current life, it is not so merely because Brand slowly tortured Pepper to death. We must shelve all thoughts of that murder, and ask questions without the least reference to it. What is the life of a fishing apprentice at sea? What is it ashore? How is he fed and clothed? What is the nature of his relations with the owners’ interests? What is the average character of the men with whom he is thrown? These and other questions I will endeavour to answer from inquiries I have made into the inner or hidden part of the lives of a body of lads of whom the public know less than they know of any other kind of seafaring people.
I once wrote an account of a voyage in a smack in the North Sea. One such journey is enough for a lifetime, and the recollection of it makes me here declare—and I am sure there is not a sailor living who will contradict me—that of all the several forms of seafaring life there is absolutely none comparable in severity, exposure, hardship, and stern peril to that of the smacksman. His vessel is a small one; his cabin a little darksome hole; his working hours are full of harsh toil; he has to give battle to the wildest weather, to struggle on for bread through storm and snow and frost,through the long blackness of the howling winter’s night, through the grey wilderness of a foaming ocean swept by winds as pitiless as the hand of death. No legislation can alter these conditions of his life. Philanthropy will have its cod and sole and turbot. The fish must be caught, but caught in such a manner that those who shoot their trawls for them catch other things besides—a wild roughness of bearing, a defiance of civilized instincts, a sense of outlawed and neglected life that brings with it a fixed conviction of social immunity. “I’m a fisherman myself, sir,” a man once said to me; “and I’ll allow that there are many well-mannered, sober, steady men among us; but, taking us all round, you’ll not find a coarser set of human beings in the world; and, if you want to know the reason, you’ve only got to look at yonder smack, heading away into the North Sea, where, maybe, she’ll be heaving and tossing about for weeks, with ne’er a proper influence in the shape of books or company for the men to come at.”
Take now the fishing apprentice. He comes to this severe, coarse life, himself most often of the coarsest. He is fresh from a reformatory, from a union, or, worse still, from the gutter. His associates are men who were themselves apprentices; lads who came one knows not from where, the refuse of the street manufactured into marine objects by the owner’s boots, and breeches, and coats; and hammered into sprawling, unwieldy smacksmen by the hard blows of their calling. They know all about dandy-bridles and trawl-warps; but they do not know how to read, and they do not know how to write, and they do not know how to think. Their home is the public-house when ashore, and they take the morals of that sort of home to sea with them.The apprentice comes among them, gets knocked about, picks up their oaths and their shore theories, and imitates them masterfully enough to be able to hand on their conditions with an added flourish, when he is out of his time and has boys under him to swear at. Now, what is legislation going to do here? You have the roughest life in the world; the roughest lads in the world recruits its ranks. What is to be done, short of what a few philanthropists are endeavouring to do, to prevent them from being the roughest men in the world? I cannot see that the smack-owners are to blame. They must have apprentices. They will take the best of such boys as they can get; and it is really carrying idealism too high to expect that these men, who have to work hard themselves, who have to be down among their vessels, seeing that their men do not run away, that they are properly engaged in preparing for the voyage, and so forth,—I say you cannot expect that these men, who come home of a night tired out, should turn schoolmaster and parson to their apprentices, and set them to moral jobs, when they are ready to abscond—with their master’s clothes also—if they are not allowed their evening out after being at work all day up to their knees in mud, scrubbing the vessel’s bottom. No one with any knowledge of the smack-owner’s calling, of his hardly earned money, of his risks and anxieties, will envy him. Boys are boys all the world over, and that smack-boys should be peculiarly troublesome is not hard to account for on reference to their antecedents—that is, the antecedents of most of them. “The law has come between us and the boys,” was said to me, “and makes our case harder than it was. We have no remedy now. Time was when we could send a constable after a lad when he wasoff; but the law has stopped that. We have got to wait a couple of days, and then apply for a warrant, by which time the boy’s t’other end of England. Take the case of a vessel about to start. A boy refuses to turn to. I’m on the spot, and call a policeman, and in his presence repeat the order. Boy still refuses. Policeman then walks him off afore a magistrate, who fines him, and I have to pay the fine if I want to get the vessel to sea; for if I don’t pay then the boy’s locked up, and the vessel detained two or three days whilst I’m seeking another boy.” The hardship is clear enough, though I for one should be heartily sorry to see it rectified by a return to the old and brutal system of locking up lads in gaol at the will of the smack-owner. Let me briefly place the case of the owners before you with regard to their apprentices. To begin with, the lads come from all parts, as I have said, and are bound apprentice for terms of three, five, or six years. If bound by institutions such as workhouses, reformatories, and the like, a certain sum of money is paid with them—in some cases £10, enough to purchase an outfit. I asked a smack-owner what he reckoned to be the average yearly cost of a lad’s clothes, and he said £8. “A pair of sea-boots alone,” said he, “cost £1 16s.” Boys, however, when they first go to sea do not get sea-boots, but “bluchers,” the cost of which is about 12s. a pair. When the lads are in harbour the smack-owner has to house them. In many instances they sleep in his own house, or in lodgings provided for them. If they do not take their meals with their masters they live as well; dining from the same joint and getting much the same fare as he has for tea and breakfast. There may be exceptions to this; but it is a practice so general that it may be taken as a rule. When ashorethe owners also keep the boys furnished with a little pocket-money. The lad, for instance, who acts as cook at sea gets, when in harbour, 6d.a night, the deck-boy 9d., and the third-hand apprentice 1s.These payments are made during what is termed “settling time;” but, in addition to this money, the owner gives them the small fish caught during the voyage, called “stocker-bait,” the produce of which yields each lad an average sum of 1s.a week all the year round. Whilst in port the apprentice’s work mainly consists in scrubbing the vessel’s bottom, touching her up with the paint-brush, preparing nets for the next voyage, etc. At sea the lesser duties are assigned him. Suppose a smack carries three boys; the youngest will probably act as cook. When the net is hove up his post is in the hold, where he coils away the trawl-warp, which done he returns to his cooking. The deck-boy’s post is on deck when the men are below taking their meals. He steers the vessel in the morning until noon or 12.30; then gets his dinner, and turns in. The duty of a third-hand apprentice is that of a man. He is commonly within two years of his time; and, though he is still an apprentice, he is generally treated as a well-seasoned and fully developed smacksman. Talking recently with a body of smack-boys, I asked them what sort of grub they got aboard.
“Good enough, master.”
“What do you have for breakfast?” said I.
“Well, we has the choice of tea or coffee or cocoa; we has roast fish and butter and soft tack—as long as it’ll last—and then we has biscuit.”
“And what do you get for dinner?”
“Why, fresh and corned beef for a spell; and when that’s ate up we has fish, and suet pudden, and cabbage—as long as it lasts—and carrots and parsnips when they’re in, and ’taties.”
“And your tea?”
“Tea’s the same as breakfast.”
“Do you get any supper?”
“Ay, master; ’twixt eleven and one, ’cording as the watch is called, we has cheese and pickles and biled fish, or if there’s any cold meat left we has that.”
When it is considered where these lads come from, this fare is scarcely of a kind to justify them in grumbling and running away. Indeed, of all seafarers, smacksmen live the best. When Jack is gnawing upon a piece of junk, and knocking his biscuit upon the deck to get the worms out of it, the fisherman is regaling himself with the best of the produce of his trawls, or fattening himself on hearty fresh beef and—if it be Sunday—on good plum-duff. The apprentice fares just the same. And even in other ways he is better off than if he were in a ship’s forecastle; as, for instance, in the matter of clothes, the owner being obliged to keep him well furnished in that respect, and to equip him with garments a hundredfold warmer and better than those which most sailors take to sea with them. The whole truth is, so far as I can judge, the comfort and happiness and prospects of the smack apprentice depend upon his own conduct. Owners, like all other employers of labour, want the best hands they can get, and smacksmen are glad to have smart and willing lads along with them. It is a rough life—the whole marine calling is a rough life, and there is none rougher than a fisherman’s. If a boy is dull and slow, obstinate and sulky, he will be shoved and kicked about, and that would be his lot in any ship he went aboard of; but if a boy is willing, does his best, lends a hand cheerfully,and is a steady lad, then he will be well treated, the men will like him, the owner favour him, and before long he will find himself in command. He has inducements to persevere and behave well such as no other ship-boy gets that I know of; for if he has served his time honestly, and shown such promise as the smack-owner wants to see, then, when he is out of his time, he is furnished with £20 worth of clothes, and a sovereign or two for his pocket. I am aware that all smack-owners are not so liberal, and I have heard of some men sending their apprentices, when out of their time, adrift in the clothes they stood up in, and forcing them to seek work from other masters. But the rule is to treat a good lad liberally when out of his time.
Whoever has examined into the fishing industry must be well aware that smack-owners have substantial cause of grievance in respect of their treatment by their apprentices. An owner told me that a boy came to him for a berth; the lad was in rags and starving, and so filthy that the owner would not send him to his house where his apprentices were. He walked with him to the Sailor’s Home, had him bathed and scrubbed and fed, paid nearly a pound for him for seven days at the Home, purchased for him some clothes that cost over £2, and then on the morning of the day on which the vessel was to sail the boy ran away, and the smack had to be detained until another lad could be shipped. Instances of such behaviour are numerous, and might really account for, if they should not justify, a very much harsher discipline and sterner kind of treatment than I have been able to discover. For always let us remember that the smack-owner has, as a rule, been a fisherman himself, gone through the mill, suffered all the hardships of the life, and, though ashore, has to work harder forhis living than ever he did when at sea. He is in this position, that he is only able to insure for total loss. He belongs to a club whose members subscribe in proportion to the number of vessels they severally enter. “Only yesterday,” said a smack-owner, “one of my vessels came in; she had lost fifteen fathom of warp, two main-bridles, dandy-bridle, trawl-warp tackle, two trawl-heads, a trawl-beam, a ground-rope, mortices, head-line, and other gear. I have to bear all that. There is Mr. ——. In one night of storm his loss amounted, in insurance of other vessels which had foundered, to £245, together with eight sets of gear, valued at £60 a set.” It is a vocation full of risk; scores of men may be beggared by a gale; and, seeing the important part that smack apprentices play in the fishing interests, it is reasonable that we should survey the question from every point of view, before hastily forming conclusions on the basis of such an incident as that of the recent Hull atrocity. Of course, there are savages and bullies among smacksmen, as there are the whole wide world over, whether among landgoers or seafarers. But whatever might have been the state of things in former days, I do not believe that, at the present time, there is half the ill usage to be found aboard smacks that I know exists at sea in other kinds of vessels. The crime of the murderer Brand necessarily gives a malignant colouring to every smack-master’s report of having lost a boy by drowning whilst at sea; but the old salt maxim, “A fisherman’s walk, three steps and overboard,” should go a long way in explanation of many of the disasters that befall smack-boys. An accident aboard a smack happens in a breath. A lad dips over the side for a bucket of water; the vessel is sailing fast, the bucket pulls the lad over the rail, and he is astern and drowned before thefellow at the tiller can sing out. Or a boy goes to look over the stern to see the white water running away; the boom jibes and flings him into the sea. I should very gravely question whether a deliberate murder could be done without some one of the men reporting it. No doubt black deeds have been perpetrated in fishing-smacks. For instance, a story is told of a lad who was frying some fish; through his neglect the fish were burnt, whereupon the skipper, smelling the fumes, bundled below, seized the boy’s hands, and thrust them into the boiling fat. The instant he was released, the boy rushed on deck and flung himself overboard, and was drowned. One might conceive of a man hating another and jogging him into the sea on a dark night. But the statistics of loss of life among smacksmen and smack apprentices at sea must reduce such dreadful possibilities to a very small number; and of that small number it is rare indeed to find one to which any better basis can be furnished than suspicion. So far as the professional life of the smack apprentice goes—his treatment at sea, his food, his clothes, and the like—it is difficult to guess, having regard to the unavoidable roughness and hardship of his calling, how his position is to be improved. You cannot make a drawing-room of a smack; there will be always hard work and hard words where there is hard weather; and there is not much hope of polished airs and genteel behaviour amongst a race of men who sleep in holes at which a blackbeetle might stand aghast, and who are boxed up for many months together in the year in a bit of a fabric whose forecastle is full of raffle, and whose hold is full of dead fish. But ashore no doubt something may be done for the lads to advance them morally, and make real men of them when they come to be men. It would be well if there were a few moreSmack-boys’ Homes than there are. There is one in Ramsgate the theory of which is exceedingly good. The manager writes to a school or reformatory for boys, the conditions of acceptance being that the lads are healthy and strong and of good character; also that enough money be paid down to furnish each youth with a fishing outfit and a Sunday suit. The boys being got together in this fashion, the smack-owners are asked to take apprentices from them. This many of them do, I believe, on the understanding that the boys lodge at the Home when in port at a cost of 2s.a day each. By this means the lads are brought under a certain moral influence. They are watched over by the clergy associated with the Home, attend service in a chapel that adjoins the building, and are provided with the means of harmlessly amusing themselves in the evenings. The sole objection is—and it is a commercial one—the expensiveness of the arrangement to smack-owners who have several apprentices. “If I had but one apprentice,” said an owner, “2s.a day would be cheap enough; but I have ten, who at 2s.a day per boy would be a good deal dearer to me at the Home than I find them in my own house.” This is a point I will not deal with, but in all other respects I know of nothing that can be advanced against smack-boys’ homes. Smacksmen make fine sailors; the navy and the merchant service ought to have no better recruiting field than the British fisheries, and therefore something of Imperial significance should enter into consideration of the smack-boy’s moral and material welfare. You are not going to make him a refined person, but you can teach him to write and read, to have a reverence for God, to think of himself as a responsible being. An early training of this kind will not impair his hardiness, but it will put him higher than he is as ahuman creature. The lower orders of smack-owners let him run loose of a night when he is ashore, he is quite uncared for, and in the prison days he passed a good deal more of his time in gaol than at sea. “Making every allowance for second or third convictions,” says the Rev. J. E. Brennan, of Ramsgate, writing in 1878, “we are not far from the truth in stating that 50 per cent. of these boys go to prison during some part of their service.” These incessant punishments naturally led people to infer the worst of the fishing life. “Think what a calling it must be,” they would say, “when boys actually beg to be sent to prison rather than on board these smacks.” But Mr. Brennan justly, I think, attributes the lads’ defection to their neglected condition, to the absence of all suitable guardianship. “The scenes of drunkenness and sin,” he writes, “of which some of these lads are cognizant I will not describe. Let it suffice to say that many a pure-minded boy has in a few months become utterly corrupted, and his character, it may be, utterly ruined for ever.” He is writing of the boys of one town; but his remarks are equally, and even more, applicable to such places as Grimsby and Hull and Yarmouth. Here, then, is the real evil. It is not that the boys are maltreated at sea to any extent outside the proverbial rough usage of the marine life; it is not that smack-owners—the majority of them certainly—do not feed and clothe them well, nor that they exact unreasonable share of labour from them; it is that, when ashore and during the evenings, they wander about, fall into bad company, acquire habits of intemperance, become unspeakable nuisances to the police, to the inhabitants, and to their own masters, run away, and leave owners in the lurch and practically now without redress; and so, in a large proportion of instances, endin becoming untrustworthy men, worthless sailors, people whom nobody will employ. Smack-owners, as I have said, cannot be expected to look after the morals of the lads; their hands are full of business, they come home wearied, and, even with the best will in the world, they must lack in ways it would take too much space to explain here the opportunities to care for the boys as they are cared for at a Home. What is really wanted is a Home wherever there are fishing-apprentices, an institution conducted with something of the self-sacrificing spirit that characterizes the Ramsgate Home; where the boys can be comfortably housed and tended at a small expense to their employers; where they may be educated and helped and rewarded for their merits as seafaring lads; and any one truly concerned in the welfare of our mercantile marine, and who holds that we should neglect no source from which we may derive the forces that keep our nation dominant upon the sea, will believe that the State could make no wiser disbursement than in helping in the establishment of such institutions, and contributing to them until they become self-supporting.
I neverpass Gravesend without thinking of poor Mrs. Henry Fielding’s dreadful toothache, and the trouble her husband and the surgeon, “the best reputed operator in Gravesend,” took to persuade the suffering lady to keep the hollow tooth a little longer. To what extent has the old town changed since the author of “Tom Jones” surveyed it from the deck of the little old vessel that carried him to Lisbon to die there? Much should have happened in a hundred and thirty years; yet in one respect Gravesend remains unaltered; it is still, so to speak, the same old point of nautical departure; ships still “drop” down abreast of it, and bring up to receive their passengers; and yet it remains the one spot of English soil which, when left astern, makes you feel that the great ocean is all before you, and that your voyage has commenced indeed. But is not human nature the same in all ages? Fielding’s description of sitting at dinner and being startled by the bowsprit of “a little ship called a cod smack,” driving in through the cabin window, and his account of the sea-blessings showered upon each other by the crews of the two vessels, might stand for a picture of to-day’s river life. “It is difficult,” he says, “I think, to assign a satisfactory reason why sailors in general should, ofall others, think themselves entirely discharged from the common bands of humanity, and should seem to glory in the language and behaviour of savages.” His opinion of Jack as a gentleman was not ill founded. But what would he think now if living, and with the memory in him of his uncouth sea-swab of a skipper (who, to the delight of posterity, fell upon his knees at last and begged Fielding to forgive him), he should step on board the 4000-ton steamer that lay abreast of Gravesend, with blue-peter at her masthead, on the day I happened to find myself in that town?
Not much imagination is needed, I think, to extinguish the monster fabrics which day after day lie floating motionless abreast of Gravesend, and refurnish the broad and quivering stretch of waters with the marine phantoms of olden times. The Indiaman of 500 tons is viewed with astonishment at her prodigious dimensions as she lies straining at her hempen cable, the sunshine sparkling in the big windows which embellish her huge quarter-galleries, her stern towering out of the water like a castle, a wondrous complication of head-boards and massive timbers distinguishing her bows, long streamers whipping from every masthead, and rows of cannon bristling along her tall, weather-tossed sides. You have little pinks, and snows, and cutters of fifty tons burden which have made part of a convoy from the West Indies, and have outweathered the heavy Atlantic surges as bravely as any Cunard liner of to-day does. Here, too, are colliers, “ships of great bulk,” Fielding calls them, though there is scarcely a skipper of an old boom-foresailAnna MariaorJohn and Susannow afloat who would not hold them capacious only as long-boats. To appreciate all that the present means, you must step back and then lookahead. Only the other day I saw a Blackwall liner towing up the river. It is not so very long ago when that ship would have been thought a wonderfully large vessel. Handsome she is, with her painted ports and frigate-like look, though her main-royal mast was uncomfortably stayed aft when I saw her, and she wants a prettier stem-piece; but as to her size, she seemed little more than a toy as she swam past the line of huge towering iron hulls. You think of the scene of the river as Fielding surveyed it, then as you remember it twenty years since, then as you see it now; and your wonder is, What will the end be should the end ever arrive? What will be the bulk and vastness of the fabrics in the good time coming?
“The new docks,” said a waterman to me, pointing across the river with a finger like a roll of old parchment, “are to start from yonder p’int, and end right aways down there;” and the sweep of his finger seemed to embrace some leagues of the opposite low, flat, treeless, and mud-coloured shore. Assuredly all that can be given will be wanted. Our marine giantesses are multiplying faster than they drown; and it seemed to me that there was something prophetic in my waterman’s finger when he made the gesture of it to signify miles instead of acres. But many changes must take place and a long time elapse before Gravesend loses its old distinctive tradition as a point of departure. Think of the thousands of eyes which have grown dim as they watched the old town veer away astern, and of the thousands of hearts which have leapt in transport as from mouth to mouth the cry has gone round, “Gravesend is in sight.” No other place—I am speaking, of course, of vessels bound Thames-wise—gives one such a sense of home as this. Jack may havethe English coast in view pretty nearly the whole way from the Isle of Wight as high as the South Foreland; he may bring up in the Downs, and have Deal and Walmer close aboard, and hear the church bells ringing, and see the people walking on the beach; he may take his fill of Ramsgate and Margate as he rounds the great headland; but somehow or other it is not until Gravesend has hove in sight, and he sees the shipping abreast of it, and the river curving into Northfleet Hope, that Jack feels home is reached at last; that the voyage is as good as over, and that in a few hours the noble ship that has carried him in safety through storm and calm, through sunshine and blackness, will be at rest, silent as the grave—as though, after the long and fitful fever of the deep, she was sleeping well.
These are the gayer thoughts, for they come with the hurricane-chorus that breaks from the forecastle of yonder ship as her crew get the anchor, now that the first of the flood has come, and the tug alongside is already to forge ahead and tauten the hawser. “Oh, when we get to the dockyard gates!” shout the poor fellows gleefully, with as much voice as a voyage from San Francisco has left in them; and you think that to-night there will be some middling salt and tough yarns spun in more than one grog-shop, whilst already Jack’s most unlovely Nan—as Charles Dickens only too truthfully described her—is overhauling her few penn’orths of finery in anticipation of the treats which are to be got out of a fund made up of £3 10s. a month.
But Gravesend appeals most from the other side of the picture—the outward-bound side. I was favoured with an immense illustration of this. A big steamer, with a black-and-white funnel, lay abreast of the Gravesend pier, with her decks literally choked withemigrants. She should have sailed the day before, I was told; but the emigrants—mainly foreigners—had rebelled; declared they had been promised a steamer belonging to another company, and refused to start in the vessel they were packed aboard of. Some one on the Gravesend pier told me that a thousand people had been put into her that morning. There was hardly room for a pin along the bulwarks. Clustering masses of human heads blackened the rail, as though all the crows in Kent had swooped down upon that great iron steamship, and were taking their ease upon her sides. I had no excuse to board her, but I managed to gather a good idea of her living freight by taking a boat and pulling round her. I had seen a very similar class of foreign emigrants in a North-country port, and had made a short voyage in company with five or six hundred of them, but that crowd did not impress me as this did. There was something very pathetic and melancholy in the postures and looks of this large concourse of people, who overhung the water, and gazed, with little of movement among them, at the shores on either hand. The thought of this mass of human souls afloat on the deep with nothing between them and eternity but a thin surface of iron, combined with the speculations as to the future into which the mind was irresistibly impelled; the new lands which awaited them; the long—perhaps everlasting—separation from their mother country; the numberless interests they represented; and the rapid growth of that amazing Western Empire, whose humanizing and civilizing progress was strangely illustrated by the embarkation of this immense assembly—the freight of a single ship, too!—for its ports, contributed to make the picture of theHolland—for that was the name of the steamer—atruly impressive and memorable one. It was a warm, sunny afternoon; far down the Hope, trending north-wise athwart Gravesend Reach, were the white heights of Cliffe, sparkling like marble in the brilliant radiance; the long stretch of water was crowded with shipping, whose bunting and variously-coloured sides filled the eye with colour; Gravesend lay in a heavy mass of grouping close down to the water’s edge, with a lumber of huddled houses to the right of the new Falcon Hotel, here and there a window flashing back the sunlight, and the church bell ringing a pleasant farewell to a Peninsular and Oriental steamer, whose head was being canted towards the north shore by a tug that she might have a clear road before her engines were set in motion; whilst, some distance up the river, vessels which had passed Gravesend twenty minutes before were fading upon the blueish haze of smoke from tall chimneys and fog from the marshes, the spars of the Blackwall liner looming huge and vague above the land which concealed her hull.
The very beauty of the picture furnished an element of melancholy to the crowded steamship, and the rows upon rows of faces which were all steadily gazing landwards. I watched the Peninsular and Oriental steamer get under way, and contrasted her with the emigrant ship. The big deck-house or saloon of the former, with the two funnels rearing out of it, gave her, to my eye, a somewhat heavy look forward; but it was something to remember to run the eye from her almost unpeopled decks—nobody to be seen but some men in uniform on the bridge, a Lascar in a turban squatting in the after-awning, holding a little white flag in his hand, and one or two figures in the forward part of the ship—to the motionless black hull of the emigrant steamer, teemingwith life, and the bulwarks literally creeping with faces. It is a responsible thing to carry mails, to be answerable for a mass of specie, and for the lives of a number of gentlemen and ladies; but think of standing on the deck of a steamer on a dark night, and reflecting that under your feet lie sleeping a thousand human beings, not counting your crew, and that the very existence of this vast company of fellow-creatures depends upon your vigilance, judgment, skill as a seaman. I believe the sympathy and wonder of any man who saw that crowded vessel and gave attention to the sight, would have gone to the captain—to the seaman who was to hold all those lives in his hand, so to speak. Who would willingly accept such a responsibility? and who, finding men equal to the discharge of these enormous trusts, would not gladly lend a hand to smooth their path for them by denouncing and demanding the removal of whatever unfairly obstructs and harasses them—the action of unjustly-constituted courts, the decisions of empirics, and of people who could not tell the difference between a gin-block and a dead-eye, the iniquities of the modern ship-building yard, and the hundred small red-tape worries which makes the shipmaster’s life a burden to him ashore?
How much Gravesend is a point of arrival and departure I was reminded as I stood overhanging the stone projection and looking down on the landing-steps. From a large sailing-ship towing up the river, a waterman’s boat shot away and made for the Gravesend pier. In it was a middle-aged man, bronzed with the suns and winds of four months, and dressed in clothes which it scarcely needed a tailor to guess were of an Antipodean cut. His luggage was heaped about him in the bottom of the boat. I watched him land, and followed him ashe came up the steps, when a rush was made by a little group of people dressed in mourning, and in a breath a woman, tossing up her black veil, was in his arms, and sobbing on his shoulder. Those sombre garments threw a shadow upon the happiness of this meeting; but still, he had come back, he was well, and by-and-by the dead, never to be forgotten, let us hope, would be buried indeed, and the living heart reassert itself. The watermen seemed to know when that ship had left her port on the other side of the world, and so I found that this man had been four months in making his way to England. And how much longer had he been absent? But then think of the glory of the green trees and fragrant beauties of our English May to this traveller fresh from one hundred and twenty days of salt water! Figure the flavour he will find in a cut from a prime sirloin! the sweetness of “soft tack”—ay, even such bread as is now baked—after the bilious little bits of dough manufactured in the galley by the baker, and sent aft under the satirical title of “rolls!”
Scarcely had the sunburnt man and his friends disappeared, when there came a little figure that I could not view without lively concern and compassion. This was a small midshipman, resplendent in the newest of uniforms. The buttons glittered on his tiny jacket, and the brand-new badge on his cap shone like a freshly minted sovereign. There lay his ship a short way down the stream—a good-looking iron vessel, very long and very narrow, without an inch of that “swell of the sides” one loves to see, as I had taken notice when she slewed on her heel to the first of the flood and gave us a view of herself end on, with double topgallant yards, skysail poles, and the capacity for an immense spread of lower cloths. The poor little chap took a long squint athis new home, and then a peep at the lady alongside of him, who, from the strong family likeness between them, I reckoned at once to be his mamma. She had been crying, her eyes were red, but she looked at her youngster with a kind of quivering smile now, for it would clearly not do to capsize his sensibilities at this most trying point. He had insisted upon going to sea, no doubt, much against poor mamma’s will. He had fine notions of the marine calling, I dare say, all acquired by days and nights of study of nautical romances; and here he was ready to sail away, handsomely brass bound, mamma red-eyed at his side, bravely fighting with her heart. Hundreds of men have gone through this, and something betwixt a laugh and a sigh will come from them when they think of this little brass bounder and look back to their first voyage. What ideas had the young fellow formed of the life? But, alas! what mariner has not allowed his boyhood to gull him in the same way? “There is,” says Dana, “a witchery in the sea, its songs and stories, and in the mere sight of a ship and the sailor’s dress, especially to a young mind, which has done more to man navies and fill merchantmen than all the pressgangs in Europe. I have known a young man with such a passion for the sea, that the very creaking of a block stirred his imagination so that he could hardly keep his feet upon dry ground.” These sentences recurred to me as I watched the little midshipman. But for how many days was the spell of the ocean’s witchery to lie upon him? Probably, if they had head winds down Channel, he would be sick of the life and longing to be ashore in a warm bed, with his mother to tuck him up, and a good breakfast to go downstairs to next morning, before they were abreast of the Start. “Oh, my golly!” said a negro whom I met at Gravesend,selling flowers, “S’elp me, sah, as I stan’ here, I’d gib dis basket—yas, ah would—and all de close horff my back, for a good blow-out of lobscouse!” But that little middy will have to be a black man if he wants to enjoy sea-fare as my negro-friend did. A few days of dark and evil-looking pork, and salt beef out of which he might cut models of ships for his friends at home, and “duff” made of copper-skimmings, not to mention the being routed out in his watch below, and having to tumble up aloft in a night blind with storm and rain, are pretty sure to disillusion him. But his buttons are new, and his hopes are young and fresh; there is no tarnish of salt water on either as yet; so let him take his mother’s yearning, passionate kiss, and bundle into the boat and be off. She could not bear to see him row away, and the moment he went down the steps she hurried off; whilst he, to show what a man he was, squatted himself in the stern sheets, and pulled out a short wooden pipe and lighted it. In a few minutes he was out in the stream. I watched him get alongside his ship, trot up the gangway ladder, and vanish in a kind of twinkle of new brass and gilt over the side.
It is these constant comings and goings which give Gravesend its interest and its memories. One hour it is a party of people newly arrived from the bottom of the world; another it is a couple of drunken firemen tumbling into a boat, and shoving off for some lump of a steamer that lies abreast of the Obelisk or Denton Mill. But, in spite of the heaps of nautical conditions which beset it, Gravesend cannot be called wholly marine. It may be thought fishy, but it certainly is not salt. Contrast it with Deal, which it resembles in its lower streets. The wind may pipe never so merrily, but there is no shrewd briny pungency in the shrilling gusts as theysweep round the corners. The boatmen have a fresh water look. Their sou’westers and jerseys cannot deceive the practised eye. They can handle an oar capitally; but they have not the toughened and bronzed and Channel-tossed look of the fellows whom you encounter lolling in blanket trousers over the Ramsgate piers, or arguing in groups at the entrance of the Margate jetties, or heightening the picturesque appearance of the Deal and Folkestone shingle. Yet I cannot conceive of any place better calculated to delight a man of maritime studies and scenes than Gravesend. You may linger all day on the queer-looking roofed-in pier, with the old barge moored against it, and never feel weary. Hour after hour unfolds the canvas of a never-ending panorama of shipping. Picture after picture goes by—the great ocean steamship, the little ratching ketch, the sturdy old collier, the white and shining yacht, the large and loftily rigged ship, the eager tug hissing through the trembling current, and all the life and light and colour and wondrous transformations of the river take a certain character of remoteness akin to unreality, as though what you gazed at was nothing but a series of noble paintings, indeed, from the quietude that prevails about you; an atmosphere of lazy stillness broken by the muffled, rushing sound of the current sweeping under the pier, the dulled voices of men conversing outside the wooden structure, and the straining noise of boats as the tide sets the little craft chafing one another’s sides.
A fewdays after the dreadful gale that had wrecked whole fleets of smacks belonging to the eastern and north-eastern ports, and drowned many hundreds of fishermen, I was visited by a Hull smacksman, who came to tell me that he had lost a son in one of the vessels which had gone down on the Dogger Bank during the storm, and to inform me of the misery and destitution into which the widows and children of the poor drowned men were plunged. He told me in a rough, plain, earnest way how his son was to have been married to a young girl on his return, and how the poor lad had saved up a few pounds to purchase a little furniture for the home, which she was preparing, when the news reached her that the smack in which her sweetheart was had gone down with all hands; how, in house after house, down whole streets, there was a constant sound of wailing and moaning, with misery and hunger indoors, amongst the weeping women and the sobbing children; and, said my fisherman to me, though God knew he was a poor man, yet such was the suffering he had witnessed, so unspeakably great was the calamity that had overtaken the fishing population of Hull—and of other ports, but he spoke of Hull because he belonged to it—that, had the thirty shillings he subscribed to the fund for the relief of these widows and orphans been thelast bit of money he had in the world, he must have given it and taken his chance for himself.
The subject was a deeply interesting one to me, who had lived among fishermen, written about them, knew their heroism well, their hardships, the simple-heartedness of them. We got talking about the smacksman’s life, his risks, of various features connected with his calling; and, as the subject is one that has been commended to the British public in an appeal for charity for those whom the frightful storm bereaved, I offer no excuse for repeating in print some of the observations made by this smacksman on his own vocation. His reference to what is known as the “boxing system” enabled me to lead off with my questions. The term boxing, I may say, is applied to the conveyance of fish in boats from the smacks to the steamers which bring the fish home. As the vessels fill up with fish they transfer them to steamers, which, by relieving them of their freight, enables them to remain for weeks on the fishing ground.
“Is it a fact,” I inquired, “that smacksmen object to the boxing system?”
“It is, sir,” was the reply.
“Why?”
“Because it’s dangerous to life, sir. It keeps men working for a considerable time in open boats in all kinds of weather. It answers the owner’s purpose; he shares in the profits of carrying the fish, and it enables him to keep his vessel at sea as long as it is possible for her to remain there; and by this means the men are deprived of all home comforts and of the management of their families.”
“What is the size of the boats employed in carrying fish from the smacks to the steam cutters?”
“Well, their length’ll be about 20 ft., breadth 6 ft., and depth 3 ft.”
“And these boats the men have to launch in heavy weather?”
“Yes, often in weather that may be called heavy. The risk is increased by the peculiar circumstances under which the men are placed whilst working at the boxing system; for you’ll hear again and again of their shoving the whole of a night’s catch into the boat at once, in order to secure a quick despatch and obtain the earliest possible market.”
“How is the Dogger Bank relished as a fishing ground?”
“Well,” he replied, “it passes by the name of ‘The Cemetery’ among us. In the winter time, I don’t suppose there’s a more dangerous place in the world. With strong winds from the N.E., veering to the N.W., there come the heavy seas from the Atlantic—if you can call the ocean to the norrards of the North Sea by that name—which strike the rising ground of the bank and turn the water into a boiling caldron. It was there where the smacks went down. The seas just coiled over and fairly broke upon ’em, smothering ’em, smashing in their decks, stamping ’em out as you might grind a beetle out of sight with your heel.”
“Are your smacks supplied with barometers? I mean by that, have they any means of knowing when to expect foul weather?”
“No, sir; they’re not generally supplied. One firm owning about twenty sail of vessels, who always work on the single-boat system in winter, provide their vessels with barometers. I should think they must be very useful instruments,” said he, speaking as though he had never been shipmates with one; “and I may here add thatnone of those twenty vessels alluded to were lost. The majority of us smacksmen have nothing to tell the weather by except practical experience.”
“But couldn’t the admiral signal—couldn’the, at least, be furnished with a barometer?”
“No doubt,” he replied. “But smacks get scattered, and it would be best for each master to understand the weather for himself. The admiral is more for rallying of us. He has his job cut out for him after a storm. His general scheme is to fall in with a steam carrier, and then sail to the ground from which he’s been driven by the gale, expecting the rest of the fleet to do likewise; but it often happens that many days pass before they’re able to get together, and this brings heavy losses among the fishermen, who, having no ice, are forced to find the admiral before they can start fishing afresh.”
“What difference is there in the mode of fishing among the Hull, Grimsby, Ramsgate, Penzance, and other smacks?”
“Vessels belonging to Hull, Grimsby, Ramsgate, and Lowestoft use the trawl net; but the Penzance boats are what is called ‘drifters,’ or herring boats.”
“I asked that question,” said I, “in order to inquire what kind of fishing—that is, which sort of voyage—is most in favour among smacksmen.”
“Why, in winter time we like best the single-boat system—when a smack goes out and gets what fish she can, and returns. This system does not require us to use small boats. It pays just as well as the other system, and is less dangerous in other directions than that of doing away with ‘boxing,’ as it leads to vessels scattering, and helps in that manner to lessen the risk of collision. We don’t object to the boxing system in summer, but itoughtn’t to be practised in winter. That’s what we think.”
“Smack-owners manage to secure themselves, don’t they?”
“Well, yes, by what’s termed mutual insurance, which provides for total loss and for damage to a certain amount apart from fishing gear. Masters don’t much like these here insurance companies. They’re too despotic. I’ll tell you what they do, sir: they won’t allow a master the right of defending himself against any charge that’s brought against him before them. Why, they think nothing of suspending a man from acting as master for a couple of years, perhaps for nothing worse than an error of judgment which the Board of Trade Commissioner would have been satisfied to reprimand him for.”
“Do smacksmen make a provision for their families by any method of insurance or clubbing?”
“Yes, sir,” he answered; “as a rule they do. There is a Fishermen’s Widow and Orphan Society, which, for payment of one shilling a month, pays a widow £20 or £25, according to the time her husband has been a member; and there is also a Friendly Protection Society, numbering at Hull 700 members, which gives sick pay for certain periods and £12 at death. Both these institutions do a great deal of good. Many fishermen also join the local friendly societies.”
“But a large number, I suppose, do not subscribe, and it is the widows and children of those who have been plunged into immediate destitution by their husbands’ death?”
“Yes, sir. But it is not always possible to subscribe; there are too many of us, and some go without work for weeks.”
“What is the average tonnage of the Hull and Grimsby smacks?”
“About seventy tons.”
“What is your opinion of them as seaworthy vessels?”
“Well, sir, the build and behaviour of them are first rate; but a great many are ill found, and are in a bad state as concerns leakage; and I can assure you that among us fishermen there is a strong feeling that there ought to be Government inspection of fishing vessels by practical men.”
“Will you explain to me the meaning of shares, and how they are proportioned?”
“It’s in this way,” said he: “the net proceeds are divided into eight shares; the master takes 1⅜ share, the mate 1⅛ share, and the owner 5½ shares, out of which he has to pay three boys or casual hands, who receive together on an average about £2 2s. a week, and he has also to find his vessel’s outfit.”
“Is it true that smacksmen object to lifebelts?”
“No; they don’t object generally. Some do, on the ground of their being too cumbersome to work in. They ought to be worn in ‘boxing.’ There’s a particular danger in that system which I forgot to mention: it’s that of collisions, which are constantly happening owing to the men being anxious to get their fish on board the steam cutter, to do which they all sail to her as close as they can, with their boats in tow and two hands in each boat.”
“And what other special dangers are there,” said I, “connected with your calling?”
“Well,” he replied, “answering that question, as concerning the single-boat system, which I’ve explained, I can but say that what the smacksman has to contendwith are just the ordinary perils of a seaman’s life, such as shipping heavy seas which wash us overboard, and being dragged into the sea whilst drawing water, hauling in the net, and the likes of that. But the boxing system adds to these dangers by the risk of collision, the capsizing of boats, and the uselessness of the casual hands, the best of them preferring to ship in vessels on the single-boat system.”
“Your casual hands, as you call them, touch the apprentice question. What is your opinion of smack-boys’ homes?”
“Why, that they’re a great advantage to all fishing ports and to the lads themselves, if the homes are properly managed.”
“Can you say that smack-boys are ill-treated at sea?”
“No, I can’t, sir. There are a few exceptions, but my experience is that the boys are treated with uniform kindness.”
“To return to the question of loss of life,” said I, “amongst smacksmen, what proposals have you to offer to diminish it?”
“Well, sir, if I had my way, I’d totally abolish the boxing system from the end of September till the end of March. That alone would greatly reduce the death-rate among fishermen; and I’d also have Government inspectors to survey the vessels, and see that they were found, and equipped, and ballasted, and so on.”
“And now,” I asked, referring to the vessels which trade among the smacks in spirits and tobacco, “what can you tell me about the system called ‘coopering’?”
“Why,” he answered, warming up, “my opinion of ‘coopering’ is that steps ought to be taken to put a stop entirely to such degrading traffic. If it could beput an end to, it would be a blessing to all concerned—particularly to the men. It ’ud make your hair stand on end to hear of some of the awful things I and scores besides have witnessed—many of our men having, in their drunken fury, jumped overboard, and in many instances been drowned, and in hundreds of cases ‘coopering’ has been the means of causing the men at sea to fall out and fight almost to death’s door. I’ll explain how it’s carried on. The trafficking craft is in most cases an old vessel that has been condemned in England and sold to some foreigner for the purpose of carrying on this trade—some one hailing from Hamburg, Bremerhaven, Antwerp, or some port along the Dutch, German, or Belgian coast. This man—or call it these people—get their tobacco, cigars, liquors, and the various other articles they deal in, in large quantities from agents in the different ports they visit, at a very low price. The articles sold are of a very inferior quality—especially the drink, which is chiefly rum and gin of a very common and fiery nature. The prices charged, as a rule, are—for shag tobacco, 1s.6d.per lb.; cavendish, 2s.per lb.; cigars, from 6s.to 12s.per box. Gin and rum are sold at 1s.6d.per bottle; brandy, 2s.The smacksmen generally arrange to take a little money to sea with them for the purpose of buying tobacco, to save paying 4s.per pound for it at home. In my opinion, this traffic would receive a blow if fishermen were allowed to get their tobacco out of the bonded stores.”
This, it will be seen, coincides with the report of the Sea-Fishing Trade Committee, who called attention in strong terms to the evils of “coopering.” Not only, was it stated, do these boats lead to the bartering of ships’ stores and gear for drink, “but theybring about the demoralization of the hands and even of the skippers serving on board smacks, and directly lead to risk and loss of life. We have it in evidence that they are floating grog-shops of the worst description, and that they are under no control whatever.”
There was little more that I could think of to ask my intelligent friend. In reply to my inquiry as to the value of smacks at various ports, he said the question was difficult to answer, “as there’s a vast deal of difference among the smacks belonging to the ports, and likewise in the damage done ’em, for its damage that counts heavily in the support of them. The cost of a new smack at Hull and Grimsby, with all the modern appliances, will be about £1500; the average worth of smacks at those ports is about £900, and the cost of their fishing-gear about £70.”
“And a Hull smack’s earnings?”
“Between £800 and £900 a year—I mean the gross earnings.”
“Smacks are being constantly run down by vessels. Do they want better lights? What is the reason of these frequent disasters?”
“As a rule,” he answered, “smacks carry very good lights; but there is room for improvement. I’m one of many who strongly advise that smacks should carry more powerful lights than they now use. If smacks are very often rundown—and true enough that is—it’s mainly because of the bad look-out that’s kept aboard vessels navigating the North Sea. There are captains who don’t respect our lives. They see us lying-to our nets, they know we can’t get out of the road; but on they come, never shifting their helm, and if they pass by without striking us, and we call to ’em to know where they’re coming, all the answer we get consists of brutal curses.”
Apparently, then—and I say it not alone on the evidence of this man, but on the assurance of many others engaged in the fishing trade—the measure that is required to diminish the loss of life at sea among the valuable class of men employed in the North Sea fishery is the suppression of the boxing system during the winter months. And another most important step would be the supervision of smacks by qualified inspectors appointed by the Board of Trade. At present I do not know of any law to prevent an owner from sending, or to punish an owner for despatching, to sea the craziest old smack that can be kept alive by long and frequent spells at the pump. It is certainly most anomalous that close attention should be given to the loading, construction, and equipment of ships belonging to one section of the English marine, whilst another section that finds occupation for many thousands of men and boys is utterly disregarded by the State in all things saving the exhibition of lights.
Dr. Johnsononce said that the full tide of human life was to be seen at Charing Cross. The full tide of human commerce begins a few bridges lower down. A man should count it a real privilege that, for the modest sum of fourpence, he is able to survey such an illustration of the wealth and power of this Empire as may enable him to form a very clear and true conception of the aggregate commerce and industry of the United Kingdom. To embark at London Bridge on board a fourpenny steamboat, bound to Woolwich, is, in my humble judgment, to be conveyed through the most wonderful series of transformation scenes that the world has to offer. What is comparable to that passage? No one who has entered the Sidney Heads but will remember the astonishment and delight inspired by the miles of blue water studded with fairy islands, the jasper-like reflection of clouds in the glass-clear depths, the rich tropical vegetation of the shores, the gleaming spars of shipping lifting their delicate tracery into the darkly-pure blue. Passages of strange and shining beauty recur like haunting memories of fragments of Eastern story to those who have threaded the waters of the Nile or the Hoogly; and recollections of the Peiho are made delightfully picturesque and impressive by visions of uncouth junks moored in the rushing stream, by glimpses of distanttemples, by remembrance of soft winds aromatic with spices.
But the Thames! Its scenery is the work of human hands. An atmosphere of yellow light gives magnitude and a vagueness of outline to the leagues of water-side structures, and an obscurity to the horizon in which the monuments of industry fade with a simulation of immensity that cheats the senses into a belief of immeasurable remoteness. The great ships are in the docks far down the river; but though the steamers which lie in tiers upon tiers in the Pool, and far beyond the limits of that reach, are for the most part but of middle size, yet the mind loses all sense of their individual dimensions in the overwhelming impression produced by their collective tonnage. One journey through this magnificent stretch of stream is a large education. The flags of a score of nationalities colour the sombre heavens with their green and blue and yellow and white folds. All the countries in the world appear to pass in a kind of review as the ear catches the hundred tongues, and the eye the hundred faces, and the nostrils the hundred scents wafted from the holds of ships whose greyish spars seem yet to retain the heat of the equatorial sun, and whose sides are fretted with the wash of the surges of the great oceans.
I once took fourpennyworth of travel aboard a Woolwich steamer, for the sake of renewing some old recollections. I will not say that a better kind of steamer would not have made the voyage more comfortable. The dexterous and watchful skipper, who stood upon the bridge carrying his freight of human lives through the intricacies of blundering barges and the bewilderment of swinging ships and capricious tugs, by light motions of his arm and soft asides to the boy, who furnished themwith ear-piercing echoes, seemed to me to deserve a stouter ship. The funnel-casing had much the appearance of an aged saucepan whose bottom has been burnt to the thinness of a sailor’s shirt. I thought to myself, “Suppose we should tip some of these old barges our stem by mistake? Assuredly we should crumple up forward like a sponge-cake; and how should we manage to save our lives?”
I looked everywhere, but there was not so much as an old cork to pitch overboard in case of accident. Even the seats, rotten as the hinges were, were not likely to come away in a hurry. But there was too much to be seen to permit me to bother over the crazy, quivering, admirably handled, and most dangerous old machine that was running us from pier to pier against a strong flood tide. Once clear of London Bridge we were in a complete lane formed by moored or anchored steamers. They were very much alike—little beauty amongst them; some of them well-decked, with their gangways out, showing the covering-board close to the water, and making the structures, with their tall afterdecks and topgallant forecastles, look as if they were in course of being built, instead of newly arrived from voyages long and short. But all such characteristics were lost in the thoughts of the immense mass of tonnage here submitted. Where did it end? where would the last of these steamers be lying? To right and left they stretched, with lighters alongside, steam winches rattling, the vapour of donkey engines blowing out in volumes, some in semi-discharged state, with a heavy list to port or starboard, with frequent alternations of the flags of Denmark, Sweden, France, the Netherlands—I know not what other bunting—amid which our own red ensign counted as twenty to one.
The whole commerce of the world seemed to be here, but in truth the Thames’ show of it was only just begun. On either hand, trembling in the distance, in the vacant places between the buildings, could be caught the hairlike outlines of the masts and rigging of ships, with their house-flags twinkling in tiny spots of colour; and still as the fleets of steamers held us in their interminable lane, did there heave up out of the remote sky more lines and threads and tapering tremulous heights of shipping. But the wealth of industry and the prodigious achievements of British commerce were not more noticeable in the vast assemblage of steam and sailing vessels than in such minute particulars as the little panting screw-tug with a chain of deeply-laden coal barges in her wake, every ebony mound embellished with a recumbent figure in shirt-sleeves, a sooty pipe in his mouth, and his face to the sky. The familiar Thames wherry was also here to add its touch of interest to the wonderful scene—the old waterman resting on his oars, and squinting over his shoulder at the passing tug, in whose tumble, as she goes by, the little boat begins to flounder, while the tall hat of the rower shortens and enlarges with the reeling of the wherry like an optical illusion.
As the lines of steamers dwindle the river widens; and when we come to the bend of a long reach, it opens into a metal-coloured surface of gleaming water trembling with the speeding of its own rushing, though it retains polish enough to serve as a mirror, and to hold under each vessel the dark, inverted shadow of a phantom ship. Here we come across a long, low, iron four-masted craft, with painted ports. Even a sailor who has never been shipmate with more than three masts at a time might gaze with something of astonishment at the complex tracery that crowds the air over that immenselylong and narrow hull, and wonder how long it would take a man to find out where all those ropes lead. It is not enough that there are four masts; there must be double topgallant yards too, making eight sets of braces where in former times three were found enough. But these are progressive days in ship-building. By-and-by we shall have five-masted full-rigged sailing ships, no doubt, with new Board of Trade rules for the examination of candidates in square-rigging. Let us hope that there will be also rules for the proper manning of such craft; for it struck me, as I looked at that big four-masted ship, that if her complement is assessed on the basis of her tonnage, without reference to the number of cloths she spreads, it must go desperately hard with the cook and the butcher’s mate in a gale of wind.
Father Thames, once a god, might more fitly be termed a goddess, under the title of Commerce; for this assuredly is the presiding spirit. It quickens with life the smallest and craziest structure by the water-side; the very ebb and flow of the noble stream seem obedient to its laws, and its shadow is in the air and upon the face of the waters. I cannot imagine any one of those skippers of the Woolwich and Greenwich steamboats, who pass up and down the river some scores of times in the course of a week, so intimately acquainted with the wharves and warehouses and the uncountable features of industry which crowd the bank for miles and miles as not to behold something new, something he has never taken close notice of before, every time he directs his gaze with attention to the shore on either hand. The billy-boys and barges squattering like mudbanks hard against the slimy piles; the giant cranes poising tons’ weight of burden in the air; the vast warehouses, with the long and powerful steamships snugged securely alongsidethem; the endless procession of wharfage teeming with hurrying figures full of business—these and countless other features of the scene furnish the apparently limitless lines of steamers and other craft with such a background as completes the deep and stirring significance of their multifarious aspect. It is a vast picture of motion—of great vessels coming, of great vessels going, of lighters swirling up swiftly with the tide broadside on, of tugs speeding in quest of towage jobs, of passenger steamers driving through the steel-coloured current with a glancing of silver at their keen stems and a whirl of snow sluicing in a broad torrent from under their counters. Now it is a big ocean steamship, of some three or four thousand tons, leisurely making for Gravesend, as trim as a man-of-war to the eye, her sides and funnel spotless, her scuttles twinkling like diamonds in her black length as they catch the sparkle of the passing water; whilst in vivid contrast there comes towing past her a full-rigged ship fresh from some Antipodean port, her brave hull covered with the scars of the conflicts she has waged with distant seas, her canvas carelessly rolled up on the yards, her rigging slack, and a crowd of men forward and aft engaged in pointing out one to another the familiar scenes ashore.
Ay, pathos is not wanting even amid so prosaic a scene of commerce as the reaches of our noble river exhibit. You find it to a degree proportioned to your powers of perception and realization in some such an object, for instance, as that ship yonder, newly warped out from one of the docks and all ready to begin her voyage. The hearty shouts which rise from her decks, the active little figures aloft, the bustle and business in her, cannot impair the pregnant suggestiveness of her leave-taking. You think of the people aboard who havesaid “Good-bye” to their friends, perhaps for ever. Poor Jack, sitting astride on the fore-topgallant yardarm, catches hold of the lift, whilst he turns his head in the direction of where he reckons Stepney or Poplar lies, and, as he thinks of his wife or sweetheart and the perplexities of the new allotment notes, he discharges a stream of tobacco juice into the air, and, with a melancholy countenance, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and goes on with his job. There may be plenty of bustle and loud calls, but there is bound to be a share of sorrow too. It is not long since the skipper took his wife to his heart, and his head is full of her and the youngsters as he paces the quarter-deck, sometimes pausing to peep over the side at the cluster of boats round the gangway ladder, and sometimes singing out to the mate, who has his hands full forward. Indeed, it is impossible to look at an outward-bound ship without sympathy and a kind of respect that comes near to being reverence in some minds. What will be her fortune? you think. She holds herself bravely on the bosom of the calm river; the current wrinkles itself sharply against her solid bows, and breaks away along her side in a cadence like the tinkling of bells. Who can doubt that tears are being shed in her darksome interior? It is hard to leave the old home. The glimpse of the church spire through the open scuttle brings up memories which tighten the throat. When shall the next meeting be? and when time brings it about, will not absent faces and a change in the spirit of old associations make it sadder than this going is? Pray God that no harm befall the stout ship! As you sweep past her your hearty hope is that prosperous winds may attend her, and that in the new country fortune and happiness await those whose sad eyes dwell fixedly on the land that will be far astern of them before the sun has thrice sunk beyond the deep.