Chapter X: Part 10

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 they bring 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.

_A FOURPENNY VOYAGE._

Dr. Johnson once 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 distant temples, 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 them with 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 immensely long 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 alongside them; 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 have said “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.

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 new interests 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.

_POOR JACK._

I climbed the 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 was shining 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 stood deferentially 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 and bruised 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 to _me_,” 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 the _Kent_, 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 the _Kent_,” said he.

I thought of the description given of the _Kent_ by the master of the _Caroline_ as 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 this ancient 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, and whose 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.

_ON THE GOODWINS_.

On a 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 is no 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 creatures running 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 their eyes 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?”