THE HAMOAZE.
Past North Corner and the steam-ferry across the Hamoaze to Torpoint in Cornwall, you come to Bull Point, where the explosives live, and to the poor discarded ships of the Navy.
Here are tiers of vessels; steel-built cruisers, gunboats, torpedo craft, and what not, at their last moorings, and presently to be sold out of the navy for the price of an old tin kettle.
There is nothing more pitiful in all this world of activity than the sight of these discarded ships of our modern navy. The old wooden men-o’-war, out-of-date long generations ago, are still things of a worshipful nobility. Even the blackened coal-hulks and the floating station of the Harbour Police have the remains of a majestic presence; but the obsolete cruisers and other vessels of the present iron age are dreadfully abject and mean. They have been in every clime, and on many a distant station have upheld the dignity of the Empire, and so have a claim upon our respect; but no worn-out boiler or discarded kitchen-range, among the rubbish-heaps of a builder’s yard, looks so utterly and unromantically sordid. For myself, I want to be impressed; I acutely wish to read romance and the pathos of neglect into these discarded things of iron and steel, that have carried the King’s commission over all the seas of the habitable globe and are now struck off the effective list, even though they be not more than twenty years old; but I find it impossible. I could as easily—nay, could with greater ease—drop a salt tear over the old kitchener that has cooked me many a dinner, and now lies rusting in the garden.
The ships look so small; and their sides and decks are red with rust-stains. When quite deserted they are even more than abject, and resemble floating scrap-heaps, but when some solitary figure of a marine is perceived, in charge, pipe in mouth, and clad in the extraordinary deshabille of undress that only a soldier will descend to when removed from the eye of command, and with intimate articles of his underclothing drying in the sun, they wear the look of sea-going slums. Figures and statistics do not commonly impress me; you can make so much play with an extra o or two, but here are cruisers that have cost £150,000 a-piece which will each fetch at auction only a trifling £5,000, and for the mere look of them, would seem to be extravagantly dear at £500; and when I think of these things, I am very much impressed indeed.
The Hamoaze between St. Budeaux on the Devonshire, and Saltash on the Cornish, shores, becomes the Tamar, and narrows to something a little less than half a mile wide. It is spanned here by the famous Saltash Bridge, built by Brunel to carry the railway across, and opened in 1859. For eleven miles above the bridge, the Tamar is navigable at high tide by small steamers, past Cargreen, to Calstock, and past Morwellham Quay, to Weir Head. Beyond, where New Bridge carries the highway across, Devon and Cornwall join hands.
