At St. Katharine's Docks the time occupied on an average in discharging a vessel of three hundred tons is eight hours, and for one of six hundred tons two days and a half. In one instance one thousand one hundred casks of tallow were discharged in six hours, but of course this was unusually rapid work. One of the cranes in the St. Katharine's Docks cost about twenty-five thousand dollars, and will raise from forty to sixty tons at a time.
There is a wharf attached to the St. Katharine Docks, which Parliament compelled the company to construct at a cost of nearly a million of dollars, and the warehouses will contain one hundred and ten thousand tons of goods and merchandise. The depth of water in the St. Katharine's Docks is twenty-eight feet at spring tide, at dead tide twenty-four feet, and at low water ten feet, so that vessels of eight hundred tons register are docked and undocked without the slightest difficulty. There is a water frontage and quays of one thousand five hundred feet in the St. Katharine Docks. The wharfage of the London Docks is one thousand two hundred and sixty feet in length and nine hundred and sixty feet in breadth. The capital of the London Docks company is about twenty-five million dollars in gold, and as many as three thousand laborers are employed in the London Docks in a day.
The walls surrounding the London Docks cost sixty-five thousand pounds in construction, and all these walls are so high (nearly thirty feet,) that they present an impregnable barrier to thieves and depredators.
The receipts for one year in the London Docks were over three million dollars, currency; the salaries and wages amounted to about one million dollars, and the revenue customs paid about eleven hundred thousand dollars. These figures show that the company is in a prosperous state, and gives the municipal governments of our American Atlantic cities the best reasons, when others which I have already enumerated are combined, why New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, Savannah and Charleston, should have stone docks to equal those of London and Liverpool in magnitude and solidity.
Having made a lengthened inspection of the London Docks I turned to leave and could not find my friend who had accompanied me. After some difficulty I discovered him afar off at the other end of the vaults discussing with the cellarman what liquor he was next to taste.
"Yer honor might just taste a little of the Hennesey Brandy of 1832—it is very fine and runs down like hile."
"By Gad, sir, the very thing—now that you mention it I will try a little, just a leetle Hennesey brandy. I'll put it to you in this way—I don't think it can hurt me—and the cellarman says it's just like oil. Now I recollect that oil never intoxicates. I will take just the faintest tint."
He did take the "faintest tint," perhaps a good sized glass-full, and he became so jolly, and affectionate, and good natured, embracing me and also the cellarman, that the latter personage had at last to call a cab into which my friend was carried, and after being propped up he was driven to his hotel. The cellarman said to me: