The constables drew up to the vessel with their boat, and found two men with a quantity of copper in a boat, with chisels and a chopper they had been using. They arrested them, and were coming out of the creek with the two boats when they discovered two other notorious river thieves climbing down the chains of a vessel lying alongside the wharf. They had been down in the forecastle, and having disturbed the crew were making their escape when the officers saw them.
The officers thereupon made for the vessel, and succeeded in apprehending them, and took them into their boat after a desperate resistance.
The first two were convicted and sentenced, one to three months, and the other to six months’ imprisonment, and the latter were sentenced to three months each in Maidstone gaol.
The Commissioners of Police rewarded the constables with a gratuity for their vigilance and gallant conduct.
Many of these tier-rangers or river pirates have a ruffianly appearance, and generally live with prostitutes, on both sides of the river, at St. George’s, Bluegate-fields, the Borough, and Bermondsey.
They confine themselves to robberies on the river, and are frequently transported by the time they are thirty years of age. Occasionally a returned convict comes back for a time, when he generally resumes his former villanies, and is again sent abroad.
These tier-rangers in most cases have sprung from the ranks of the mudlarks, and step by step have advanced further in crime, until they have become callous brutal ruffians, living as brigands on the sides of the river.
| Number of felonies, &c., on the river Thames in the metropolitan districts for 1860 | 203 |
| Value of property abstracted thereby | £712 |