I was charged about 3l. for being towed to Paris; but the various steamers (six in all) I employed on the river were every one well managed, and with civil people on board. Indeed, I became a favourite with one captain’s wife, a sturdy-looking body, always cutting up leaves of lettuce. She gave me a basin of warm soup, and I presented her with some good Yorkshire bacon. Next day she cooked some of this for me with beans, and I returned the present by a packet of London tea, a book, a picture of Napoleon, and another of “the Rob Roy on the Seine,” in the highest style of art attainable by a man steering all the time he is at the easel.
From all this it will be readily understood by any one who has travelled much in various ways that to be towed up the Seine is quite different from all other modes of progress, and that it brings you among a large, new, and sharply-defined class of people, who could scarcely be known, and certainly could not be studied so well in any other way.
Nor is the traveller less interesting to these people than they are to him. Often it was necessary to restrain the inquisitive French gamins, who would teaze a boat to pieces if not looked after; but it is always against the grain with me to be strict with boys, especially about boats, for I hold that it is a good sign of them when they relish nautical curiosities.
CHAPTER VII.
Dull reading—Chain boat—Kedging—St. Cloud—Training-Dogs—Wrong colours—My policeman—Yankee notion.—Red, White, and Blue.
The effect of living on board a little boat for a month at a time without more than three or four nights of usual repose, was to bring the mind and body into a curious condition of subdued life, a sort of contemplative oriental placid state in which both cares and pleasures ceased to be acute, and the flight of time seemed gliding and even, and not marked by the distinct epochs which define our civilised life. Although this passive enjoyment was really agreeable—and, in fine weather and good health, perhaps a mollusc could affirm as much of its existence,—certainly an experience of the condition I have described enables one to understand what is evidently the normal state of many thousands of hard-worked, ill-fed, and irregularly-sleeped labourers; the men who, sitting down thus weary at night, we expect to read some prosy book full of desperately good advice, of which one half the words are not needed for the sense and the other half are not understood by the reader. [98]
The last tug-boat we had to use was of a peculiar kind, and I am not aware that it is employed upon any of our rivers in Britain. A chain is laid along the bottom of the Seine for (I think) two hundred miles. At certain hours of the day a long solidly-built vessel with a powerful engine on board comes over this, and the chain is seized and put round a wheel on board. By turning this wheel one way or the other it is evident that the chain will be wound up and let down behind, while it cannot slip along the river’s bottom—the enormous friction is enough to prevent that, and therefore the boat is wound up and goes through the water. The power of this chain-boat is so great that it will pull along, and that too against the rapid stream, a whole string of barges, several of them of 300 tons’ burthen. The long fleet advances steadily though slowly, and the irresistible engine works with smokeless funnels, but there are groanings within, telling of tight-strained iron, and earnest undertoned breathings of confined steam.
Although the chain-boat is not often steered for the purpose of avoiding other vessels (these must take care of their own safety), yet it has to be carefully managed by the rudders (one at each end), so that it may drop the chain in a proper part of the river for the next steamer of the Company which is to use it. When two such boats meet from opposite directions, and both are pulling at the same chain, there is much time lost in effecting a passage, and again when the chain-boat and all its string of heavy craft arrives at a lock, you may make up your mind for a long delay. It is evident that we do not require this particular sort of tug-boat on the Thames below Teddington, for the strong tide up and down twice every day carries along thousands of tons of merchandize at a rapid pace, and one or two men will be enough to attend upon each barge. In fact we have the sun and moon for our tugs. These draw the water up, and the tide is the rope which hauls our ships along.
To manœuvre properly with the Rob Roy in such a case as this with the chain-boat required every vigilance, and strong exercise of muscular force, as well as caution and prompt decision, for I had sometimes to cling to the middle barge, then to drop back to the last, and always to keep off from the river-banks, the shoals, and the trees. On one occasion we had to shift her position by “kedging” for nearly half a mile, and this in a crowded part of the Seine too, where the current also was swift. On another occasion the sharp iron of a screw steamer’s frame ran right against my bow, and at once cut a clean hole quite through the mahogany. Instantly I seized a lump of soft putty, and leaning over the side I squeezed it into the hole, and then “clinched” it (so to speak) on the inside; and this stop-gap actually served for three weeks, until a proper repair could be made.
The lovely precincts of St. Cloud came in sight at dawn on the last day of June, prettier than Richmond, I must confess, or almost any river-town we can boast of in England; and here I was to rest while my little yawl was thoroughly cleaned, brightly varnished, and its inside gaily painted with Cambridge blue, so as to appear at the French Exhibition in its very best suit, and then at the British Regatta on the Seine.