into the country the turbot and salmon as fresh as we receive it in the metropolis; for what are a hundred miles on the great railways?
Old Billingsgate is now pulled down; the muddy dock, where so many fishing-smacks have been harboured is filled up; and, instead of the old-fashioned market which illustrates this chapter, a pile is erected more befitting the greatest city in the world, and more like the noble edifice—the New Coal Exchange—that faces it.
Eels cannot be brought to Billingsgate in such perfection as they formerly were. We have now before us a Parliamentary report, given in above twenty years ago, complaining of the poisonous state of the Thames. The following evidence of Mr. Butcher, a fish-salesman, and agent for Dutch vessels, will be interesting at this moment, while the Thames is made the great sewer of London:
“Eight Dutch vessels arrived at Gravesend with full cargoes of healthy eels in July 1827, and the following is the state in which they reached the London market:
| First | 15,000 | lbs. | Reached | market | alive | 4000 | lbs. |
| Second | 14,000 | " | " | " | 4000 | " | |
| Third | 13,000 | " | " | " | 3000 | " | |
| Fourth | 14,000 | " | " | " | about | 4000 | " |
And so on in proportion, but little more than a fourth of the cargo being marketed alive.”
Mr. Butcher stated to the commissioners, that in 1815 (or twelve years before), “one of these vessels seldom lost more than thirty pounds weight of eels in a night in coming up the river; but that the water had become so bad, that as it flowed through the wells in the bottom of the vessels it poisoned the eels, and the quantity which died was more than three times the quantity marketed.”