Hogarth’s Water Frolic—Billingsgate—Salesmen’s Cries—The Custom House—Queen Elizabeth and the Customs—The Tower, and Tower Hill—The Pool—The Docks—Ratcliff Highway—The Thames Tunnel—In Rotherhithe—The Isle of Dogs—The Dock Labourer—Deptford and Greenwich—Woolwich Reach and Dockyard—The Warspite.
THERE is a mighty change in the river after it has passed Fishmonger’s Hall. When the tide is running out it races through the arches of London Bridge, and swirls round the buttresses, and eddies to right and to left in such manner that the Thames waterman, having remembrance of many disasters brought about by absence of knowledge or want of care, amazes his passenger by his singular method of progression, rowing round a clump of barges, getting under the hull of a steamer, shooting across the river with the current, creeping slowly along by the wharves, and otherwise manœuvring as if he were a general preparing to take a town. It requires a long pull and a strong pull to shoot the bridge against the tide, and often has it happened to the idler, leaning over the buttresses, to behold an upturned boat floating below him, and behind it the boatman and his passenger sustaining themselves above water by clinging to the oars.
The Thames waterman of the present year of grace is by no means such a picturesque person as the oarsman of former days. There is no salt water flavour about him; he wears no indication of his calling; he is, to all appearances, merely a landsman in a boat. It was otherwise in jolly William Hogarth’s time. That great humorist drew, as the tailpiece to an eccentric book, a queer little design of a grinning Thames waterman, stout and jolly, seated on crossed oars, his legs drawn up to his chin, a drinking-glass and an earthen pipkin dangling from his gigantic heels. He was a creature all hat, boots, and broad grin; whereas the waterman of to-day is rather a solemn sort of person, very indifferently clad, who takes your shilling or your half-crown as if you were doing him an injury.
ST. MAGNUS’ CHURCH AND THE MONUMENT.
The tailpiece aforesaid adorns the last page of an entertaining account of how Hogarth, and three friends of his, set off on a holiday excursion to Gravesend, Rochester, and Sheerness, sailing over just that space of water which we are about to explore. The four boon companions set off from the Bedford Coffee House, in Covent Garden, on the 27th of May, 1732. They spent a day in the neighbourhood of Billingsgate, drinking, apparently, and Hogarth drew a caricature of a long-shore humorist who was known as “the Duke of Puddledock,” which said caricature, the rhyming chronicler of the expedition records, in execrable verse, “was pasted on the cellar door.” Thackeray calls these four, “a jolly party of tradesmen at high jinks,” and high jinks they certainly had, Hogarth and one of his companions playing at hopscotch in Rochester Town Hall. They went down the river in a “tilt boat,” laughing and shouting and drinking, exchanging jokes with the watermen, singing each other to sleep with jolly choruses, and behaving generally in a manner that was highly indecorous and reprehensible. It was six o’clock in the morning when they reached Gravesend, something like twenty-four hours after their start. With the tide in your favour, on the steamers which leave London Bridge twice a day, you may now make the same bright and agreeable journey in two hours and a half.
And such a journey should every one make who wishes to realise, however faintly, the picturesque magnificence, the prodigious commerce, the splendid importance of the Thames. The crowded shipping of the Pool, the steamers coming and going, the vessels lying at anchor here and there, as if the river were a huge dock, only feebly represent the vast tonnage which is borne on our grand and historic river every day of every year. Behind the great piles of warehouses—towering over the housetops, ornamenting the sky with a curious fretwork of masts and spars and cordage—lie scores and hundreds of the vessels of all nations, crowded into dock beyond dock, making a line of rigging, of glittering yards and masts, of furled sails and flaunting canvas, on either side of the Thames for mile on mile.