The London Docks, much larger than those of St. Katharine, are beginning to share in the same neglect. They are of more ancient date than their neighbours, having been designed by Rennie, the architect of London Bridge, in 1805. As many as three hundred vessels can find a comfortable haven here. The warehouses will contain 220,000 tons of goods; there is storage for 130,000 bales of wool; the wine-cellars are among the marvels and attractions of London. “Here,” Mr. Sala has remarked, “in a vast succession of vaults, roofed with cobwebs many years old, are stored in pipes and hogsheads the wines that thirsty London—thirsty England, Ireland, and Scotland—must needs drink.” Curious persons come here with tasting orders, and are shown round by brawny coopers, who seem marvellously wasteful of good wine, and are more generous to their visitors than the most prosperous of City merchants, with the best plenished of wine-cellars, is to his friends. Many a visitor to the wine-cellars of the London Docks has found occasion to regret, when he has reached the open air, that he has been so easily tempted to pass too frequent opinions on too many varieties of wine. In the cellars an amateur wine-taster is apt to overrate the strength of his head; above ground once more, the breath of the river brings him to a sense of his own incapacity for frequent and varied potations, and he shamefacedly betakes himself to a cab, to escape as quickly as may be from the scenes of his bibulous indiscretion.
LIMEHOUSE CHURCH.
On the dockside one encounters men of all nationalities—the swart Lascar, the dusky Suliote, the quiet pigtailed Chinaman, the grizzled negro; Germans, Swedes, stout little Dutchmen; Americans, Fins, Malays, Greeks, and Russians. Nowadays an English ship is a polyglot institution. In the Sailors’ Home, near to the gates of St. Katharine’s Docks, one may hear men conversing in all the European languages; in the Asiatic Home, close to the India Docks, there is such a confusion of tongues as dismayed the builders of Babel. Entering and departing, the owners of all these voices, and the thousands of dock labourers, lightermen, loafers, visitors, must pass the inspection of the police, who stand at the dock gates always on the watch, and who do not scruple to submit to close examination the garments of all those whose pockets may happen to bulge unduly, or who, having entered in the morning with a perfectly erect spine, stoop inexplainably at the shoulders when they have completed their business at night. In the docks there is a perfect system of espionage, and “the Queen’s Tobacco Pipe,” until recently located at the London, and now at the Victoria Docks, has smoked many thousands of little presents of tobacco that large-hearted sailors had intended for the gratification of their friends.
THE RIVER BELOW WAPPING.
The long, narrow, grimy, and dissolute lane known to Englishmen everywhere as Ratcliff Highway, and now disguised under the name of St. George’s Street East, begins its career near the gates of St. Katharine’s Docks, and winds along like a great slimy snake towards Limehouse and Blackwall. It is unvisited of all those who have not business to transact with men who go down to the sea in ships; for this is peculiarly the sailors’ quarter of London. Jack is to be encountered at every step, not infrequently reeling somewhat, and with a lady of loose manners on his arm. The shop-fronts are hidden behind strange collections of oil-skins, sea-boots, mattresses, blankets, and the miscellaneous assortment of articles specially provided for emigrants and sailors. The public-houses, of which there are many, resound with the noise of mechanical organs and string bands. The language one hears is of a strictly nautical description; and every third house or so is a lodging-house for sailors.
Of late years Ratcliff Highway has improved in character somewhat, and many of the men who were wont to be fleeced and robbed in it have been rescued from the crimps and sharpers by the Sailors’ Home; but it has still much of its old disrepute left, and discreet persons do not perambulate it after nightfall without the escort of the police. Here the seafaring men of various nationalities separate themselves into groups, and form little colonies of their own. The public-house is their forum, to whatever nation they may belong. In one of these, English is spoken, in another German, in a third Norwegian, in a fourth Greek. Even the negroes have a special house of call of their own. As for the Chinamen, they prefer to smoke opium in quietness, and so they divide themselves between various Chinese lodging-houses, where they can eat, in the properly orthodox manner, with chopsticks, and assemble round a table at night to gamble with their friends. It is a strange, stirring, disordered place, Ratcliff Highway. Its population is changing with the arrival or departure of every ship, yet its aspect and its frequenters always seem to be the same, similar in manners, bent on the same amusements, afflicted by the same vices, reeling into or out of the same doors. There is nothing here except an occasional piece of nautical slang to suggest the jolly British tar. To a great extent, indeed, the tar has ceased to be either jolly or British. The majority of the sailors to be met with in Ratcliff Highway are visibly and distinctly foreign. There are no white “ducks,” or raking straw hats; nobody publicly “shivers his timbers,” or speaks in that mixed and technical language which helps to make the characters of Captain Marryat so delightful. Only on the stage is it nowadays possible to encounter the sailor of tradition. The seaman who frequents Ratcliff Highway outwardly resembles the stoker of a railway train, attired in his second best suit. There is nothing romantic about him, nothing picturesque; and if the river and the docks were not so near, and the shops were not so nautical-looking, and one’s ears were not occasionally saluted with “How goes it, Captain?” and “Hallo, mate!” there would be nothing to suggest his connection with the sea.