A nation’s grateful tribute to the brave.”
Wren’s subject seems to have inspired his higher genius, and none of his works, not even St. Paul’s, is a worthier memorial of his powers.
It was Charles II. who planted the trees of Greenwich Park, now remarkable for their great size and nobleness. From the crown of the steep ascent on which the Observatory stands, once the site of “Duke Humphrey’s Tower,” there spreads before the observer one of the broadest and most impressive prospects to be encountered anywhere round about London. Far down below lie, first, the Naval School, and then the two great wings of the hospital, each lifting its beautiful dome aloft into the blue of the sky; in front, the eye wanders, over the Albert and Victoria Docks, to the valleys of the Lea and the Roding; to the left, the river, broader than at any previous portion of its course, bends suddenly round the Isle of Dogs, beyond which lies London, dim and distant, its white towers and spires gleaming out of the haze, its great cross of St. Paul’s glittering in the sunlight; to the right, the Thames—laden with ships, alive with barges—flows on, a wide shining space of water, past ship-building yards, and warehouses, and dry docks, until it loses itself in the grey distance of the Kent and Essex marshes.
Where the Lea—Walton’s river—after flowing through Bedfordshire, by pleasant Hertford, on to Enfield, and Edmonton, and Bow, ends in an estuary of unfathomable mud, and joins the Thames at Blackwall, we are near to the entrance of the Victoria Docks.
At Blackwall, docks were being constructed in Pepys’ day, and he makes this curious entry in his Diary:—“1665, Sept. 22nd. At Blackwall, there is observable what Johnson tells us, that, in digging a late Docke, they did twelve feet underground find perfect trees over-covered with earth. Nut trees, with the branches and the very nuts upon them; some of whose nuts he showed us. Their shells black with age, and their kernell, upon opening, decayed, but their shell perfectly hard as ever. And a yew tree (upon which the very ivy was taken up whole about it), which, upon cutting with an addes, we found to be rather harder than the living tree usually is.” Similar curiosities, it is probable, lie waiting for discovery all along the Thames shore; and at the “New Falcon” at Gravesend there is a perfect specimen of moss, with still just a tint of green remaining in its fronds, which has been dug up from many feet below the surface at Tilbury.
THE ALBERT DOCKS.
Far down the river the docks are spreading—growing longer, and deeper, and roomier with the necessities of our trade. From the entrance to Victoria Dock at Blackwall to that of the Albert Dock at North Woolwich is a distance of more than three miles. The Albert Dock itself is a long, straight expanse of two miles of water, lined on either side by great ocean steamers lying stem to stern. It is always resounding with the “Yo, heave oh!” of sailors, the shouts of bargemen, the cries of dock labourers, the screaming and panting of steam-cranes, the exclamations of bewildered passengers on the look-out for the vessel which is to bear them over seas. Up the River Thames every year there makes its way a vast fleet of 6,000 steamers and 5,000 sailing vessels, with an aggregate of 6,000,000 tons burden. To one who desires to understand clearly what life, and excitement, and perpetual going and coming this entails, there could be no more stirring or instructive sight than the Victoria and Albert Docks. Some of the great steamers are like floating streets, almost as populous, with rooms like palaces, and decks as clean as village hearthstones. From gigantic port-holes strange wild faces and turbaned heads look out; the quays swarm with coolies in blue and white tunics, with negroes in cast-off garments from Wapping, with Chinamen in curious pointed shoes, and pigtails neatly tied up for convenience. Above decks the officers may be heard giving their orders in Hindostanee; the red-turbaned sailors speak to their mates in unknown tongues; the howl with which a rope is hauled in or a bale is lowered is not unlike the cry of tigers in the jungle.