Rivers of Great Britain. The Thames, from Source to Sea. / Descriptive, Historical, Pictorial

by Various

Bum-boats selling goods before sunrising and after sunsetting are very hardly dealt with. For the first offence the boat forfeits 40s., and for every succeeding offence £4.

The fares made for the year 1785 were easy enough. From London to Gravesend the figure required was six shillings, and the other fares were proportionately reasonable. Thus quiet City men ran down from London Bridge on one tide and returned on the next, but the tilt-boat is now as extinct as the caravel. A few smart wherries dodge about the lower reaches waiting for inward bound vessels; but the watermen is no longer jolly, and in a few years it will be found impossible to find a youthful member of the craft, for no parent would apprentice his son to a trade in which few men can earn enough to keep body and soul together. A righteous retribution seems to have doomed a race of harpies to extinction. In the old days, when a towering East Indiaman came up the river, and the tanned soldiers and the weary civilians crowded joyously to the side, the watermen pounced on their prey, and each eager passenger had to run the gauntlet of a band of marauders. Times have altered, and the keen, ragged men who ply the wherries are only too glad to take a passenger to the Nore and back for a sovereign.

Across the water Tilbury Fort frowns over the bulge of the reach. The guns command the Lower Hope, and it would be impossible for an enemy’s vessel to sail so far as Northfleet without being badly mauled or sunk. The place is associated with the names of a great queen and our greatest soldier. There the fierce Amazon mustered her troops and spoke rough words of encouragement to them; there General Gordon walked, with his quick, quiet movements, and his curt, low speech. Gordon planned the fortifications at the south of the river, but he travelled from bank to bank with that eager activity which marked his every action. His work is masterly in conception and execution, and if the torpedo service is properly organised it is hardly likely that the roar of a foreigner’s cannon will ever be heard in London again. A roistering multitude once fluttered the people of the infant village of Tilbury, and rioted through the quiet place on the southern shore. The old historian grows quite haughty in his malice as he tells how “A rude rout of Rascals, under the leading of Wat Tyler, a taylor, who commanded in chief, with their grave ministers, John Ball, Jack Straw, a thresher, Jack Sheppard, of the Council of War, under the title of King’s Men, and the servants of the Commonwealth of England, after ransacking and demolishing all the fair structures of the nobility and gentry of the Essex side, summoned K. Richard II. to give them a meeting, who accordingly, accompanied with most of his best counsellors, took his barge and went to Gravesend, but seeing the rabble so ragged and rogue-like, a company of swabs, composed of the scum of the people; it was held no discretion for the King to venture his person among them, and so returned to the Tower from whence he came.”

Poor Richard let the “swabs” pass up the north side of the river, and he met them there with a gallantry which is a little unlike the conduct of the driveller who long afterwards fell from the throne which he had covered with dishonour. All the scene is dull and peaceful now. Gordon is gone from us, and his name will pass, like that of the “swab” Tyler, into the quietude of the history-books.

“So much carry the winds away.”

North of Tilbury, and away to the eastward along the Essex shore, stretches a strange, level country netted with winding streams. As the tide runs out, the little ditches send down runnels of clear water. Charles Dickens was always fascinated by this region; but, strangely enough, his works have given everybody a false impression of the whole marsh country. People think of slime, and darkness, and poisonous exhalations, and an atmosphere of horror and crime. They think of the faces of hunted convicts and the grim night-scenes in which Joe Gargery and his pet took part; but at certain times of the year the marshes are really cheerful—the clear streams glitter in the morning sun, and the larks sing their hearts out high up in the air. The multitudinous notes fall around you from the shining heights like a shower of pearls, and for miles the eye is met by a blaze of colour and dazzling glitter. The ragworts spread in blinding sheets of yellow; the purple stars of the mallow peep modestly out from the coarse grass; and amid all the riot of sound and colour the peaceful cattle stand, and give a sense of homely companionship to the scene. When the tide flows, the river slips into the channels, and the tiny runnels of spring water are driven back to their sources; the ditches fill and overflow; the fishes, in many cases, catch their prey within a yard of where the cattle were feeding; and the grass becomes impregnated by the tide. It is this daily advance of the brackish flood that makes the marshes so valuable as grazing grounds. The cattle eagerly tear at the salty grass, and its nutritive qualities are so great, that it is sometimes found that a whole herd turned out on the marshes within a week or two weigh on the average half a stone more than they did when they first fed on the saltings. In winter, truly, the marshes are bleak and inhospitable; but in the soft, rich mud of the ditches the wild-fowl swarm, and the sportsmen have good times when the weather is frosty. A man who is not greedy, and who will be content with a very moderate bag, can hardly find a better place for exciting sport than within these northern saltings. Sometimes a redshank starts up, whistling desperately, and goes off down wind until the charge stops him; the ringed plovers cower low in the ditch, and shoot along under the bank with steady, level flight, until they are forced to sweep out over the grass and give the gunner his chance. At the fall of the evening the wild note of the curlew sounds with piercing cadence. There be many men in London who count Benfleet Station as the entrance to Paradise; and it is a very pleasant sight to see the smart shooters dispersing on a brisk, frosty morning. Below Canvey Island, and over the immense flats of that dismal place, the heaviest bags can be made with a big duck-gun. Most of the yachts on the river have a punt with the orthodox engine of destruction attached. There is something murderous and commercial about the duck-gun. To get up to a flock of birds needs a certain cunning and skill, which almost rise to the dignity of a fine art, and the excitement is amongst the keenest forms of pleasure that sport can give; but when the black, screaming flock has risen, and the boom of the huge gun has sent the echoes flying, then the sight of destruction, struggling, and suffering is apt to pain the sentimentalist. An hour’s wander with a small gun—an hour that will bring its couple of brace of birds—offers the more artistic form of sport.

The shooting country is hardly broken between Benfleet and the Blackwater. Everywhere the eye travels over dark ditches, speckled flats, and stray groups of birds. At times the ground seems to be covered by a struggling army, whereof the squadrons perform strange evolutions. Then the wary gunner, watching with his glass from afar off, knows that the troops are on the feed, and takes his measures accordingly.

In choosing a boat for the river work, you can hardly do better than follow the model adopted by the waterside folk. Right round the coast, the action of years of experience has enabled the inhabitants of every place to choose the exact kind of craft best suited for their locality. In the North the delicate “cobles,” with their light draught astern, are adapted for the long, shelving beaches. No fisherman ever thinks of running into the cove without preparing to make for the beach with his craft stern-foremost. The Yarmouth men have their stiff “hookers,” which draw a good deal of water, and are without the dangerous “crankness” that characterises a “coble.” The Suffolk men, on the stony stretches of coast between Southwold and Aldborough, have broad, clumsy, longshore boats, which stand a great amount of knocking about. In this way the unconscious process of adaptation, involving the transmission of hints from one generation to another, has made the Thames boats all that can be desired for their work. For all practical purposes a Gravesend wherry will see you safely to the mouth of the river, and beyond the Nore; while the average Thames “hooker,” or “bowler” boat, as it is called, will stand up well to any weather that she is likely to encounter.

Take an ordinary wherry, and an hour’s sail from Gravesend brings you into a foreign colony. Clustered thick in the sheltered haven of the river lies a fleet of vessels, strange in build, startling in colour, outlandish in rig. Their bulging bows are like the breasts of some Titanic women. The low sweep of their bulwark makes it astonishing that they can ever go to sea without being swept, even when the enormous boards are hung in position to keep out the rush of water and to stiffen the vessel. Quiet, good-humoured men lounge on the spotless decks of these ships, and address you in broken English or in a strange tongue. As you walk, you hear the sound of wallowing, and when you look into the gulf of the hold you see a strange, weltering mass of snaky-brown things of which the aspect makes an unaccustomed man shudder. Tons of eels welter in these watery caverns, and the landsman sees with astonishment that the sides of the vessel are thickly perforated to allow the rush of the sea, and that each ship is neither more or less than a huge floating sieve. In quiet ponds in Holland this harvest of eels is raised, and the vessels go to this point in all weathers. If they sailed past Gravesend, not one fish of their cargo would survive; so they remain at the bend where the water is salt, and the Thames flows through and through their holds until the last consignment has gone to Billingsgate. Then the quaint vessels warp themselves out of the haven. With their slow, blundering appearance they always seem as if they must come to mischief, yet somehow or other the quiet, phlegmatic Dutchmen make their queer craft do exactly what they wish. These fellows are not fond of the English fishermen, and a fight between the nationalities sometimes enlivens the dreary monotony of the haven; but to any one who boards their ship in a polite manner, and shows signs of good breeding, they are most complacent, and one learns to like their grim simplicity.