And blooming thickets; nor by rocky bands
Held; but in radiant progress towards the deep”—
flows broadly onward to the Northern Sea.
FERRYBOAT LANDING, MIDDLESBROUGH.
During the last quarter of a century the river below Stockton has been constantly undergoing a process of enlargement and improvement, necessarily accompanied by a destruction of its former picturesque beauty. The work done is in the highest sense creditable to northern enterprise. The foundation stones of two great breakwaters were laid in 1863, these defences against the incoming waves being appropriately built of slag from the furnaces of Middlesbrough and Stockton. The large quantity of 443,000 tons of this material was deposited in a single year, and by 1874, when close upon £100,000 had been spent, it was possible to report that a shifting bed of sand had been replaced by a solid and immovable wall. The breakwaters have cost close upon a quarter of a million sterling at the present date, a sum well expended, for a fine harbour has now been constructed only less important than that of the Tyne. On good authority it has been declared that the recent improvements on the Tees are to be ranked amongst the most successful engineering works of the century.
Messrs. Besant and Rice have made the marvellous development of Middlesbrough the leading motive of one of their most striking novels. The mere history of the place is in itself a romance. So recently as in 1831 the place had only 154 inhabitants, and it has now, it is believed, considerably more than 60,000. Until iron was discovered in the Cleveland Hills the smelting works of the North of England were situated almost solely on the Tyne and the Wear. The finding of Cleveland iron made a vast change in the locale of a great industry, and covered the low-lying and desolate lands near the estuary of the Tees with mighty forges, and blast furnaces, and iron shipbuilding yards and crowded streets. Where, sixty years ago, a shallow stream wound down to the sea, with only an occasional house discernible along its banks, there is now one of the finest outlets of our commerce and manufactures, and a deep river flowing through thickly populated towns. And as regards development the end is not yet. It has seemed more than once that Middlesbrough would collapse almost as rapidly as it has grown up, but it has risen stronger from every depression, and some new invention or discovery has at each crisis brought its assurance of continued life and growth.
However, it is an unlovely Tees that the eye alights upon since the smoke of the blast furnaces came in sight. It would scarcely be possible for a river so beautiful in its upper reaches to undergo a more surprising and spirit-depressing change. Yet standing on the lofty quays at Middlesbrough and looking seaward, one is conscious of a throb of exhilaration, such as the hero of “Locksley Hall” must have felt when, imagining the future, he—
“Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.”