The Roman Segendunum, which covered about three acres and a half of land, stood near to the river where it comes once more into a straight course after having taken a great bend southward shortly after leaving Newcastle. The wall thus enclosed a great bight of land between Pons Ælii and its eastern extremity, probably made useful in the landing of troops. From Segendunum it would be possible to signal to the important Roman stations at the mouth of the Tyne. But of Roman rule there is now nothing to remind us except after long search. The fame of Wallsend has been carried over the world by its coal, though, curiously enough, no coal is ever brought to bank at this place now.
Rather more than half-way from Newcastle to the sea, and over the river from Wallsend, the flames of the Jarrow furnaces leap into the air. At two widely separated periods of our history, Jarrow—the Saxon Gyrwy—has reached a distinction and importance altogether out of proportion to its size and the advantages of its situation. Here, as Mr. Green has beautifully observed, “the quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge, the tranquil pleasure that lies in learning and teaching and writing, dawned for Englishmen in the story of Bede.” And of late years Jarrow has become the seat of an immense industry, whose results are to be met with in all parts of the world and on every sea. The first screw collier, the John Bowes, was built at Jarrow. It revolutionised the coal trade, and has made an almost inconceivable change in the commerce of the Tyne. Esteemed a large vessel in its day, it may occasionally be seen in Shields Harbour—for it still carries coals to London—dwarfed into insignificance by the passing to and fro of its gigantic successors. It is probable that the smallest steamer now built in the Jarrow shipyards is larger than the John Bowes. The place which gave the little steamer birth has grown into a considerable town, with a mayor and corporation, and some expectation of a member of Parliament by-and-bye. In all England, so far as I know, there is no sight which gives so powerful and weird an idea of a great industry as do the Jarrow furnaces when the flames are leaping from their lofty mouths on a murky night. The fire plays and burns and glows on voluminous clouds of smoke and steam; the Tyne is illumined by blazing pillars and rippling sheets of flame; everything shorewards is gigantic and undefined and awful, “’twixt upper, nether, and surrounding fires.”
SHIELDS HARBOUR: THE HIGH LIGHTS.
How different was the quiet Gyrwy on which Bede first opened his eyes! Beyond the furnaces and the shipyards the river broadens out suddenly over a space which is like a great bay. At low water this is nothing more than a huge acreage of mud, with quicksands beneath. To the right, Jarrow Church and Monastery stand on a lonely eminence; to the left, the little river Don flows sluggishly into the Tyne. After the landing of Hengist, says Gibbon, “an ample space of wood and morass was resigned to the vague dominion of Nature, and the modern bishopric of Durham, the whole territory from the Tyne to the Tees, had returned to its primitive state of a savage and solitary forest.” All round Jarrow there was morass only—so much we should know from its ancient name, which means “marsh” or “fen,” if there did not now remain something of the ancient appearance of things. The one piece of irredeemable land is this Jarrow “Slake.” The river Don must have scoured out a wider estuary in Bede’s day and before, for twice at least it was used as a haven—once by the Romans, who anchored their vessels at its mouth, and once by King Egfrid, who found shelter in it for the whole of his fleet. Of Bede’s monastery—he was born at Monkton, close by—only a few broken walls remain, but they are attached to a large and interesting church, which has a good example of a restored Saxon tower. Ruin swept over the monastery again and again in its early days. In less than a century after Bede’s death, the Danes were spreading themselves over England; the Cross went down before the hammer of Thor; and one mournful illustration of the reasserted supremacy of heathenism was to be found in the ruined monastery of St. Paul at Jarrow. When the monks of Lindisfarne, bearing with them the body of their saint, turned round to look upon Jarrow on their way to Chester-le-Street, they saw quick tongues of flame shooting upwards, and the wild, active figures of marauding Danes visible in the midnight glare. That same year a great battle was fought near the monastery, and the Vikings were overcome; whereat the monks crept back to their former quarters, rebuilt dormitories there, and enjoyed eighty years of peace; but in 867 a fleet of Baltic pirates sailed up the Tyne, and so plundered and burnt Jarrow Monastery that “it remained desolate and a desert for two centuries, nothing being left but the naked walls.”
In the whole course of the river there is no finer sweep of water than that which stretches from Jarrow Slake into the harbour of Shields. On the north side we have passed the Northumberland Docks, which have a water-space of fifty-five acres, and are entirely devoted to the lading of coals. On the south side are the Tyne Docks of the North-Eastern Railway Company, which have a water space of fifty acres, and are employed equally for coals and general merchandise. The one is the main outlet of the great Northumberland coalfield, the other of the still more productive coalfield of North Durham. With the Albert Edward Dock, constructed more recently than either of these, and fit for ships of heavier draught, this is the whole dock accommodation of the Tyne; for, as I have had occasion previously to remark, the river itself, from the sea to two miles above Newcastle, is a huge tidal dock, which is available in all weathers, and in all states of the tide, for the largest vessels that float. What this phrase means may be seen to the full in Shields Harbour, where, on either side of the broad stream, vessels lie chained to the buoys in tier beyond tier, leaving a wide passage in mid-river along which great steamers are for ever passing to and fro.
The story of how the Tyne has been developed from a shallow and perilous stream into one of the noblest rivers of the kingdom makes a curious history, much too long to relate in this place. All the more extensive changes have been effected since the middle of the present century. The Tyne had a foreign as well as a domestic coal trade so early, at least, as the year 1325; but so little had at any time been done for its accommodation that there are many now living who remember how a small vessel might be stranded on sandbanks some five or six times in the course of its passage from Newcastle to Shields. Indeed, the reckless emptying of ballast into the bed of the river, and the utter neglect of means for keeping a navigable passage—things which seem altogether incredible in these days—at length brought matters to such a pass that the small passenger steamers often stuck fast at some portion of their journey, wherefore there was always a fiddler on board, to keep the passengers entertained till the rising of the next tide. It was whilst the Newcastle Corporation still successfully asserted its jurisdiction that such things were, and were growing worse; but as strong young communities grew up along the banks of the Tyne, the oppression and neglect of Newcastle became intolerable, and in 1850 the Tyne Commission was formed, with results that cannot have been foreseen by its founders; for the river has been widened and deepened over an extent of fifteen miles or more. Docks have been made, the Tyne has been straightened where “points” projected dangerously, enormous stone breakwaters have been built out into the sea, and where, in 1851, there were thirty vessels ashore in one confused heap, the British Navy might now safely ride at anchor, even in the teeth of a north-east gale. The transformation of the Tyne from its former dangerous condition into such a harbour of refuge as does not exist elsewhere on our coasts is one of the noblest pieces of engineering that our century has seen, and there is no other great engineering work the fame of which has been so little noised abroad.
THE RIVER AT TYNEMOUTH CASTLE.