Round the Galley Fire

by William Clark Russell

Instantly a crowd of fists were thrust under my nose, filled with documents, and “Here’s mine!” and “Here’s mine!” “V. G. every one of ’em!” was roared out in twenty or thirty voices. I looked at some of these certificates, and found the letters “V. G.” (very good) endorsed on the backs of all that I examined.

“D’ye want to ship, sir?” sung out a fellow whilst I was glancing over these papers. “I’ve got two V. G. certificates in my pocket, and as I’ve not had anything to eat to-day you shall have ’em both for a couple of shillings.”

“Are certificates often sold in this fashion?” said I, of a quiet-looking man standing alongside of me.

“Sold!” he exclaimed indignantly; “what’s to hinder ’em? If a man sticks to the name that’s on the certificate, who’s to know? and so ye get men shipping themselves with false characters, no more fit for sailors’ work than if they wos greengrocers.”

“Perhaps that’s one reason why skippers and owners prefer Dutchmen to Englishmen,” said I. But this raised another storm; they shouted that more rascality went on in that way among Dutchmen than British sailors; that the reason was not that, but because, as I had heard, Dutchmen shipped for wages no Englishman would look at, and put up with food, accommodation, and treatment which no Englishman would endure, and likewise because there was a deal of underhand crimping work going on between the foreign boarding-house runners and mates and captains, and so on.

Here the emotions of these sixty or seventy men brought them pressing so heavily around me, that my anxiety to hear their statements was swamped in the labour of breathing and the struggle to liberate myself. I bawled to them to make way, as I wanted to have a look at the rooms under the shed; on which they drew back and let me out, though they followed at my heels as I passed from one room to another, talking and arguing hotly, calling marine blessings down on the heads of all Dutchmen, and wondering what good it was nowadays being born an Englishman, when even a Finn, whom, in the olden times, no sailor liked to be shipmates with, was thought a better man? The rooms were middle-sized, damp, dark, and dirty compartments, and were meant to serve as waiting-rooms for the unhappy creatures who thronged the bleak and frowsy yard in the hope of being engaged by captains. It was like being in the dungeons in the Tower of London—which, by the way, stood close at hand—to pass through these death-cold apartments and view the legends, dictated by hopeless waiting, roughly scrawled in pencil upon the walls. Dirt and soot everywhere!—on the ceilings, on the floors, on the walls, on the benches, in the very atmosphere that filled the cheerless haunt. A strip of grating ran through the floors, disclosing the outline of a hot-water pipe; but it looked, in that grave, the very corpse of a heating apparatus; and when I asked if ever these stone rooms were made warm by that old, mouldy, dirt and soot covered contrivance, the only answer I got was a loud growling laugh, as if, exquisite as was the joke, it was likewise very offensive. And this, thought I, as I stood gazing with mingled astonishment and disgust at the picture of grime, neglect, and dirt, is the great London shipping office, the medium for the vast and ever-growing port of London for the transaction of business between the masters and crews of ships! Who are these men who come here in the hope of obtaining employment by manning the fleets we are never weary of extolling as the source of Great Britain’s wealth and power, that they should be used in this manner—furnished for their long, weary, and often hopeless waiting with accommodation fouler, unwholesomer, colder, more soul-depressing than the worst prison that ever excited the horror and provoked the denunciations of the philanthropist?

“Has this place,” I asked, “been long in this condition?”

“It used to be kept a little more decent,” was the reply; “but it’s been falling from bad to worse for many a month gone. Considering the fees[A] we sailors have to pay, it’s a shame that we should have to put up with a place which no farmer who values the lives of his hogs would stow ’em in. I’ve been day after day down here, from the opening hour till the closing at four o’clock, for six weeks, hoping to be engaged; and I tell you, sir, that a man need be to be born a gutter-snipe, used to sleeping all his life under railway arches and the likes of them places, not to feel the effects of such a slum as this upon his spirits, when day after day goes by and he has to keep on waiting here for a captain to single him out. You are seeing it now in summer, when the air’s warm; think of it in winter, sir, with the slush a foot thick, and the wind blowing into those waiting-rooms fit to turn your marrow into ice.”

The Board of Trade is responsible for the conduct and keeping of this office. Have the officials of that great department any conception of the state of the place? Is it ever visited by them? Do they know anything more about it than that it is situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of Tower Hill? Nothing more disgraceful is to be found in London.

By degrees the men left me, to resume their weary trudging up and down or to draw together in groups; on which, finding that I should be able to converse without the risk of suffocation, I went up to a well-looking, decently-dressed sailor-man, on whom I had had my eye for some time previously, and asked how long he had been waiting for a ship.