“And a Hull smack’s earnings?”
“Between £800 and £900 a year—I mean the gross earnings.”
“Smacks are being constantly run down by vessels. Do they want better lights? What is the reason of these frequent disasters?”
“As a rule,” he answered, “smacks carry very good lights; but there is room for improvement. I’m one of many who strongly advise that smacks should carry more powerful lights than they now use. If smacks are very often rundown—and true enough that is—it’s mainly because of the bad look-out that’s kept aboard vessels navigating the North Sea. There are captains who don’t respect our lives. They see us lying-to our nets, they know we can’t get out of the road; but on they come, never shifting their helm, and if they pass by without striking us, and we call to ’em to know where they’re coming, all the answer we get consists of brutal curses.”
Apparently, then—and I say it not alone on the evidence of this man, but on the assurance of many others engaged in the fishing trade—the measure that is required to diminish the loss of life at sea among the valuable class of men employed in the North Sea fishery is the suppression of the boxing system during the winter months. And another most important step would be the supervision of smacks by qualified inspectors appointed by the Board of Trade. At present I do not know of any law to prevent an owner from sending, or to punish an owner for despatching, to sea the craziest old smack that can be kept alive by long and frequent spells at the pump. It is certainly most anomalous that close attention should be given to the loading, construction, and equipment of ships belonging to one section of the English marine, whilst another section that finds occupation for many thousands of men and boys is utterly disregarded by the State in all things saving the exhibition of lights.
A FOURPENNY VOYAGE.
Dr. Johnson once said that the full tide of human life was to be seen at Charing Cross. The full tide of human commerce begins a few bridges lower down. A man should count it a real privilege that, for the modest sum of fourpence, he is able to survey such an illustration of the wealth and power of this Empire as may enable him to form a very clear and true conception of the aggregate commerce and industry of the United Kingdom. To embark at London Bridge on board a fourpenny steamboat, bound to Woolwich, is, in my humble judgment, to be conveyed through the most wonderful series of transformation scenes that the world has to offer. What is comparable to that passage? No one who has entered the Sidney Heads but will remember the astonishment and delight inspired by the miles of blue water studded with fairy islands, the jasper-like reflection of clouds in the glass-clear depths, the rich tropical vegetation of the shores, the gleaming spars of shipping lifting their delicate tracery into the darkly-pure blue. Passages of strange and shining beauty recur like haunting memories of fragments of Eastern story to those who have threaded the waters of the Nile or the Hoogly; and recollections of the Peiho are made delightfully picturesque and impressive by visions of uncouth junks moored in the rushing stream, by glimpses of distant temples, by remembrance of soft winds aromatic with spices.
But the Thames! Its scenery is the work of human hands. An atmosphere of yellow light gives magnitude and a vagueness of outline to the leagues of water-side structures, and an obscurity to the horizon in which the monuments of industry fade with a simulation of immensity that cheats the senses into a belief of immeasurable remoteness. The great ships are in the docks far down the river; but though the steamers which lie in tiers upon tiers in the Pool, and far beyond the limits of that reach, are for the most part but of middle size, yet the mind loses all sense of their individual dimensions in the overwhelming impression produced by their collective tonnage. One journey through this magnificent stretch of stream is a large education. The flags of a score of nationalities colour the sombre heavens with their green and blue and yellow and white folds. All the countries in the world appear to pass in a kind of review as the ear catches the hundred tongues, and the eye the hundred faces, and the nostrils the hundred scents wafted from the holds of ships whose greyish spars seem yet to retain the heat of the equatorial sun, and whose sides are fretted with the wash of the surges of the great oceans.
I once took fourpennyworth of travel aboard a Woolwich steamer, for the sake of renewing some old recollections. I will not say that a better kind of steamer would not have made the voyage more comfortable. The dexterous and watchful skipper, who stood upon the bridge carrying his freight of human lives through the intricacies of blundering barges and the bewilderment of swinging ships and capricious tugs, by light motions of his arm and soft asides to the boy, who furnished them with ear-piercing echoes, seemed to me to deserve a stouter ship. The funnel-casing had much the appearance of an aged saucepan whose bottom has been burnt to the thinness of a sailor’s shirt. I thought to myself, “Suppose we should tip some of these old barges our stem by mistake? Assuredly we should crumple up forward like a sponge-cake; and how should we manage to save our lives?”
I looked everywhere, but there was not so much as an old cork to pitch overboard in case of accident. Even the seats, rotten as the hinges were, were not likely to come away in a hurry. But there was too much to be seen to permit me to bother over the crazy, quivering, admirably handled, and most dangerous old machine that was running us from pier to pier against a strong flood tide. Once clear of London Bridge we were in a complete lane formed by moored or anchored steamers. They were very much alike—little beauty amongst them; some of them well-decked, with their gangways out, showing the covering-board close to the water, and making the structures, with their tall afterdecks and topgallant forecastles, look as if they were in course of being built, instead of newly arrived from voyages long and short. But all such characteristics were lost in the thoughts of the immense mass of tonnage here submitted. Where did it end? where would the last of these steamers be lying? To right and left they stretched, with lighters alongside, steam winches rattling, the vapour of donkey engines blowing out in volumes, some in semi-discharged state, with a heavy list to port or starboard, with frequent alternations of the flags of Denmark, Sweden, France, the Netherlands—I know not what other bunting—amid which our own red ensign counted as twenty to one.