We were still about a mile from the hulk, when I observed a large ship in tow of a tug coming up the river. She sat deep in the water and was plainly fresh from a long voyage, rusty about the bows and weather-stained along the line of her painted ports; but she carried the smartness of a frigate aloft in the well-squared yards, from which all canvas had been unbent, and in the perfectly-stayed and lofty topgallant-masts, whose royal yards had been sent down. I seemed to recognise the large house-flag she flew at the main.
‘What ship is that?’ I asked, well aware that Thames watermen know every ship out of London.
He turned his chin on his shoulder and viewed her leisurely and answered:
‘The Childe Harold.’
‘The Childe Harold!’ I cried, and I threw up my veil to look at her. Will Johnstone’s ship! I could scarcely credit my eyes. She glided, stately and slow, in the wake of the tug. Her home was at hand, the forest of the East India Docks was in sight, and the paddles of the little steamer were beating the water slowly.
I observed a crowd of people on the forecastle, and a number of men and women walked the poop, or after-deck. The red flag streamed brightly from the peak, the glass and brass about her sparkled, the little circular windows in her side flashed like gems as they took the sun, and the raiment of the ladies fluttered in many tints. Here and there a sailor was trotting aloft, and a man standing high and conspicuously on the forecastle was shouting, with one hand against his mouth, to the tug. As the noble ship passed she made a holiday picture of the water round about her and the land on either hand. I stared hard, hoping I might catch a sight of Will, but the distance between was too wide to enable me to distinguish faces.
‘There’s no finer ship out of London,’ said the waterman. ‘She’s from Australey. That’s where the gents yah’re going to visit are sent to. If there’s naught but nettles to be blowed out of dead convicts there’s blisterin’ fine cities to be growed out of live ones. I’m going to Australey myself some of these here days—just to take a look ’round—work my way out and home again. A shilling a month ’ud do. I’m no sailor man.’
He sank into silence. The Childe Harold floated away astern, and now right ahead of us and near loomed the giant figure of the prison-hulk Warrior, her head pointing toward London. Another hulk lay moored close by. All these hulks, those off the Arsenal, as well as those off the Dockyard, were as familiar to me as the fingers of my hand. Over and over again had I passed them and looked at them during my lonely pleasant jaunts upon the river, but always with an incurious eye; but a new, deep, fearful significance had now to my gaze entered the grim and hideous fabric of the mountainous Warrior. I viewed the rows of ports savagely and massively grated, and thought of the many eyes of crime and suffering, of guilt—and, O my God! of innocence too—which might have peered through those metal meshes at the outside scene of flowing river, with the spirit of liberty strong in the speeding craft, in the flight of the cloud, in the feathering of the hissing ripple.
She was a hideous ship, horrible in her suggestions of human crime and despair. Rows of coarse convict linen fluttered betwixt her pole masts, at the head of the foremost of which streamed the long pennon of the State. She was bulged up all about the bows with rude band-box-like buildings; cowled ventilating-shafts gaped above her decks; the dull gleam of gilt and glass about her vast quarter-galleries and stern affected the imagination as a faded memorial of times when her sides bristled with the black dogs of war, when her copper sheathing trembled like a glance of sunset under her, when she lifted star-searching spires to the sky, space upon space of symmetric whiteness swelling soft as sifted snow to the glittering buttons of her trucks.
There was an off gangway ladder, with a warder standing like a sentinel at the head of it. The convicts were ashore, all of them, saving a few, silent at their trades under deck. A singular hush lay upon the big ship; though the morning was advanced and wide and brilliant, and the river alive with stemming barges and row-boats and sailing craft of all sorts, and alive too on the banks where the Dockyard was, and higher, where were many low wharves and dismantled hulks and riverside public-houses, and higher yet, where the Arsenal was, with its chimneys pouring smoke and feathers of steam darting from great square buildings; such was the stillness upon this slumbering mass of prison hulk, that, as we drew alongside, I could hear no sound but the sob of the stream of tide washing along the bends and an occasional groan of aged timber as the sweep of the water strained the old fabric upon its bed of mud.