XXXIII.
A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses,
has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the
sadness of a free spirit put under restraint. Chain cables and
stout ropes keep her bound to stone posts at the edge of a paved
shore, and a berthing-master, with brass buttons on his coat, walks
about like a weather-beaten and ruddy gaoler, casting jealous,
watchful glances upon the moorings that fetter a ship lying passive
and still and safe, as if lost in deep regrets of her days of
liberty and danger on the sea.
The swarm of renegades--dock-masters, berthing-masters, gatemen,
and such like--appear to nurse an immense distrust of the captive
ship's resignation. There never seem chains and ropes enough to
satisfy their minds concerned with the safe binding of free ships
to the strong, muddy, enslaved earth. "You had better put another
bight of a hawser astern, Mr. Mate," is the usual phrase in their
mouth. I brand them for renegades, because most of them have been
sailors in their time. As if the infirmities of old age--the gray
hair, the wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, and the knotted
veins of the hands--were the symptoms of moral poison, they prowl
about the quays with an underhand air of gloating over the broken
spirit of noble captives. They want more fenders, more breasting-
ropes; they want more springs, more shackles, more fetters; they
want to make ships with volatile souls as motionless as square
blocks of stone. They stand on the mud of pavements, these
degraded sea-dogs, with long lines of railway-trucks clanking their
couplings behind their backs, and run malevolent glances over your
ship from headgear to taffrail, only wishing to tyrannize over the
poor creature under the hypocritical cloak of benevolence and care.
Here and there cargo cranes looking like instruments of torture for
ships swing cruel hooks at the end of long chains. Gangs of dock-
labourers swarm with muddy feet over the gangways. It is a moving
sight this, of so many men of the earth, earthy, who never cared
anything for a ship, trampling unconcerned, brutal and hob-nailed
upon her helpless body.
Fortunately, nothing can deface the beauty of a ship. That sense
of a dungeon, that sense of a horrible and degrading misfortune
overtaking a creature fair to see and safe to trust, attaches only
to ships moored in the docks of great European ports. You feel
that they are dishonestly locked up, to be hunted about from wharf
to wharf on a dark, greasy, square pool of black water as a brutal
reward at the end of a faithful voyage.
A ship anchored in an open roadstead, with cargo-lighters alongside
and her own tackle swinging the burden over the rail, is
accomplishing in freedom a function of her life. There is no
restraint; there is space: clear water around her, and a clear sky
above her mastheads, with a landscape of green hills and charming
bays opening around her anchorage. She is not abandoned by her own
men to the tender mercies of shore people. She still shelters, and
is looked after by, her own little devoted band, and you feel that
presently she will glide between the headlands and disappear. It
is only at home, in dock, that she lies abandoned, shut off from
freedom by all the artifices of men that think of quick despatch
and profitable freights. It is only then that the odious,
rectangular shadows of walls and roofs fall upon her decks, with
showers of soot.
To a man who has never seen the extraordinary nobility, strength,
and grace that the devoted generations of ship-builders have
evolved from some pure nooks of their simple souls, the sight that
could be seen five-and-twenty years ago of a large fleet of
clippers moored along the north side of the New South Dock was an
inspiring spectacle. Then there was a quarter of a mile of them,
from the iron dockyard-gates guarded by policemen, in a long,
forest-like perspective of masts, moored two and two to many stout
wooden jetties. Their spars dwarfed with their loftiness the
corrugated-iron sheds, their jibbooms extended far over the shore,
their white-and-gold figure-heads, almost dazzling in their purity,
overhung the straight, long quay above the mud and dirt of the
wharfside, with the busy figures of groups and single men moving to
and fro, restless and grimy under their soaring immobility.
At tide-time you would see one of the loaded ships with battened-
down hatches drop out of the ranks and float in the clear space of
the dock, held by lines dark and slender, like the first threads of
a spider's web, extending from her bows and her quarters to the
mooring-posts on shore. There, graceful and still, like a bird
ready to spread its wings, she waited till, at the opening of the
gates, a tug or two would hurry in noisily, hovering round her with
an air of fuss and solicitude, and take her out into the river,
tending, shepherding her through open bridges, through dam-like
gates between the flat pier-heads, with a bit of green lawn
surrounded by gravel and a white signal-mast with yard and gaff,
flying a couple of dingy blue, red, or white flags.
This New South Dock (it was its official name), round which my
earlier professional memories are centred, belongs to the group of
West India Docks, together with two smaller and much older basins
called Import and Export respectively, both with the greatness of
their trade departed from them already. Picturesque and clean as
docks go, these twin basins spread side by side the dark lustre of
their glassy water, sparely peopled by a few ships laid up on buoys
or tucked far away from each other at the end of sheds in the
corners of empty quays, where they seemed to slumber quietly
remote, untouched by the bustle of men's affairs--in retreat rather
than in captivity. They were quaint and sympathetic, those two
homely basins, unfurnished and silent, with no aggressive display
of cranes, no apparatus of hurry and work on their narrow shores.
No railway-lines cumbered them. The knots of labourers trooping in
clumsily round the corners of cargo-sheds to eat their food in
peace out of red cotton handkerchiefs had the air of picnicking by
the side of a lonely mountain pool. They were restful (and I
should say very unprofitable), those basins, where the chief
officer of one of the ships involved in the harassing, strenuous,
noisy activity of the New South Dock only a few yards away could
escape in the dinner-hour to stroll, unhampered by men and affairs,
meditating (if he chose) on the vanity of all things human. At one
time they must have been full of good old slow West Indiamen of the
square-stern type, that took their captivity, one imagines, as
stolidly as they had faced the buffeting of the waves with their
blunt, honest bows, and disgorged sugar, rum, molasses, coffee, or
logwood sedately with their own winch and tackle. But when I knew
them, of exports there was never a sign that one could detect; and
all the imports I have ever seen were some rare cargoes of tropical
timber, enormous baulks roughed out of iron trunks grown in the
woods about the Gulf of Mexico. They lay piled up in stacks of
mighty boles, and it was hard to believe that all this mass of dead
and stripped trees had come out of the flanks of a slender,
innocent-looking little barque with, as likely as not, a homely
woman's name--Ellen this or Annie that--upon her fine bows. But
this is generally the case with a discharged cargo. Once spread at
large over the quay, it looks the most impossible bulk to have all
come there out of that ship along-side.
They were quiet, serene nooks in the busy world of docks, these
basins where it has never been my good luck to get a berth after
some more or less arduous passage. But one could see at a glance
that men and ships were never hustled there. They were so quiet
that, remembering them well, one comes to doubt that they ever
existed--places of repose for tired ships to dream in, places of
meditation rather than work, where wicked ships--the cranky, the
lazy, the wet, the bad sea boats, the wild steerers, the
capricious, the pig-headed, the generally ungovernable--would have
full leisure to take count and repent of their sins, sorrowful and
naked, with their rent garments of sailcloth stripped off them, and
with the dust and ashes of the London atmosphere upon their
mastheads. For that the worst of ships would repent if she were
ever given time I make no doubt. I have known too many of them.
No ship is wholly bad; and now that their bodies that had braved so
many tempests have been blown off the face of the sea by a puff of
steam, the evil and the good together into the limbo of things that
have served their time, there can be no harm in affirming that in
these vanished generations of willing servants there never has been
one utterly unredeemable soul.
In the New South Dock there was certainly no time for remorse,
introspection, repentance, or any phenomena of inner life either
for the captive ships or for their officers. From six in the
morning till six at night the hard labour of the prison-house,
which rewards the valiance of ships that win the harbour went on
steadily, great slings of general cargo swinging over the rail, to
drop plumb into the hatchways at the sign of the gangway-tender's
hand. The New South Dock was especially a loading dock for the
Colonies in those great (and last) days of smart wool-clippers,
good to look at and--well--exciting to handle. Some of them were
more fair to see than the others; many were (to put it mildly)
somewhat over-masted; all were expected to make good passages; and
of all that line of ships, whose rigging made a thick, enormous
network against the sky, whose brasses flashed almost as far as the
eye of the policeman at the gates could reach, there was hardly one
that knew of any other port amongst all the ports on the wide earth
but London and Sydney, or London and Melbourne, or London and
Adelaide, perhaps with Hobart Town added for those of smaller
tonnage. One could almost have believed, as her gray-whiskered
second mate used to say of the old Duke of S-, that they knew the
road to the Antipodes better than their own skippers, who, year in,
year out, took them from London--the place of captivity--to some
Australian port where, twenty-five years ago, though moored well
and tight enough to the wooden wharves, they felt themselves no
captives, but honoured guests.
