THAMES BARGES. T HE primitive explorers who came up the Thames
in their rough craft examined the site of what was afterwards to be London, and saw that it was good. The river was the making of London ; London is where it is because of the river. It is curious that Londoners of to-day should know so little of their river below bridges, but the reason of course is that the means of seeing it are very poor. How many Londoners could say how to come upon even a peep of the lower river, within a distance of ten miles of London Bridge, by any of the ordinary means of transport ? There is a general impression that the river is impenetrably walled up by ware- houses, wharfs, docks, and other forbidden ground. An obvious way is to go by "penny steamer," but the penny steamers are rare, when not altogether absent. A steamer is, however, worth waiting for. Before you pass through the wonderful Pool of London, notice the two Dutch schuyts moored off Billingsgate. The Dutch fishermen have held the moorings as a right ever since the time of Charles II., on condition that they are never left empty. The schuyts in possession do not move off till two others are ready to take their places. Taine said that the only proper approach to London was by the Thames, as in no other way could a stranger conceive the com- merce of England. The penny steamer will also give you one of the most beautiful architectural visions in the world—the magnificent front of Greenwich Hospital, seen as you come round a bend of the river, rising out of the water like a more noble palace than ever Venice imagined. All these characteristic sights are too little known, but the most characteristic sight of all is that of the sailing barges, of which you may pass hundreds between London Bridge and the Nore. These are vessels of which every Londoner ought to be very proud; he ought to boast of them, and take foreigners to see them ; and he ought to be as proud of the consummate seamanship of the bargees of London River (as sailors call the Thames) as of the appearance of the vessels. But alas ! the very word "barge" is used almost as a symbol of ungainliness and sordidness.
What beauty of line these barges really have from the bead of the towering topsail to the tiny mizzen that lightens the massive weight of the rudder! There is no detail that is weak or mean; a barge dodging among the shipping of the winding river in a stiff breeze is boldness perfectly embodied in a human design. The Thames sailing barges are one of the best schools of seamanship that remain to a world enslaved by steam. In no other waters can you find such a spread of canvas handled by so small a crew. The type of barge tends to become larger, and many of them are now over a hundred tons, yet these large vessels with their lofty sails are managed by a couple of hands. In the fair weather of summer days you may see the skipper helped only by a boy. Of course, such an economy of labour is made possible only by appliances specially thought out for the purpose. It has been said that in some of the United States coasting schooners everything is worked by machinery except the ship ; the sails are set by steam, the ship is lighted by electricity ; labour is reduced to its irreducible minimum, and only the propulsion of the ship is left to the chances of the weather. But even that economy does not exceed what is familiar on the Thames. The mainsail of a barge is what is known as a spritsail. The huge swinging sprit to the top of which the peak of the mainsail is fixed is longer than the mast. It is supported in a socket near the foot of the mast. The mainsail is always in position ; there is no hauling up or down. Instead of being lowered it is " brailed," that is to say, drawn up to the sprit in a bunch like a curtain. The foot of the sail is, of course, without a boom, and the sheet works on a horse. The topsail is an especially large sail, and so far from being the mere auxiliary which it is in yachts, it is one of the most important parts of the sail plan, and is the best-drawing sail in the vessel. Often in a strong wind you may see a barge scudding along under topsail and headsails only. The topsail remains permanently aloft. It is attached to the mast by hoops, and can be huddled out of action or drawn taut again in a moment. There is none of the coaxing and trimming which the average yachtsman goes through before he is satisfied with the set of the little sail which stands in so different a proportion and relation to his other sails. The length of a modern barge is a good eighty feet. Her beam is some eighteen feet. Her draught when she is unloaded is not much more than two feet, but she draws six feet when she is loaded. The leeboards of a barge, by which she is kept on the wind, for she is flat-bottomed and has no keel, give her a draught of fourteen feet when loaded. You may see a Thames barge anywhere along the south coast of England, but her true habitat is from the Thames estuary to Suffolk.
Those who have watched the annual race of the Thames barges in a strong breeze have seen the perfection of motion ancl colour in the smaller vessels of commerce. The writer, when first he saw this race and beheld a brand-new barge heeling over in a wind which was as much as she could stand, glistening blackly from stem to stern except where the line of vivid green ran round her bulwark (a touch of genius, that green), with her red-brown sails as smooth and taut as a new dog-skin glove, and her crew in red woollen caps in honour of the occasion, exclaimed that this was not a barge but a yacht. He has often seen the barge that won that race plying her lawful trades in the years since, and she is still one of the trimmest and fastest sailers in the Thames. She continues to carry grain or cement or some cargo that would be spoiled by damp. But her days of pride are numbered. She may last forty years or more, but the strain is immense, and after a few years it cannot be expected that she will be perfectly watertight. She will then carry iron, or bricks, or waste paper, or bones, or manure, or anything, in a gradually descending scale of value, that need not be kept absolutely dry. One familiar cargo of the Thames barges must be men- tioned by itself—the stacks of hay or straw. In the distance you may see what looks like a haystack afloat on the sea with a truncated set of sails above it. The " stackie," as Thames people call a barge that carries hay or straw, is an ordinary barge with the mainsail and foresail reefed so as to clear the top of the stack. Ladders are placed fore and aft of the stack, and when a man wants to run from one end of the vessel to the other he goes up one ladder, along the top of the stack, and down the other ladder. Most of the time the mate stands on the top of the stack and calls out directions to the skipper at the wheel, who can see nothing. The spectacle of a haystack blindly but accurately turning in and out of the intricate traffic of the London River against a head wind is one of the most enchanting that a nautical eye can look upon.
Anywhere along the broken coast of Essex, whether you gaze inland across saltings and marshes, or seawards as far as your eye carries, you will see a Thames barge. She may be moving in some creek, of which the entrance is invisible, so that she seems to be sailing over the fields, or she may be anchored in a position that seems to the uninstructed to be in unplumbed depths of the North Sea. To the bargee the bed of the sea is as familiar and clear as Piccadilly, Oxford Street, and the Strand to the Londoner. He need not travel many miles without being able to bring up, if compelled to it by stress of weather, in some patch of water protected by a bank. The deep-draught vessels give the banks as wide a berth as they can, but to the bargee they are all friendly means to his end. The banks which break the heavy seas have made the evolu- tion of the sailing barge possible. The barges thread the intricate swatchways, or take shelter in a shoal on the top of a bank where the receding tide will leave them high and dry. The skill of the bargee in these places is his security.
But of course the bargees pay their toll of lives like other sailors. They are not always in the quiet waters of liquid reflections that seem to make their vessels the fit subject of a Vandevelde picture. Many stories of wreck, suffering, and endurance might be told, but one will suffice—a true narrative of events that happened a few weeks ago. On January 31st, according to the East Anglian Daily News, the barge 'The Sisters,' laden with barley screenings, left Felixstowe dock for the Medway. She called at Burnham-on-Crouch, and on the following Friday afternoon was between the Ma.plin Sands and the Mouse Lightship, when a south-west gale arose with extraordinary suddenness. Before sail could be shortened the topsail and jib were blown away. The foresail sheet broke, and the sail slatted itself into several pieces before a remnant could be secured. Under the mainsail and the remaining portion of the foresail the skipper and his mate steered for Sheerness, but they were unable to point high enough up the river, and they bore away for Whitstable. Then the steering-chain broke, and nothing could be done but let go the anchor. They were then in what is called the four-fathom channel, about three-quarters of a mile inside the West Ooze Buoy. The seas swept the barge from end to end. Darkness fell, and for an hour the skipper burnt flares, while his mate stood by the boat ready to cast it off from the cleat in an emergency. The emergency came before there was a sign of approaching rescue. The barge suddenly plunged head first and disappeared. The mate, with the instinct of long experience, cast off the painter of the boat as the deck went down below his feet. Both men went under water, but the boat was jerked forwards from her position astern before the painter wholly released itself, and as the men came up the dinghy was between them. It was a miracle, but so it happened. They grabbed hold of her before she could be swept away, climbed in and began to bail out the water. With one oar over the tee side and the other in the sculling-hole they made for the Mouse Lightship. "If we miss that," said the skipper, "God knows where we shall go!" For four hours they struggled towards the Mouse light, although they could not always see it, and eventually came within hailing distance. They shouted again and again, but the crew of the lightship, though they heard them, could not at first see them. At last the boat came near enough for a line to be thrown across it. The boat was hauled alongside and the men were drawn up into safety, "eaten up with cramp," as the skipper said, and numb with exhaustion and exposure. At the same moment the boat, which was half- filled with water, broke away and disappeared. Thus barge and boat were both gone, and the crew found themselves, at the end of this strange adventure, marooned, as it were, on a floating rock, where they waited till the Southend lifeboat came, in answer to signals, to carry them away.
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