A bright contrast was afforded by the noble conduct of the Mayor of Deal, one Thomas Powell, a slop-seller, who appealed successfully to these callous wretches’ hopes of gain by offering five shillings a head for every life saved. He had in the first instance entreated the Customs House officials to put out to save them, but without success, and the boats were refused; whereupon he and his mercenaries took them by force. More than two hundred of the shipwrecked were thus rescued; but even when brought ashore248 there was no shelter or food to be procured for them by appealing to officials, and the generous Powell was at the costs and charges of feeding, sheltering, and clothing the castaways. Further, he buried those who died, and paid the travelling expenses to Gravesend of the survivors.
Defoe’s biting indictment came home to the inhabitants of Deal, and, after a considerable time for thinking it over, they grew angry and resentful about it, in proportion to the truth of the charges. Thus we find them on June 21st, 1705, despatching the following letter:
“Whereas there has been this day produced to us a book called the ‘Storm,’ printed in London in the year 1704, for G. Sawbridge, in Little Britain, and sold by J. Nutt, near Stationers’ Hall, pretending to give an account of some particular accidents that happened thereby. We find, amongst other things, several scandalous and false reflections unjustly cast upon the inhabitants of the town and borough of Deal, with the malicious intent to bring a disreputation upon the people thereof, and to create a misunderstanding between her Majesty’s subjects which, if not timely confuted, may produce consequences detrimental to the town, and tend to a breach of the peace. To the end thereof, that the person who caused the publication thereof may be known, in order to be brought to condign punishment for such his infamous libel; we have thought fit, therefore, to appoint our Town Clerk to proceed against him in a Court of Law, unless he shall249 within the space of ten days thereof make known to us the person or persons, and where he or they may be found, who furnished the libellous article in the book commencing page 199 to the end of page 202, to which we expect a truthful answer within the time specified.”
There followed upon this hectoring document the signatures of the then Mayor, Jurats, and Corporation of Deal. But it proved to be all sound and empty fury, for nothing came of it.
Such men as these were the ancestors of the Deal boatmen of to-day; a race now very much down on its luck. The very town of Deal, one may almost say, is a survival. The causes that conjured it up, or at any rate, brought about its growth from a mere village, along the unprotected stark shingle beach, have ceased to operate, and great ships no longer sit for weeks in the Downs, awaiting a breeze, or in any numbers ride out storms in that once providential anchorage, all immensely to the profit of the purveyors of ships’ stores and to that of the boatmen. Deal in those times was one vast general shop, in which the mariner might buy anything, from anchors and cables, down to “salthorse” and ships’ biscuits. Those days of pigtails, hemp, and sails brought Deal to its time of greatest prosperity, and the present-day appearance of the town still tells the tale of it. Smuggling was then in its prime, and many a lugger constantly made successful runs on dark starless nights, or crept cautiously across Channel when the air250 was thick as a blanket with fog, under the very bows of the frigates at anchor in the roadstead.
I do not know that the Deal boatmen of to-day think much of this ancestry of theirs, or set much store by it. They are too much concerned, poor fellows, in considering how they are to get a living in these hard times; times particularly hard for them. But their daring and accomplished launching of a galley-punt and their handling of it in a seaway are exhibitions of craftsmanship impossible to be demonstrated except by these men, who have the hereditary aptitude.
To a landsman, the launching of one of these heavy, lug-sailed, undecked boats off such a beach as this, in a raging surf such as these shores alone can know in time of storm, is a marvel. The breakers are coming in snarling and screaming, in cruel, curving walls of water from whose crests the wind whips off the stinging brine that flies through the hurrying air in particles half in the likeness of sleet and half in that of fog. Here, and at such times, if anywhere, is—
“The scream of a madden’d beach dragged down by the wave”—
so finely phrased by Tennyson, in Maud, to be heard.
A launch would seem impossible, but down the beach the galley-punt is run, her keel scrunching through the pebbles with a hurrying roar that rises even above the clamour of wind and251 waves, and in a moment she is off, her crew of three leaping or tumbling in like jumping-jacks, and in another moment she is clear of the breakers and heading out to where some steamer is dimly seen rolling and pitching yonder in the obscurity, flying a signal for the landing of the pilot, who has brought her round from the port of London and has now finished his job and is going home by train, as the custom is with pilots.
To such work as this did the Deal boatmen’s lives come: hard work, and often hazardous; and, considering the casual nature of it, not well paid. Landing a pilot is, or was, worth twenty-five to thirty shillings or thereabouts, and it is obvious that this sum, casually earned and divided among a crew of three, is a poor recompense. But even this standby has been snatched away from the Deal boatmen since the Trinity House has established a steam pilot-cutter at Dover, which cruises about to land pilots from outward-bound ships at a fixed charge of £1. It is an excellent institution from the pilots’ point of view, but it is the last blow to the boatmen of Deal. Steam has ever been their enemy.
Dirty weather is, perhaps, more than ever the opportunity of this hardy and hard-bitten race, of whom it has been said that “every finger is a fish-hook, every hair a rope-yarn, and whose blood is pure Stockholm tar.” Mother Carey’s chickens—by which I mean, of course, the gulls—are not more at home amid the mountainous waves at such times. They cruise about in252 these dangerous seas in search of some captain who has lost his way. It is exquisitely true that other people’s misfortunes are their opportunity, and a ship likely without the aid of their expert knowledge of these waters to come to grief on the Goodwins, or other shoals, to say nothing of getting under the unkindly cliffs, is like a choice bone to a hungry dog. I hope I do no injustice to these men in the comparison. It simply discloses the measure of their needs and of their prize. It is a desperate livelihood for these days for them. The winter is hard, the summer season is short, and the fishing and the money earned in taking visitors for a sail form but a scanty and uncertain support for wives and children. Therefore, a ship in difficulties is a godsend that is worth a good deal of cruising for, and worth a good deal of hardship endured and bitter disappointments suffered. But when that ship is picked up there are no more savage and determined men to be found than these. They are embittered by much fruitless quartering of violent seas, and spurred by the thought of weeks of enforced idleness ashore, and by the spectre of empty cupboards at home. A shipmaster in peril out there is their legitimate prey, and they bear down upon him out of the driving spindrift as saviours, at a price. These men, who would, and do, man the lifeboats for life-saving with no after-thought for profit, are close dealers in these cases, and if a ship-master declines, for reasons of economy, their help, he may drive on253 sands or under cliffs or lose his ship in any way that chance may dictate, and they will not lend a helping hand. And quite rightly, too. Help under such circumstances is well worth the paying for.
“Want any help, sir?” Thus, or in some such way, comes their hail as their craft comes round in the eye of the wind and manœuvres carefully in the swashing seas. It is odds whether the captain, asking perhaps where he is, will be told, or whether he is flatly invited to “find out,” in the extremely strong language of these parts. Perhaps he asks “how much to take her into Ramsgate,” or whatever port he is making for.
“Twenty pounds”—or ten or fifteen, as the case may be, according to his emergencies.
Bargaining is little use. An offer of half, or more, is pretty sure to be curtly rejected, with “So long, captain; no time to waste.”
And then the bargainer almost invariably submits, ungraciously enough with “All right, you —— pirates,” or “beachcombers,” or something equally offensive. Strong language is cheap on the seas, and no one resents it, least of all the hovellers and the boatmen who have thus gained their point: it is all the harassed master has left him, and he may put his tongue to what strange curses he will, if it be any satisfaction.
And then, at a carefully chosen moment, as the vessels large and small set to one another in a peculiarly violent kind of maritime dance254 and the boatmen’s little craft swings dizzily up on a wave alongside, a rope is thrown and one of the galley-punt’s crew clambers breathlessly aboard, dashes the brine from his eyes, and is ready to navigate his charge through the seething waters as surely as a cab-driver takes a fare through well-known streets. His companions, sitting like statues in the boat, in streaming yellow oilskins, fade away like ghosts in the turmoil, and make for home.
Such are at those times the men you will see lounging the summer days on Deal beach and suggesting to visitors that it is a “fine day for a sail.” It looks a lazy life, this lounging, with hands in pockets, day after day, varied by an occasional turn with the tar-brush or paint-pot upon boat or timbered shanty; but it is really a life of one long waiting for something to turn up, and there is nothing else for it but to lounge hands in pockets. And to do the Deal boatmen the merest justice, they lounge extremely well. Do not mistake me: I do not mean that they do it elegantly. The figure of your typical ’longshoreman, bargelike and extremely solid, does not permit of that. No, I mean that he absolutely abandons himself to it. There used to be in London, and in society, the Bond Street and the Hyde Park lounge. I believe the exquisite insouciance thus indicated is long since extinct. No one lounges now, in these days of motor-cars and general hustle; no one, that is to say, except the ’longshoremen of Deal and elsewhere, but255 here at Deal it is perfected. The lounge of Hyde Park—you may see it represented in Punch, in many of du Maurier’s drawings—was a graceful droop over the railings of the Row; but the lounger had always in the look of him a curious mixture of world-weariness and self-consciousness. He knew he was beautiful, as beautiful as his tailor and toilet-club could make him. Now the ’longshoreman cannot droop, gracefully or otherwise. He is not built that way. There is about him a breadth of beam and an appalling negation of waist that vehemently forbids the very thought of it. He is not beautiful, nor, on the other hand, is he self-conscious. He is of that solid bulk, despite his privations, poor chap, which makes the crazy old capstans on the beach creak and complain, and the tarred shanties shiver when he leans against them. And his costume has been the delight of serious artists and comic for at least a century. His trousers, of some astounding dreadnought material that might almost stand by itself, come a much longer distance up his body than such articles of attire commonly do, and end, according to the caricaturists, under his armpits. According to the same unveracious authorities, they are invariably re-seated, and with materials of an altogether alien colour from the original fabric and generally with some uproarious pattern.
Defoe’s biting indictment came home to the inhabitants of Deal, and, after a considerable time for thinking it over, they grew angry and resentful about it, in proportion to the truth of the charges. Thus we find them on June 21st, 1705, despatching the following letter:
“Whereas there has been this day produced to us a book called the ‘Storm,’ printed in London in the year 1704, for G. Sawbridge, in Little Britain, and sold by J. Nutt, near Stationers’ Hall, pretending to give an account of some particular accidents that happened thereby. We find, amongst other things, several scandalous and false reflections unjustly cast upon the inhabitants of the town and borough of Deal, with the malicious intent to bring a disreputation upon the people thereof, and to create a misunderstanding between her Majesty’s subjects which, if not timely confuted, may produce consequences detrimental to the town, and tend to a breach of the peace. To the end thereof, that the person who caused the publication thereof may be known, in order to be brought to condign punishment for such his infamous libel; we have thought fit, therefore, to appoint our Town Clerk to proceed against him in a Court of Law, unless he shall249 within the space of ten days thereof make known to us the person or persons, and where he or they may be found, who furnished the libellous article in the book commencing page 199 to the end of page 202, to which we expect a truthful answer within the time specified.”
There followed upon this hectoring document the signatures of the then Mayor, Jurats, and Corporation of Deal. But it proved to be all sound and empty fury, for nothing came of it.
Such men as these were the ancestors of the Deal boatmen of to-day; a race now very much down on its luck. The very town of Deal, one may almost say, is a survival. The causes that conjured it up, or at any rate, brought about its growth from a mere village, along the unprotected stark shingle beach, have ceased to operate, and great ships no longer sit for weeks in the Downs, awaiting a breeze, or in any numbers ride out storms in that once providential anchorage, all immensely to the profit of the purveyors of ships’ stores and to that of the boatmen. Deal in those times was one vast general shop, in which the mariner might buy anything, from anchors and cables, down to “salthorse” and ships’ biscuits. Those days of pigtails, hemp, and sails brought Deal to its time of greatest prosperity, and the present-day appearance of the town still tells the tale of it. Smuggling was then in its prime, and many a lugger constantly made successful runs on dark starless nights, or crept cautiously across Channel when the air250 was thick as a blanket with fog, under the very bows of the frigates at anchor in the roadstead.
I do not know that the Deal boatmen of to-day think much of this ancestry of theirs, or set much store by it. They are too much concerned, poor fellows, in considering how they are to get a living in these hard times; times particularly hard for them. But their daring and accomplished launching of a galley-punt and their handling of it in a seaway are exhibitions of craftsmanship impossible to be demonstrated except by these men, who have the hereditary aptitude.
To a landsman, the launching of one of these heavy, lug-sailed, undecked boats off such a beach as this, in a raging surf such as these shores alone can know in time of storm, is a marvel. The breakers are coming in snarling and screaming, in cruel, curving walls of water from whose crests the wind whips off the stinging brine that flies through the hurrying air in particles half in the likeness of sleet and half in that of fog. Here, and at such times, if anywhere, is—
“The scream of a madden’d beach dragged down by the wave”—
so finely phrased by Tennyson, in Maud, to be heard.
A launch would seem impossible, but down the beach the galley-punt is run, her keel scrunching through the pebbles with a hurrying roar that rises even above the clamour of wind and251 waves, and in a moment she is off, her crew of three leaping or tumbling in like jumping-jacks, and in another moment she is clear of the breakers and heading out to where some steamer is dimly seen rolling and pitching yonder in the obscurity, flying a signal for the landing of the pilot, who has brought her round from the port of London and has now finished his job and is going home by train, as the custom is with pilots.
To such work as this did the Deal boatmen’s lives come: hard work, and often hazardous; and, considering the casual nature of it, not well paid. Landing a pilot is, or was, worth twenty-five to thirty shillings or thereabouts, and it is obvious that this sum, casually earned and divided among a crew of three, is a poor recompense. But even this standby has been snatched away from the Deal boatmen since the Trinity House has established a steam pilot-cutter at Dover, which cruises about to land pilots from outward-bound ships at a fixed charge of £1. It is an excellent institution from the pilots’ point of view, but it is the last blow to the boatmen of Deal. Steam has ever been their enemy.
Dirty weather is, perhaps, more than ever the opportunity of this hardy and hard-bitten race, of whom it has been said that “every finger is a fish-hook, every hair a rope-yarn, and whose blood is pure Stockholm tar.” Mother Carey’s chickens—by which I mean, of course, the gulls—are not more at home amid the mountainous waves at such times. They cruise about in252 these dangerous seas in search of some captain who has lost his way. It is exquisitely true that other people’s misfortunes are their opportunity, and a ship likely without the aid of their expert knowledge of these waters to come to grief on the Goodwins, or other shoals, to say nothing of getting under the unkindly cliffs, is like a choice bone to a hungry dog. I hope I do no injustice to these men in the comparison. It simply discloses the measure of their needs and of their prize. It is a desperate livelihood for these days for them. The winter is hard, the summer season is short, and the fishing and the money earned in taking visitors for a sail form but a scanty and uncertain support for wives and children. Therefore, a ship in difficulties is a godsend that is worth a good deal of cruising for, and worth a good deal of hardship endured and bitter disappointments suffered. But when that ship is picked up there are no more savage and determined men to be found than these. They are embittered by much fruitless quartering of violent seas, and spurred by the thought of weeks of enforced idleness ashore, and by the spectre of empty cupboards at home. A shipmaster in peril out there is their legitimate prey, and they bear down upon him out of the driving spindrift as saviours, at a price. These men, who would, and do, man the lifeboats for life-saving with no after-thought for profit, are close dealers in these cases, and if a ship-master declines, for reasons of economy, their help, he may drive on253 sands or under cliffs or lose his ship in any way that chance may dictate, and they will not lend a helping hand. And quite rightly, too. Help under such circumstances is well worth the paying for.
“Want any help, sir?” Thus, or in some such way, comes their hail as their craft comes round in the eye of the wind and manœuvres carefully in the swashing seas. It is odds whether the captain, asking perhaps where he is, will be told, or whether he is flatly invited to “find out,” in the extremely strong language of these parts. Perhaps he asks “how much to take her into Ramsgate,” or whatever port he is making for.
“Twenty pounds”—or ten or fifteen, as the case may be, according to his emergencies.
Bargaining is little use. An offer of half, or more, is pretty sure to be curtly rejected, with “So long, captain; no time to waste.”
And then the bargainer almost invariably submits, ungraciously enough with “All right, you —— pirates,” or “beachcombers,” or something equally offensive. Strong language is cheap on the seas, and no one resents it, least of all the hovellers and the boatmen who have thus gained their point: it is all the harassed master has left him, and he may put his tongue to what strange curses he will, if it be any satisfaction.
And then, at a carefully chosen moment, as the vessels large and small set to one another in a peculiarly violent kind of maritime dance254 and the boatmen’s little craft swings dizzily up on a wave alongside, a rope is thrown and one of the galley-punt’s crew clambers breathlessly aboard, dashes the brine from his eyes, and is ready to navigate his charge through the seething waters as surely as a cab-driver takes a fare through well-known streets. His companions, sitting like statues in the boat, in streaming yellow oilskins, fade away like ghosts in the turmoil, and make for home.
Such are at those times the men you will see lounging the summer days on Deal beach and suggesting to visitors that it is a “fine day for a sail.” It looks a lazy life, this lounging, with hands in pockets, day after day, varied by an occasional turn with the tar-brush or paint-pot upon boat or timbered shanty; but it is really a life of one long waiting for something to turn up, and there is nothing else for it but to lounge hands in pockets. And to do the Deal boatmen the merest justice, they lounge extremely well. Do not mistake me: I do not mean that they do it elegantly. The figure of your typical ’longshoreman, bargelike and extremely solid, does not permit of that. No, I mean that he absolutely abandons himself to it. There used to be in London, and in society, the Bond Street and the Hyde Park lounge. I believe the exquisite insouciance thus indicated is long since extinct. No one lounges now, in these days of motor-cars and general hustle; no one, that is to say, except the ’longshoremen of Deal and elsewhere, but255 here at Deal it is perfected. The lounge of Hyde Park—you may see it represented in Punch, in many of du Maurier’s drawings—was a graceful droop over the railings of the Row; but the lounger had always in the look of him a curious mixture of world-weariness and self-consciousness. He knew he was beautiful, as beautiful as his tailor and toilet-club could make him. Now the ’longshoreman cannot droop, gracefully or otherwise. He is not built that way. There is about him a breadth of beam and an appalling negation of waist that vehemently forbids the very thought of it. He is not beautiful, nor, on the other hand, is he self-conscious. He is of that solid bulk, despite his privations, poor chap, which makes the crazy old capstans on the beach creak and complain, and the tarred shanties shiver when he leans against them. And his costume has been the delight of serious artists and comic for at least a century. His trousers, of some astounding dreadnought material that might almost stand by itself, come a much longer distance up his body than such articles of attire commonly do, and end, according to the caricaturists, under his armpits. According to the same unveracious authorities, they are invariably re-seated, and with materials of an altogether alien colour from the original fabric and generally with some uproarious pattern.
Comments
Post a Comment