that it is well worth the while of the sellers of smuggled tobacco
to use hydraulic presses, to squeeze a single pound into a package
small enough to be contained in an ordinary pocket. Next, said my
friend Pea, there were the Truckers – less thieves than smugglers,
whose business it was to land more considerable parcels of goods
than the Lumpers could manage. They sometimes sold articles of
grocery and so forth, to the crews, in order to cloak their real
calling, and get aboard without suspicion. Many of them had boats
of their own, and made money. Besides these, there were the
Dredgermen, who, under pretence of dredging up coals and such like
from the bottom of the river, hung about barges and other undecked
craft, and when they saw an opportunity, threw any property they
could lay their hands on overboard: in order slyly to dredge it up
when the vessel was gone. Sometimes, they dexterously used their
dredges to whip away anything that might lie within reach. Some of
them were mighty neat at this, and the accomplishment was called
dry dredging. Then, there was a vast deal of property, such as
copper nails, sheathing, hardwood, &c., habitually brought away by
shipwrights and other workmen from their employers’ yards, and
disposed of to marine store dealers, many of whom escaped detection
through hard swearing, and their extraordinary artful ways of
accounting for the possession of stolen property. Likewise, there
were special-pleading practitioners, for whom barges ‘drifted away
of their own selves’ – they having no hand in it, except first
cutting them loose, and afterwards plundering them – innocents,
meaning no harm, who had the misfortune to observe those foundlings
wandering about the Thames.
We were now going in and out, with little noise and great nicety,
among the tiers of shipping, whose many hulls, lying close
together, rose out of the water like black streets. Here and
there, a Scotch, an Irish, or a foreign steamer, getting up her
steam as the tide made, looked, with her great chimney and high
sides, like a quiet factory among the common buildings. Now, the
streets opened into clearer spaces, now contracted into alleys; but
the tiers were so like houses, in the dark, that I could almost
have believed myself in the narrower bye-ways of Venice.
Everything was wonderfully still; for, it wanted full three hours
of flood, and nothing seemed awake but a dog here and there.
So we took no Tier-rangers captive, nor any Lumpers, nor Truckers,
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nor Dredgermen, nor other evil-disposed person or persons; but went
ashore at Wapping, where the old Thames Police office is now a
station-house, and where the old Court, with its cabin windows
looking on the river, is a quaint charge room: with nothing worse
in it usually than a stuffed cat in a glass case, and a portrait,
pleasant to behold, of a rare old Thames Police officer, Mr.
Superintendent Evans, now succeeded by his son. We looked over the
charge books, admirably kept, and found the prevention so good that
there were not five hundred entries (including drunken and
disorderly) in a whole year. Then, we looked into the store-room;
where there was an oakum smell, and a nautical seasoning of
dreadnought clothing, rope yarn, boat-hooks, sculls and oars, spare
stretchers, rudders, pistols, cutlasses, and the like. Then, into
the cell, aired high up in the wooden wall through an opening like
a kitchen plate-rack: wherein there was a drunken man, not at all
warm, and very wishful to know if it were morning yet. Then, into
a better sort of watch and ward room, where there was a squadron of
stone bottles drawn up, ready to be filled with hot water and
applied to any unfortunate creature who might be brought in
apparently drowned. Finally, we shook hands with our worthy friend
Pea, and ran all the way to Tower Hill, under strong Police
suspicion occasionally, before we got warm.
A WALK IN A WORKHOUSE
ON a certain Sunday, I formed one of the congregation assembled in
the chapel of a large metropolitan Workhouse. With the exception
of the clergyman and clerk, and a very few officials, there were