London Docks

“ Under the London Docks are the finest vaults in the world, vast catacombs of the precious vintages garnered from every famous vineyard in the globe. The vaults in the London docks cover an area of eighteen acres, and afford accommodation for eighty thousand pipes of wine. ”

“ And now we come on a scene, which from our infancy we have been accustomed to, yet which has always possessed a strange and fearful degree of interest for us. Large numbers of gaunt-featured, squalid, hungry-looking men, are silently but nervously lounging about the gate which forms the entrance to the London Docks. From morning till night they linger there, with restless eye and hopeless heart, in the vain hope of obtaining employment as an “extra” in unlading the ships. ”

“ Katherine’s, and the two adjoining London Docks—which alone cover a space of more than a hundred acres—will contain six hundred ships, and near half a million tons of goods. In the West India Docks, which lie nearer Blackwall, merchandise valued at twenty millions of money has at one time been deposited on the wharfs, in the warehouses, and in the vaults below. The wealth of London lies not in her gaudy shops: beyond the Tower stand her great storehouses. ”

“ The capital of the London Docks company is about twenty-five million dollars in gold, and as many as three thousand laborers are employed in the London Docks in a day.
The walls surrounding the London Docks cost sixty-five thousand pounds in construction, and all these walls are so high (nearly thirty feet,) that they present an impregnable barrier to thieves and depredators. ”

“ If they cannot find a convenient spring, sufficiently high, they force the water to a proper height by pumps and steam-engines; and by these inventions, do with ease, what the best ancient philosophers might have thought impossible. When one of the great pipes, which run through the streets of London, happens to burst, the water soon forces up the pavement, and a fountain is produced.
85. The London Docks
Are situated in Wapping, between Ratcliffe Highway and the Thames. One of the docks is so large, that it covers more than twenty acres of ground, being 1262 feet long, and 699 feet wide. ”

“ Katharine’s Docks, which lie just below the Tower, hemmed in by what was once fashionable London, now fashionable no more, but famous the world over as the accustomed haunt of the seaman on shore. Before docks were constructed along Thames-side, vessels were unloaded into barges and wherries, and river-robbery was a thriving trade. Numbers of men lived, and grew rich, on what they had contrived to steal from cargoes that were waiting to be discharged at the wharves about London Bridge. ”

“ Thirty thousand men find employment, daily, as laborers, in the London Docks. Men who have been reduced by want, misfortune, or by drunkeness, find in these vast commercial reservoirs, a precarious means of subsistence, earning from eighteen pence to two shillings a day, half of which generally goes for beer, or potations of a heavier and more spirituous kind. This kind of labor is unskilled, and has for its propulsion mere manual strength, so that, when a man fails in everything else, he may possibly succeed as a dock laborer. ”

“ The most wonderful of all the London sights are the huge artificial basins, bound in masses of masonry and known as the London Docks. No other city in the world can boast of such magnificent artificial basins, where millions of tons of shipping can be accommodated. ”

“ The docks of London were started, in the first instance, not so much as a profitable speculation to investors, as a response to an urgent national demand which the vested interests in the old order of things were no longer able to resist; not so much in a spirit of competition with the wharves, as the only means of saving the commerce of the port from utter ruin; not so much as wealthy grasping corporations, who, finding they have made a bad bargain, now wish to [Pg 35] draw out of it, as the pioneers of the marvellous prosperity of the port, if not its founders, its liberators. ”

“ Both competitors for the trade of the port, the docks should be as free from unfair restrictions as [Pg 75] the wharves; and it is to be hoped that before long the love of fair play, and hatred of oppression, of which we Englishmen claim to be so proud, will find expression in a great practical remonstrance, in which this burdensome tax upon the vitality and prosperity of the dock establishments, to the foundation of which London mainly owes its marvellous development as the great entrepôt for the commerce of the world, will be indignantly swept away. ”

“ In the old times before steam had been discovered and these magnificent docks had been built, an East Indiaman of eight hundred tons took a month to discharge her cargo, or if of one thousand two hundred tons, six weeks were required for the labor, and their goods had to be taken from Blackwall to London Bridge in lighters, when they were placed on the quay exposed to dock rats and river thieves as goods are in New York, where the private watchmen on the rotten wooden docks are generally to be found in league with the thieves. ”

“ The London Docks, the East and West India docks (see Dock) at Blackwall with their freight sheds, the Hull Docks, the Prince's Docks at Liverpool, and those of Dublin, Greenock, and Leith, were all designed and wholly or partially executed under his superintendence. ”

“ The sea does not change, and seamen are what they were if their ships are not those we admired many years ago in the India Docks. It is impossible for those who know them to see those moody streets of Dockland, indeterminate, for they follow the River, which run from Tooley Street by the Hole-in-the-Wall to the Deptford docks, and from Tower Hill along Wapping High Street to Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs, as strangers would see them. ”

“ Many have not fed at all; for, of the motley herd of dock-labourers, hundreds, especially in the London Docks—where no recommendation save strength is needed, and they are taken on their good behaviour from day to day—are of the Irish way of thinking ”

“ Berthing the monstrous ships of the future is a problem met by a radical and world-wide alteration in the dimensions of docks, supplemented by quays running out into deep water, which in London would extend on both sides of the Thames, on the north from Tilbury to the Albert Docks, thus converting the old river, like the Clyde, into a long water-street lined by sea-walls, and kept constantly dredged, and connected with London by special lines of railway. ”

“ The docks on the Middlesex side of the river, which are used for the reception and unlading of timber-ships, are the West India and the Regent’s Dock, or the entrance to the Regent’s Canal.
The number of wood-laden ships that have entered the three principal docks for the last ten years is given below. I am informed by Mr. Jones of the Commercial Docks, that for every ship above 100 tons six men are required to sort and pile away. Rafting from ships of the above burden requires one or two men daily, according to circumstances. ”

“ Hence we find men of every calling labouring at the docks. There are decayed and bankrupt master-butchers, master-bakers, publicans, grocers, old soldiers, old sailors, Polish refugees, broken-down gentlemen, discharged lawyers’ clerks, suspended government clerks, almsmen, pensioners, servants, thieves—indeed, every one who wants a loaf, and is willing to work for it. The London Dock is one of the few places in the metropolis where men can get employment without either character or recommendation, so that the labourers employed there are naturally a most incongruous assembly. ”

“ These dingy docks, these blackened wharves, represent, in reality, the world's great treasure-house. For to this vast port of London comes all "the wealth of Ormus and of Ind," all the riches of "a thousand islands rocked in an idle main," all the luxuriant produce of new-world farms, of Colonial ranches, of tropical gardens. ”

“ Then dawn. If there is anything more wonderful in London than dawn coming up over the tangled shipping of the docks I would like to know of it. First a silvery light in the air, a chilly greyness, then a flush in the east, and with startling suddenness every mast, every funnel, every leaning crane is silhouetted jet-black against the pearl-coloured sky.... Unreal ... still ... silent.
Gradually the docks awaken. Men walk along the wharfside, doors are opened. In the depths of little ships men rise and become busy with ropes; there is, from some, a smell of frying bacon ”

“ There are people still living who can remember when Blackwall-Reach had for its landmarks grim gibbet-posts, on which the bodies of pirates bleached and blackened in the storm and sunshine, “making night hideous;” when the whole neighbourhood beyond the Tower, instead of being the home of mighty ships—that seem to sleep after their perilous voyages in the Docks—was a nest of ill-famed streets and dangerous alleys, unsafe even in the open noon of day, and at night trodden with dread by the peaceful passenger ”

“ Though narrow timber jetties were introduced in some of the wider London docks for increasing the length of quays by placing vessels alongside them, no definite arrangement of docks was adopted in carrying out the large Victoria and Albert docks between 1850 and 1880 ”

“ There the prospect of masts is a line of derrick poles. But still in the upper docks is what will soon have gone for ever from London, a dark haze of spars and rigging, with sometimes a white sail floating in it like a cloud. We had a Russian barquentine there yesterday. I think a barquentine is the most beautiful of ships, the most aerial and graceful of rigs, the foremast with its transverse spars giving breadth and balance, and steadying the unhindered lift skywards of main and mizzen poles. The model of this Russian ship was as memorable as a Greek statue. ”

“ The London Docks extend from East Smithfield to Shadwell and have twelve thousand four hundred and forty feet of wharf frontage, and are intended principally for the reception of vessels laden with wines, brandy, tobacco, and rice.
There are forty warehouses for the storage of merchandise of every description, convenient in arrangement, and magnificent in design and execution. The cubical capacity of the warehouses is two hundred and forty-nine thousand four hundred and thirty tons ”

“ Every old bridge when removed leaves so many tons of gravel which eventually finds its way to the mouth of the Thames, and there forms shoals.
The channel of the river thus deepened, becomes more and more brackish every year, and it can be but a question of time, as to how and from what source the inhabitants are to derive their water supply for drinking purposes.
At the East India Docks the tide falls fourteen inches lower than formerly, and it is a fact that the low water at London Docks is lower than the low water at Sheerness, sixty miles below. ”

“ Other railways are as well provided; and the pussies that work in the London dock-yards seem to be among the most useful members of a busy community. It is even said that they assume airs of ridiculous importance, swaggering around the docks in off hours, and giving idlers to understand that the shipping industries of London depend largely upon their intelligence and activity. They are a closely organized body, and no one who knows them would feel surprised at hearing any day of a strike among the dock-yard cats. ”

“ The pressure of the shipping was so great, extending as it did, in unbroken sequence, from London Bridge to Greenwich, that more dock accommodation was needed: the small ones, such as Hermitage and Shadwell Docks, being far too small to relieve the congested state of the river. In 1799 several plans were put forward for new Docks, and some were actually put in progress. The Bill for the West India Docks was passed in 1799. The first stone was laid on the 12th of July, 1800, and the docks were partly [200] opened in the summer of 1802. ”

“ There is accommodation for 65,000 pipes. These cellars being dark, all who enter and go through them carry lights. Admission may be had by procuring an order from a wine-merchant to taste and examine any pipes he may have in bond: a cooper accompanies the visitor to pierce the casks. Besides this large vault, which principally contains port and sherry, there are other vaults for French wines, &c. St. Katharine’s Docks, between the Tower and the London Docks, were formed in 1828, on a site which required the removal of more than 1,200 houses and 13,000 inhabitants ”

“ So the stranger in Petersburg and Moscow has at first but scant attention to bestow on the superb monuments, the picturesque costumes; his senses are riveted upon the golden domes of Tzaaks and the Kremlin. Liverpool is one huge dock; and from the landing-stage to West Derby island, everything is of the docks and docky. The only wonder seems to be that the ships do not sail up the streets, and discharge their cargoes at the doors of the merchants’ counting-houses. ”

“ Armed with one of these permits I visited the London docks one day with a friend, and we penetrated the gloomy cavern's entrance, and finally found our way to a part of the vaults where were stored thousands of pipes of the delicious golden brown vintage of Xeres de la Frontera.
My friend was one of those wandering Americans you are always sure to light upon abroad, who makes your acquaintance whether you like it or not, and who cries out frantically whenever he sees a foreign flag. ”