Poole Harbour

“ The piquancy of Poole’s ancient repose being p. 262neighboured by Bournemouth’s wide-awake life is italicised when that port—the “Havenpool” of To Please his Wife—is entered. It would not be correct to say that the days of Poole as a port are over, but with the growth in size of modern ships, the shallowness of Poole Harbour in whose recesses it is tucked rather obscurely away, prevents any but vessels of slight draught coming up to its quays. ”

“ This barren heathland, spreading over the Bagshot sands, extends for many a mile, and stretches out to the deeply indented coast-line of Poole Harbour, forming the northern limit of the Isle of Purbeck. The wild beauty of this low-lying district can only be enjoyed by those who are prepared to explore it on foot, for carriage-roads there are none, and the cart-tracks are not always passable. ”

“ There are silk-mills at Sherborne and elsewhere. There are numerous fishing stations along the coast, the fishing being mostly coastal. There are oyster beds in Poole Harbour. The chief ports are Poole, Weymouth, Swanage, Bridport, and Lyme Regis. The harbour of refuge at Portland, under the Admiralty, is an important naval station, and is fortified.
Communications.—The main line of the London & South Western railway serves Gillingham and Sherborne in the north of the county. Branches of this system serve Wimborne, Poole, Swanage, Dorchester, Weymouth and Portland. ”

“ The waters of Poole Harbour are salt as the sea outside though fed by the rivers Frome and Puddle, and so of course its best aspect is when the tide is full. The erratic ebb and flow is more pronounced here than at Southampton and there are longer periods of high than low water. Brownsea Island, that occupies the centre of this inland sea, with its wooded banks of dark greenery makes an effective foil to the sparkling waters and long mauve line of the Purbeck Hills. There is always deep water at the eastern extremity of the island, to which boats can be taken. ”

“ They average two feet in height and are some of their very old, having very hard wood, about two inches in diameter near the root.
Poole harbour contains several islands, all of the plastic clay formation, which, though picturesque, and beautifully situated, afford little variety of indigenous species. The very largest of these is Brownsea island, the watering residence of Sir Charles Chad, Bart., which, among many other natural beauties, possesses several fresh water tarns, similar to those of Parkstone and Creekmoor, one of which contains a great abundance of the Typha angustifolia, Lin. ”

“ In the following year another Poole seaman, William Thompson, master of a fishing boat which was only manned by himself, one seaman, and a boy, attacked and captured a privateer sloop hailing from Cherbourg, carrying no less than twenty men, and brought her in triumph into the harbour.
One of the most romantic portions of the history of Poole during the last two centuries is connected with the many smugglers who dwelt in the town and neighbourhood. During that period smuggling formed the livelihood of many fishermen and seaboard dwellers along the whole of the south coast. ”

“ No strangers ever come within many miles of Poole, without being struck with the apparent sterility of the scene. To the north of Poole as far as Wimborne and extending east and west to Christchurch and Wareham, dry heath land is the prevailing feature of the country. This is the general character also of the plastic clay portion of Purbeck. But to proceed to particulars:—
Poole is situated on a peninsula on the north side of the extensive harbour, and is very little above its level. I leave, however, the remarks I intend to make on the maritime botany of Poole, to a future period. ”

“ Rivers Hill and Company for the purpose of growing lavender for their perfume distilleries. It is an ideal spot, where a large tract of heather land, on a portion of Lord Wimborne's estate, rises in a series of undulations from Poole Harbour. Although it is quite a new industry for Dorset, it has already proved of great value in finding constant employment, and an employment as healthy as it is constant, for a large number of men and women. Unfortunately, perhaps, it is an industry which demands peculiar climatic conditions to render it commercially profitable. ”

“ One was of the towering sails that my father had told me he had seen on his first day on the harbor, when coming here a crude boy from the inland he had thrilled to the vision of owning such ships with crews to whom his word should be law, and of sending them over the ocean world. Such was the age he had lived in. The other was of the stokers down in the bottom of the ship, and Joe's tired frowning face as he said, "Yes, they look like a lot of bums—and they feed all the fires at sea." What was there in common between these two? To each age a harbor of its own. ”

“ To the west the harbor was empty, no smoke from ships obscured the sun, and it shone with radiant clearness upon eleven races of men, upon Italians, Germans, French, on English, Poles and Russians, on Negroes and Norwegians, Lascars, Malays, Coolies, on figures burly, figures puny, faces white and faces swarthy, yellow, brown and black. The sun shone upon all alike—except where that Morgan liner, still lying unloaded at her dock, threw a long dark creeping shadow out across the throng.
Thirty thousand people were here. Thirty thousand intensely alive. ”

“ Like an automobile in a crowded street our craft was lurching its way in short dashes in and out of the rush hour traffic. The narrow East River was black with boats. Ferries, tugs and steamers seemed to be coming at us from every side. Now with a leap we would be off, then abruptly churning the water behind us we would hold back drifting, watching our chance for another rush. Eleanore's face was glowing now, her hat was off, her neck was tense—and her blue-gray eyes, wide open, fixed on the chaos ahead, were shining with excitement. ”

“ Does he say a word to you about Graft? Does he talk of the North Atlantic Pool or any one of the other pools and schemes by which they keep up rates? Does he make you think about low wages and long hours and all the fellows hurt or killed on the docks and in the stoke holes? Does he give you any feeling at all of this harbor as a city of four million people, most of 'em getting a raw deal and getting mad about it? That's more important to you and me than all the efficiency gods on earth. You've got to decide which side you're on. ”

“ Rumors of war and high finance, trade unions, strikes and sabotage burst on my startled artist's ears. It made me think of the harbor! This was not my Paris!
"It is," said J. K. stoutly. "There's no place like a newspaper office to put you right next to the heart of a town."
He would not hear to our seeing him off. I remember him that last night after supper strapping his bag onto his bike and starting off down our quiet old street on his way to the station.
"To-morrow," he said, "I'll stop off in Leipsic. I want to have a look at the college that stirred my young grandfather up for life. ”

“ Afraid to face the men outside, whose jobs they had taken, these strike-breakers were to live on the dock, under cover of police. Soon half of them lay snoring on long crowded rows of cots. Food and hot coffee were served to the rest. Then I heard the harsh rattle of winches, I saw these negroes trundling freight, the cargo went swooping up into the ship—and with a deep dismay, a sharp foreboding of trouble ahead, I felt the work of the harbor begun. ”

“ One night the watchman on the dump showed me a heavy paper bag with what would have been a baby inside. Where had it come from? He didn't know. Tossed out of some woman's life, in a day it would be far out on the ocean, bobbing, bobbing with the rest. Water from here to Naples, water from here to heathen lands. Just here a patch of light from a lantern. That imp from Italy looking down—into something immense and dark and unknown.
He was having a spree with the harbor, as I had had when as small as he. ”

“ But then I would pull myself up with a jerk: "Stop looking at her, you young fool, keep your mind on this engineer. You've got the chance of your life right now to make good in your work and be happy. Don't fall down! Get busy!"
And I did. I threw myself into the lives of these men who were the living embodiments of all that bigness, boldness, punch that had so gripped and thrilled me. The harbor had drawn them around it out of the hum and rush of the country, and here they were in its service, watching it, studying, planning for its even more stupendous growth. ”

“ Caught up in the tide of democracy now sweeping all around the earth, they had wanted to feel themselves running themselves in all this work they were doing. So they had come out on strike and become a crowd, and in the crowd they had suddenly found such strength as they never dreamed could be theirs. And they would not easily forget. The harbor was already seeing to that, for already its work had gone on with a rush, and all its heavy labor was [Pg 351] weighing down upon them—"like a million tons of brick on their chests." ”

“ For day by day I felt myself sink deeper and deeper into the crowd, into surging multitudes of men—till something that I found down there lifted me up and swept me on—into a strange new harbor.
Of the strike I can give only one man's view, what I could see with my one pair of eyes in that swiftly spreading confusion that soon embraced the whole port of New York and other ports both here and abroad. War correspondents, I suppose, must feel the same chaos around them, but in my case it rose from within me as well. I was like a war correspondent who is trying to make up his mind about war. ”

“ Their front is one unbroken wall of sheet iron and concrete.
I came up against this wall. Over the top I could see here and there the great round funnels of the ships, but at every passenger doorway and at every wide freight entrance I found a sign, "No Visitors Admitted," and under the sign a watchman who would ungraciously take a cigar and then go right on being a watchman. There seemed no way to get inside. The old-fashioned mystery of the sea was replaced by the inscrutability of what some muckrakers called "The Pool."
"Don't hurry," Eleanore's father had said. ”

“ I interrupted hotly. "It's just for them and their children that fellows like Dillon are on the job—to make a better harbor!"
"For them, for the people!" said Joe. "That's what I'm kicking at in you, Bill—you treat us all like a mass of dubs that need gods above to do everything for us because we can't do it all by ourselves!"
"I don't believe the people can," I retorted. "From what I've seen I honestly don't believe they count. ”

“ It was as though my father had packed all the rich and romantic Far East into common barrels and crates and then nailed down the covers. And he himself became for me as common as his warehouse. For in his case, too, I could see the walls.
"I know you now," I thought to myself. He could sit [Pg 24] through supper night after night and not utter a word in his gloom. But the mystery in him was gone. Business, nothing but business. A man and a place to be let alone.
But it was my mother more than anyone else who drew me away from the harbor. ”

“ You can get your roots here, you can feel you are real.
"You see what my father is doing is to take this whole harbor and study it hard—not just the water, the shipping and docks, for when he says 'the port of New York' he means all the railroads too—and he's studying [Pg 145] how they all come in and why it is that everything has become so frightfully snarled. A lot of big shipping men are behind him, and he's to draw up a plan for it all which they're going to give to the city to use, to make this port what it's got to be, the very first in the ocean world. ”

“ He alone had no strike feeling.
Battered and worn from the day's impressions I wanted to be alone and to think. I made my way in and out among trucks and around a dockshed out to a slip. It was filled with barges, tugs and floats jammed in between the two big vessels that loomed one at either pier. It was a dark jumble of spars and masts, derricks, funnels and cabin roofs, all shadowy and silent. A single light gleamed here and there from the long dark deck of the Morgan coaster close to my right. She was heavily loaded still, for she had come to dock too late. ”

“ I want to stay here, I want to put through this job if I can, you see it has taken six years of my life. And besides," he added wistfully, "in a very few weeks they'll finish the work at Panama—and the ships of the world will begin to crowd into a harbor that isn't ready here—we haven't even completed our plans. It's not a good time to stop our work. But of course if you and Eleanore get into a hole that is serious—as I said before and you'll agree, you'd have to let me help you—even if to do it I should have to give up my work for a while and take up something that will pay." ”

“ He told me of his first day here, when he stood on the deck of a ferry and watched three great clippers go out with the tide, bound for Calcutta. There were pictures of these vessels on the walls of his office, stately East Indiamen bearing such names as Star of Empire, Daniel Webster, Ocean Monarch, Flying Cloud—ships known in every port of the world for their speed. He told how a British vessel, her topsails reefed in a gale of wind, would see a white tower of swelling canvas come out of the spray behind her, come booming, staggering, plunging by—a Yankee clipper under royals. ”