Port of London

“ The great liners flashing along their policed and humdrum lanes, have long since abandoned London, but every turn of the tide brings up her fleet of cargo ships, straggling, weather-worn and grey, trudging in from ports far-flung and incredible—Surinam, Punta Arenas, Antofagasta, Port Banana, Tang-chow, Noumea, Sarawak. If you think that commerce, yielding to steel and steam, has lost all romance, just give an idle day or two to London docks. ”

“ With a modern visitor it is somewhat different; he usually enters by one of the eight great gateways, London Bridge, Waterloo, Euston, Paddington, St. Pancras, King's Cross, Victoria or Charing Cross, unless by any chance he arrives by sea, which is seldom; the port of London, for the great ocean liner, is mostly a "home port," usually embarking or disembarking passengers at some place on the south or west coast,—Southampton, Plymouth, Liverpool, or Glasgow. ”

“ He who now stands on London Bridge and looks down the river, will see a large number of steamers lying off the quays; there are barges, river steamers, and boats, there are great ocean steamers working up or down the river; but there is little to give the stranger even a suspicion of the enormous trade that is carried on at the Port of London. That port is now hidden behind the dock gates; the trade is invisible unless one enters the docks and reckons up the ships and their tonnage, the warehouses and their contents. ”

“ Betty asked.
“One of the chief reasons. England has already beaten the Spanish Armada and become ‘Mistress of the Seas,’ and the ships you see here, go to and from this port of London increasing its trade and its riches every day. Now you understand why that Exchange built by Sir Thomas Gresham was so much needed as a meeting-place for merchants to arrange the enormous amount of business the sailors have won for them. London is becoming more and more a city of merchants, living in beautiful houses. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How many, for instance, know that to-day Duluth is the second greatest freight-shipping port on earth; that London, the capital of the British Empire, queen of the world’s commerce for many years, has abdicated in favour of a port so remote from the heart of British commercial enterprise that it is doubtful if fifty thousand of the five million people of London have ever heard of the name of the city which has taken the place of the world’s metropolis in the list of the great harbours of the world? ”

“ The largest vessels that enter into this trade in the port of London are to be found in the West India South Dock, formerly the City Canal. On one occasion in this dock a vessel of 800 tons, containing 24,000 deals and ends, was discharged in twenty-six working hours—forty-five men being employed. I am informed that twenty men would discharge a ship of 600 tons of timber and deals in seven days. Forty men will do it in four days. In order to become acquainted with the system of lumping, I went on board a vessel in the river where a gang of twenty men were at work. ”

“ The port of London has always supplied the main evidence of the state of our commerce. I know, that, amidst all the difficulties and embarrassments of the year 1793, from causes unconnected with and prior to the war, the tonnage of ships in the Thames actually rose. ”

“ Hitherto the prevention of the importation of the various sorts of disease into London by vessels trading to the Port of London from all quarters of the world had been confided to the officers of Her Majesty’s Customs, and was of the most superficial and inadequate character.
The district assigned to the Port of London Sanitary Authority extended from Teddington Lock to the North Foreland, and was 88 miles in length. It included 8 sets of docks and 13 “creeks.” ”

“ London does not face the New World. It looks away from it.
The truth is that the singular position of the Lower Thames as a terminal for international commerce, and of its port as an international market, must be sought in a medley of causes, the chief of which fall into two clear categories. We have first the causes which made London what it was before the transformation of commerce through the discoveries of the Renaissance and the later gigantic expansion which reposes upon modern facilities of communication. ”

“ The Thames, England's greatest river, does not, so far as it serves the port of London and facilitates the immense trade there carried on, enter so much into consideration from the point of view of strictly "internal communication" as some of the lesser rivers already mentioned, the position alike of London, Liverpool, Newcastle, Southampton, etc., relating to ports, docks, harbours and commerce in general rather than to the particular forms of inland transport here under review. ”

“ Think of the maritime interests of the port of London, the docks of which cover considerably over 300 acres of water-space, and to which 7,000 or more vessels enter annually. Over 100 vessels, exclusive of small craft, enter the port daily; its exports form nearly one-fourth of the total exports of the United Kingdom. Liverpool in some maritime interests excels it. This, the second largest city in Great Britain, had, as late [pg 198] as 1697, a population of only 5,000; 80 small vessels then belonged to the port. ”

“ A man desiring to go from Boulogne to Flushing by sea or from some lower French port to, say, [Pg 113] Amsterdam, would very probably find his cheapest road to lie by way of going into the Thames and out of it. We must not exaggerate this element in the present position of London, where it is but a survival and that a small one: but in the past, and particularly in the establishment of the port at the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Middle Ages, this ‘facing’ of London River towards the great political frontier line of Europe, was of capital importance. ”

“ I think that to know the River of London the journey must be made from the sea upwards, in something not larger than a barge, in a motor boat, or in a fishing vessel, or little half-rater, and taken upon one tide with an easterly wind, as all the men of the past took it, making the great port upstream under the weather they had chosen. ”

“ In designing dock works, it is expedient to make provision, as far as possible, for future extensions as the trade of the port increases. Generally this can be effected alongside tidal rivers and estuaries by utilizing sites lower down the river, as carried out on Dock extensions. the Thames for the port of London, or reclaiming unoccupied foreshores of an estuary, as adopted for extensions of the ports of Liverpool, Hull and Havre. ”

“ London was founded as a commercial port. We have seen that at first the trade of the country passed to the south over Thorney Island; but that, after the convenience of London had been discovered, it went to London. As a trading centre London was founded, and as a trading centre it continued. The people were always as they are now, traders. It was not the military capital; it was not, until late in the Roman occupation, the head-quarters of the civil administration. It flourished or it decayed, consequently, with the prosperity or the decline of trade. ”

“ And, truth to say, for all the criticisms flung upon the heads of the dock companies, the other docks of the Thames are no disgrace to the town with a population greater than that of some commonwealths. The growth of London as a well-equipped port has been slow, while not unworthy of a great capital, of a great centre of distribution. It must not be forgotten that London has not the backing of great industrial districts or great fields of natural exploitation. ”

“ The steamers are not the great liners; they are much smaller craft. They run between London and Hamburg, London and Antwerp, London and Dieppe. The ships which bring the treasures of the world to London port are all in the docks where they are out of sight; there is no evidence to this group of spectators from the bridge of their presence at all, or of the rich argosies they bear within them. ”

“ Come back to the Pool of the eighteenth century, because it is there that we get the first glimpse of the people who lived by the shipping and the port. They were, first, the sailors themselves; next, the lightermen, stevedores, and porters; then the boat builders, barge builders, rope-makers, block-makers, ships’ carpenters, mast- and yard-makers, shipwrights, keepers of taverns and ale-houses, dealers in ships’ stores, and many others. Now, in the eighteenth century, the shipping of London port increased by leaps and bounds ”

“ Factory chimneys smoke right over against Westminster with an air of carelessly not having permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of all London east of Temple Bar and of the huge dingy immensity of London port is to me of something disproportionately large, something morbidly expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the clean clear social assurance of the West End. ”

“ For a considerable period, the population of London has been increasing at the rate of about half a million in each decade. If the same rate of increase is continued, the shipping entering and clearing from the port [355] of London in twenty years should amount to five millions additional, which would bring the annual total up to about 221⁄2 millions of tons. Will the river Thames be equal to carrying on this enormous traffic without serious inconvenience and danger? ”

“ They were interrupted by a gentle knock at the door, and when Philip opened it, Madge entered.
SANITARY INSPECTION OF THE PORT OF LONDON.
We move easily in the little beaten track of our own concerns, and do not think of the care that is taken of us. What snug citizen of us all ever imagines danger to himself and the community from such a source as the port of London? ”

“ London, as I have before shown, has four times the number of sailing vessels, and ten times the amount of tonnage, over and above any port in the kingdom, whilst of steam-impelled coasting vessels it has but little more than one-third, compared with Liverpool. ”

“ Once bridged the same spot would mark the terminal of sea-borne traffic and the place of exchange between foreign and domestic produce, while the roads radiating north and south from such a crossing would further establish its pre-eminence.
But that pre-eminence was, from some very early period, commercial. The first mention of London in recorded history, the [Pg 72] phrase of Tacitus, speaks of the town particularly as a market. As a market London has grown, and as a market it is still chiefly eminent. But London is a market only because it is a port, and it is the port of the Thames. ”

“ When all these conditions changed—when the discovery of the New World, and of the Cape route to the Indies, when the growth of north-country industries and one hundred other factors had taken away from the site of London its old topographical supremacy, the port was so firmly established that it provided its own sources of vitality.
It is always so in the economic affairs of a town or of a nation. Material causes are discovered to be more powerful in the middle period of their growth; once the town or nation are rooted they nourish themselves. ”

“ The Thames, therefore, with London as its port of transhipment between the inland communications and the sea, tapped the very heart of all that was wealthiest in [Pg 102] England for fifteen hundred years, and all that commerce by river as by road drained upon London because London was “central” to exchange in the rich south and east of the island.
But, as we have seen, two further characters were attached to “draining” power. ”

“ Ebbegate, which is mentioned in twelfth-century documents, is, Riley says, the same as Swan Wharf. [101]
There must, even in Alfred’s time, have been some sort of customs house, for there were quay dues, and a charter of 857 speaks of the place in London where the weighing and measuring of the port was done. [102]
We thus have a picture of a busy river front, the shore, backed by the city walls and gates, indented with a series of docks crowded with shipping. Says FitzStephen, “To this city from every nation under heaven merchants delight to bring their trade by sea. ”

“ But the dangers incident to the navigation of the Mersey early called attention to the necessity of artificial water accommodation for its shipping. This the people of Liverpool were wise enough to recognise; and who can doubt that Liverpool, which, considering its importance three hundred years ago, has grown even more rapidly than London, owes its marvellous prosperity to its magnificent dock system. Look, again, at Bristol. Time was when Bristol, as a port, ranked next to London; and why? Simply because of her unrivalled geographical situation and the early establishment of the dock system. ”

“ Defoe says of Lynn: "There is the greatest extent of Inland Navigation here, of any Port in England, London excepted. The Reason whereof is this, that there are more Navigable Rivers empty themselves here into the Sea, including the Washes, which are branches of the same Port, than at any one Mouth of Waters in England, except the Thames and the Humber." ”

“ In front of us is the ancient port once called Edred’s Hythe after the name of a former Wharfinger or Harbour Master or Port Captain; it was afterwards called Potter’s Hythe and later Queen Hythe, because King John gave it to his mother Queen Eleanor, which name it still retains. The port is square, and open on one side to the river; there are never any storms to wreck the shipping within. It is now filled with ships, chiefly of the smaller kind, because the larger craft cannot pass through the Bridge. ”