The view of ships lying moored in some of the older docks of London has always suggested to my mind the image of a flock of swans kept in the flooded backyard of grim tenement houses.The flatness of the walls surrounding the dark pool on which they float brings out wonderfully the flowing grace of the lines on which a ship's hull is built.The lightness of these forms, devised to meet the winds and the seas, makes, by contrast with the great piles of bricks, the chains and cables of their moorings appear very necessary, as if nothing less could prevent them from soaring upwards and over the roofs.The least puff of wind stealing round the corners of the dock buildings stirs these captives fettered to rigid shores.
It is as if the soul of a ship were impatient of confinement.
Those masted hulls, relieved of their cargo, become restless at the slightest hint of the wind's freedom.However tightly moored, they range a little at their berths, swaying imperceptibly the spire-like assemblages of cordage and spars.You can detect their impatience by watching the sway of the mastheads against the motionless, the soulless gravity of mortar and stones.As you pass alongside each hopeless prisoner chained to the quay, the slight grinding noise of the wooden fenders makes a sound of angry muttering.But, after all, it may be good for ships to go through a period of restraint and repose, as the restraint and self-communion of inactivity may be good for an unruly soul - not, indeed, that I mean to say that ships are unruly; on the contrary, they are faithful creatures, as so many men can testify.And faithfulness is a great restraint, the strongest bond laid upon the self-will of men and ships on this globe of land and sea.
This interval of bondage in the docks rounds each period of a ship's life with the sense of accomplished duty, of an effectively played part in the work of the world.The dock is the scene of what the world would think the most serious part in the light, bounding, swaying life of a ship.But there are docks and docks.
The ugliness of some docks is appalling.Wild horses would not drag from me the name of a certain river in the north whose narrow estuary is inhospitable and dangerous, and whose docks are like a nightmare of dreariness and misery.Their dismal shores are studded thickly with scaffold-like, enormous timber structures, whose lofty heads are veiled periodically by the infernal gritty night of a cloud of coal-dust.The most important ingredient for getting the world's work along is distributed there under the circumstances of the greatest cruelty meted out to helpless ships.
Shut up in the desolate circuit of these basins, you would think a free ship would droop and die like a wild bird put into a dirty cage.But a ship, perhaps because of her faithfulness to men, will endure an extraordinary lot of ill-usage.Still, I have seen ships issue from certain docks like half-dead prisoners from a dungeon, bedraggled, overcome, wholly disguised in dirt, and with their men rolling white eyeballs in black and worried faces raised to a heaven which, in its smoky and soiled aspect, seemed to reflect the sordidness of the earth below.One thing, however, may be said for the docks of the Port of London on both sides of the river: for all the complaints of their insufficient equipment, of their obsolete rules, of failure (they say) in the matter of quick despatch, no ship need ever issue from their gates in a half-fainting condition.London is a general cargo port, as is only proper for the greatest capital of the world to be.General cargo ports belong to the aristocracy of the earth's trading places, and in that aristocracy London, as it is its way, has a unique physiognomy.
