The owner of the Will Arding, whom we met the next day, was a kindly simple man who told us all we needed to know about the vessel. We had prepared ourselves to cope with a coper of the worst kind; but we were soon disarmed, and that not to our detriment. He told us that the barge had just finished her contract, and as, in his opinion, the days of small barges were over, except in good times, he was going to sell her, as she was barely paying her way. He showed us the record of her trips, the cargoes she had carried, the places she had traded to, and the repairs done to her from time to time.

He was so agreeable that the Mate hesitated to ask about her character, but her sense of duty prevailed. One collision, in which she was not to blame, and two fingers off the hand of one of her mates, appeared to be the only blots on an otherwise stainless career. Joe Applegate had already told us of the collision, though not of the fingers, and I hoped that the Mate would be satisfied. And she was, when she had learned that the fingers had been lost in the least ominous manner in which fingers conceivably could be lost.

Two days later we received a message that the Will Arding had unloaded, and was lying at Greenwich ready for us to examine her.

A more gloomy February day for our visit could hardly have been; the wind was light and easterly, and a cold drizzle fell through the fog. The damp, however, did not touch our spirits. Even our bodies were warmed by excitement. The owner met us in his yard, and we tried to assume an indifference which probably did not deceive him.

The tide had ebbed some way, leaving the gravelly foreshore covered with black slime, and there, half afloat, half resting on the ground, and gently rocking to the wash of a passing tug, lay the Will Arding, with a slight cant outwards. Her annual overhaul was due in a month, the owner told us, thus explaining the condition of her paint and tar. She had been sailed to Greenwich by odd hands who had not even troubled to wash her down. Certainly she was looking her worst, but the eye of faith already saw the splendours of her resurrection.

As we went on board, the owner told us he had given instructions for one of the plugs to be lifted and water let in. The water was mixed with creosote to sweeten the bilge. It was as well that he told us this, for what we saw when we descended into the hold might have daunted CÆsar. Some of the hatches were left on, and under these we took cover from the rain in the long dirty hold. She was still rocking slightly, and on the lee side black bilge water was slopping disconsolately backwards and forwards across the floor. A strong smell of creosote and smells of cement and other cargoes scarcely to be determined competed for recognition in our nostrils. The Will Arding seemed to have come down in the world; and this was the fact, for lately she had been sailed by men who can always be hired in the open market, but who do not look after their barges as the better class of skippers do. The best skippers had all taken up with the more modern class of large barges. The barges we had known in the country had always been scrupulously clean and tidy below. It was perhaps fortunate that our experience in the gin-drinker’s cabin had revealed to us another world, and thus in some sense deadened the shock of what we saw now.

We passed to the cabin aft, and one glance told us that the grimy mariners of the public-houses had truly been the friends of the late skipper George. To say that the cabin was dirty and stuffy is to say nothing. Even the paint was greasy, and a stale smell, indescribable but unforgettable, hung in the air. George and his mate had left their bedding, presumably as not worth taking away. No doubt they were right.

Some old clothes, a half-empty tin of condensed milk, stale mustard in an egg-cup, some kind of grease in a frying-pan, two mugs with the dregs of beer in them, lay about; and on the floor there were broken boots and old socks.

Returning to the hold, we took all the measurements necessary for our present purpose. We found that though the Will Arding had not as much headroom under her decks as we should have liked, she had enough for our piano, which was the tallest piece of furniture we intended to have on board. Moreover, we knew that barges of that size seldom have more headroom.

Still undepressed, if sobered by the prospect of the work to be done before we could possibly live on board, we went on shore to discuss the price with the owner. It was a most unpolemical discussion, and ended in my undertaking to buy the Will Arding for £140 subject to the surveyor’s report. We agreed upon a surveyor, and the owner gave orders for the vessel to be put on the blocks at the next tide.

From this time forward the owner was unreservedly our friend, and we dreaded lest our prize should be snatched from us at the last moment by the untoward judgment of the surveyor. The owner fortified our courage by assuring us he had done all the annual overhauls and repairs for many years, and therefore it was hardly possible that the survey would reveal anything that could not easily be put right. Whatever the surveyor suggested he would do, whether we bought the barge or not.

We could only await the surveyor’s report as patiently as might be, and having bade the owner good-bye, we took one more look at the Will Arding with I hardly know what thoughts in our minds. She had canted over still further, and looked more dingy than ever in the growing dusk as she sat in a foreground of slime. Behind her on the wonderful old river, now hurrying its fastest seawards in muddy eddies, two of her sisters, their sails just drawing, glided noiselessly past and were received into the enveloping gloom, where the drizzle shut in the horizon and sky and water met indistinguishably.

Then we returned to London.

At last—as it seemed, though it was only three days later—the surveyor’s report arrived. All was well with the Will Arding, and she was, in the surveyor’s private opinion, worth all the money we were giving for her. The only defects worth speaking of were a sprung topmast and three damaged ribs forward, but these had been strengthened by ‘floating’ ribs alongside.

We hurried to Greenwich and paid a deposit on the price.

This time the Will Arding was on the blocks, and a gang of men had burned off the old tar and were busy tarring and blackleading her hull; her gear had been lowered, and our friend the owner was having a new topmast fitted to make all good. He had also turned his men on to replace a length of damaged rail. That was not the only thing which he did for us outside our agreement. Soon, indeed, he became almost as much interested in our scheme as we were ourselves, and we consulted him at almost every turn.

While the repairs were going on we completed the purchase; and we were profoundly conscious of the importance of the formalities which constituted us the recognized owners of ‘sixty-four sixty-fourths’ of the sailing barge Will Arding, with a registered number of our own.

Well, we were shipowners at any rate, and possessed the outer walls of our new home. And now the Mate and I found ourselves faced with a thousand unforeseen difficulties and problems, which crowded on us so thick that we scarcely knew where to begin to tackle them. This state of affairs compelled the drafting of rules of procedure, the chairman (myself) refusing motions on any point not mentioned in the agenda. Members of the Committee (the Mate) were allowed to make notes during the authorized debates on subjects to be referred to in the time set apart for general discussion. In this way our sanity was saved.

The first and most important thing was to disinfect the ship. And here the luck was with us, for next door to the yard where the Will Arding lay were some gas-works, the manager of which was a friend of the Will Arding’s late owner. Our requirements were disclosed to the manager, who not only told us what disinfectant to use, but most kindly offered to have it mixed in the right proportions in one of his boilers at a nominal cost. From the boiler it could be discharged direct under pressure into the Will Arding. After consultation we decided to have holes drilled through the lining of the hold at regular intervals. When this had been done the Will Arding was berthed as near as possible to the boiler.

Eighty gallons of neat disinfectant were mixed with 800 gallons of boiling water, a hose was laid on board, and the fluid was squirted into each of the holes. By the time the last gallon was on board the disinfectant was just above the floor, but the bubbles of foam reached to the decks. This process caused intense curiosity in the yard, and there were many croakers who told us that we should never get her sweet.

The barge returned to the yard, where the various repairs went on for several days. In the meantime, being in the best market of the world, we bought the timber, panelling, bath, kitchen range, a hundredweight of nails, paint, varnish, hot-water apparatus, and the hundred and one other things we required to turn the barge into a tenantable house. Now we enjoyed the advantage of all our work in the winter, for we had drawn up precise lists of the things to be bought.

We look back on those purchases with delight. It gives one a sense of real contact with the business of life to ask for the price of something f.o.b. London, on board one’s own ship, and to order the goods to be sent to such and such a wharf to the sailing barge Will Arding. The summit of dignity was reached when I was able to tell a dealer, who was late in delivering his goods, that my ship with her general cargo on board was waiting to sail, and that if his goods were not on board that afternoon they would have to be sent by rail at his expense.

At last the repairs were finished, the general cargo was complete, and the hatches were on. As nothing would induce me to sleep in the cabin until it had been wholly cleaned, I decided not to sail the Will Arding to the Essex coast myself, but to have her delivered at the shipwright’s at Bridgend—a place a few miles below Fleetwick on our river.

We saw the Will Arding get under way. She had improved vastly in appearance. The tide was on the turn, and the wind westerly; great clouds sailed across the sky. It was a brave wind with a touch of spring in it, and it made the Will Arding’s topsail slat furiously as the mate hoisted it to the music of the patent blocks. The brails were let go, the mainsail was sheeted home; both men went forward, and then the clank, clank, clank of the windlass fell on our ears with the sound we knew so well both by day and night. The chain was soon ‘up and down,’ and the foresail was hoisted and made fast to the rigging with a bowline. The Will Arding sheered slowly towards us with her sails full until the anchor checked her. Then swinging slowly round she came head to wind, her mainsail and foresail flapping loudly, and the mainsheet blocks crashing backwards and forwards on the main horse. When the foresail was aback the anchor was quickly broken out, and the barge filled on the other tack and gathered way.

We watched her standing over towards the opposite shore, until the mate got the anchor catted. Then bearing away with her great sprit right off and a white wave under her fore-foot, our home fled down the river.

BRADWELL CREEK