I never pass Gravesend without thinking of poor Mrs. Henry Fielding’s dreadful toothache, and the trouble her husband and the surgeon, “the best reputed operator in Gravesend,” took to persuade the suffering lady to keep the hollow tooth a little longer. To what extent has the old town changed since the author of “Tom Jones” surveyed it from the deck of the little old vessel that carried him to Lisbon to die there? Much should have happened in a hundred and thirty years; yet in one respect Gravesend remains unaltered; it is still, so to speak, the same old point of nautical departure; ships still “drop” down abreast of it, and bring up to receive their passengers; and yet it remains the one spot of English soil which, when left astern, makes you feel that the great ocean is all before you, and that your voyage has commenced indeed. But is not human nature the same in all ages? Fielding’s description of sitting at dinner and being startled by the bowsprit of “a little ship called a cod smack,” driving in through the cabin window, and his account of the sea-blessings showered upon each other by the crews of the two vessels, might stand for a picture of to-day’s river life. “It is difficult,” he says, “I think, to assign a satisfactory reason why sailors in general should, of all others, think themselves entirely discharged from the common bands of humanity, and should seem to glory in the language and behaviour of savages.” His opinion of Jack as a gentleman was not ill founded. But what would he think now if living, and with the memory in him of his uncouth sea-swab of a skipper (who, to the delight of posterity, fell upon his knees at last and begged Fielding to forgive him), he should step on board the 4000-ton steamer that lay abreast of Gravesend, with blue-peter at her masthead, on the day I happened to find myself in that town?

Not much imagination is needed, I think, to extinguish the monster fabrics which day after day lie floating motionless abreast of Gravesend, and refurnish the broad and quivering stretch of waters with the marine phantoms of olden times. The Indiaman of 500 tons is viewed with astonishment at her prodigious dimensions as she lies straining at her hempen cable, the sunshine sparkling in the big windows which embellish her huge quarter-galleries, her stern towering out of the water like a castle, a wondrous complication of head-boards and massive timbers distinguishing her bows, long streamers whipping from every masthead, and rows of cannon bristling along her tall, weather-tossed sides. You have little pinks, and snows, and cutters of fifty tons burden which have made part of a convoy from the West Indies, and have outweathered the heavy Atlantic surges as bravely as any Cunard liner of to-day does. Here, too, are colliers, “ships of great bulk,” Fielding calls them, though there is scarcely a skipper of an old boom-foresail Anna Maria or John and Susan now afloat who would not hold them capacious only as long-boats. To appreciate all that the present means, you must step back and then look ahead. Only the other day I saw a Blackwall liner towing up the river. It is not so very long ago when that ship would have been thought a wonderfully large vessel. Handsome she is, with her painted ports and frigate-like look, though her main-royal mast was uncomfortably stayed aft when I saw her, and she wants a prettier stem-piece; but as to her size, she seemed little more than a toy as she swam past the line of huge towering iron hulls. You think of the scene of the river as Fielding surveyed it, then as you remember it twenty years since, then as you see it now; and your wonder is, What will the end be should the end ever arrive? What will be the bulk and vastness of the fabrics in the good time coming?

“The new docks,” said a waterman to me, pointing across the river with a finger like a roll of old parchment, “are to start from yonder p’int, and end right aways down there;” and the sweep of his finger seemed to embrace some leagues of the opposite low, flat, treeless, and mud-coloured shore. Assuredly all that can be given will be wanted. Our marine giantesses are multiplying faster than they drown; and it seemed to me that there was something prophetic in my waterman’s finger when he made the gesture of it to signify miles instead of acres. But many changes must take place and a long time elapse before Gravesend loses its old distinctive tradition as a point of departure. Think of the thousands of eyes which have grown dim as they watched the old town veer away astern, and of the thousands of hearts which have leapt in transport as from mouth to mouth the cry has gone round, “Gravesend is in sight.” No other place—I am speaking, of course, of vessels bound Thames-wise—gives one such a sense of home as this. Jack may have the English coast in view pretty nearly the whole way from the Isle of Wight as high as the South Foreland; he may bring up in the Downs, and have Deal and Walmer close aboard, and hear the church bells ringing, and see the people walking on the beach; he may take his fill of Ramsgate and Margate as he rounds the great headland; but somehow or other it is not until Gravesend has hove in sight, and he sees the shipping abreast of it, and the river curving into Northfleet Hope, that Jack feels home is reached at last; that the voyage is as good as over, and that in a few hours the noble ship that has carried him in safety through storm and calm, through sunshine and blackness, will be at rest, silent as the grave—as though, after the long and fitful fever of the deep, she was sleeping well.

These are the gayer thoughts, for they come with the hurricane-chorus that breaks from the forecastle of yonder ship as her crew get the anchor, now that the first of the flood has come, and the tug alongside is already to forge ahead and tauten the hawser. “Oh, when we get to the dockyard gates!” shout the poor fellows gleefully, with as much voice as a voyage from San Francisco has left in them; and you think that to-night there will be some middling salt and tough yarns spun in more than one grog-shop, whilst already Jack’s most unlovely Nan—as Charles Dickens only too truthfully described her—is overhauling her few penn’orths of finery in anticipation of the treats which are to be got out of a fund made up of £3 10s. a month.

But Gravesend appeals most from the other side of the picture—the outward-bound side. I was favoured with an immense illustration of this. A big steamer, with a black-and-white funnel, lay abreast of the Gravesend pier, with her decks literally choked with emigrants. She should have sailed the day before, I was told; but the emigrants—mainly foreigners—had rebelled; declared they had been promised a steamer belonging to another company, and refused to start in the vessel they were packed aboard of. Some one on the Gravesend pier told me that a thousand people had been put into her that morning. There was hardly room for a pin along the bulwarks. Clustering masses of human heads blackened the rail, as though all the crows in Kent had swooped down upon that great iron steamship, and were taking their ease upon her sides. I had no excuse to board her, but I managed to gather a good idea of her living freight by taking a boat and pulling round her. I had seen a very similar class of foreign emigrants in a North-country port, and had made a short voyage in company with five or six hundred of them, but that crowd did not impress me as this did. There was something very pathetic and melancholy in the postures and looks of this large concourse of people, who overhung the water, and gazed, with little of movement among them, at the shores on either hand. The thought of this mass of human souls afloat on the deep with nothing between them and eternity but a thin surface of iron, combined with the speculations as to the future into which the mind was irresistibly impelled; the new lands which awaited them; the long—perhaps everlasting—separation from their mother country; the numberless interests they represented; and the rapid growth of that amazing Western Empire, whose humanizing and civilizing progress was strangely illustrated by the embarkation of this immense assembly—the freight of a single ship, too!—for its ports, contributed to make the picture of the Holland—for that was the name of the steamer—a truly impressive and memorable one. It was a warm, sunny afternoon; far down the Hope, trending north-wise athwart Gravesend Reach, were the white heights of Cliffe, sparkling like marble in the brilliant radiance; the long stretch of water was crowded with shipping, whose bunting and variously-coloured sides filled the eye with colour; Gravesend lay in a heavy mass of grouping close down to the water’s edge, with a lumber of huddled houses to the right of the new Falcon Hotel, here and there a window flashing back the sunlight, and the church bell ringing a pleasant farewell to a Peninsular and Oriental steamer, whose head was being canted towards the north shore by a tug that she might have a clear road before her engines were set in motion; whilst, some distance up the river, vessels which had passed Gravesend twenty minutes before were fading upon the blueish haze of smoke from tall chimneys and fog from the marshes, the spars of the Blackwall liner looming huge and vague above the land which concealed her hull.

The very beauty of the picture furnished an element of melancholy to the crowded steamship, and the rows upon rows of faces which were all steadily gazing landwards. I watched the Peninsular and Oriental steamer get under way, and contrasted her with the emigrant ship. The big deck-house or saloon of the former, with the two funnels rearing out of it, gave her, to my eye, a somewhat heavy look forward; but it was something to remember to run the eye from her almost unpeopled decks—nobody to be seen but some men in uniform on the bridge, a Lascar in a turban squatting in the after-awning, holding a little white flag in his hand, and one or two figures in the forward part of the ship—to the motionless black hull of the emigrant steamer, teeming with life, and the bulwarks literally creeping with faces. It is a responsible thing to carry mails, to be answerable for a mass of specie, and for the lives of a number of gentlemen and ladies; but think of standing on the deck of a steamer on a dark night, and reflecting that under your feet lie sleeping a thousand human beings, not counting your crew, and that the very existence of this vast company of fellow-creatures depends upon your vigilance, judgment, skill as a seaman. I believe the sympathy and wonder of any man who saw that crowded vessel and gave attention to the sight, would have gone to the captain—to the seaman who was to hold all those lives in his hand, so to speak. Who would willingly accept such a responsibility? and who, finding men equal to the discharge of these enormous trusts, would not gladly lend a hand to smooth their path for them by denouncing and demanding the removal of whatever unfairly obstructs and harasses them—the action of unjustly-constituted courts, the decisions of empirics, and of people who could not tell the difference between a gin-block and a dead-eye, the iniquities of the modern ship-building yard, and the hundred small red-tape worries which makes the shipmaster’s life a burden to him ashore?

How much Gravesend is a point of arrival and departure I was reminded as I stood overhanging the stone projection and looking down on the landing-steps. From a large sailing-ship towing up the river, a waterman’s boat shot away and made for the Gravesend pier. In it was a middle-aged man, bronzed with the suns and winds of four months, and dressed in clothes which it scarcely needed a tailor to guess were of an Antipodean cut. His luggage was heaped about him in the bottom of the boat. I watched him land, and followed him as he came up the steps, when a rush was made by a little group of people dressed in mourning, and in a breath a woman, tossing up her black veil, was in his arms, and sobbing on his shoulder. Those sombre garments threw a shadow upon the happiness of this meeting; but still, he had come back, he was well, and by-and-by the dead, never to be forgotten, let us hope, would be buried indeed, and the living heart reassert itself. The watermen seemed to know when that ship had left her port on the other side of the world, and so I found that this man had been four months in making his way to England. And how much longer had he been absent? But then think of the glory of the green trees and fragrant beauties of our English May to this traveller fresh from one hundred and twenty days of salt water! Figure the flavour he will find in a cut from a prime sirloin! the sweetness of “soft tack”—ay, even such bread as is now baked—after the bilious little bits of dough manufactured in the galley by the baker, and sent aft under the satirical title of “rolls!”

Scarcely had the sunburnt man and his friends disappeared, when there came a little figure that I could not view without lively concern and compassion. This was a small midshipman, resplendent in the newest of uniforms. The buttons glittered on his tiny jacket, and the brand-new badge on his cap shone like a freshly minted sovereign. There lay his ship a short way down the stream—a good-looking iron vessel, very long and very narrow, without an inch of that “swell of the sides” one loves to see, as I had taken notice when she slewed on her heel to the first of the flood and gave us a view of herself end on, with double topgallant yards, skysail poles, and the capacity for an immense spread of lower cloths. The poor little chap took a long squint at his new home, and then a peep at the lady alongside of him, who, from the strong family likeness between them, I reckoned at once to be his mamma. She had been crying, her eyes were red, but she looked at her youngster with a kind of quivering smile now, for it would clearly not do to capsize his sensibilities at this most trying point. He had insisted upon going to sea, no doubt, much against poor mamma’s will. He had fine notions of the marine calling, I dare say, all acquired by days and nights of study of nautical romances; and here he was ready to sail away, handsomely brass bound, mamma red-eyed at his side, bravely fighting with her heart. Hundreds of men have gone through this, and something betwixt a laugh and a sigh will come from them when they think of this little brass bounder and look back to their first voyage. What ideas had the young fellow formed of the life? But, alas! what mariner has not allowed his boyhood to gull him in the same way? “There is,” says Dana, “a witchery in the sea, its songs and stories, and in the mere sight of a ship and the sailor’s dress, especially to a young mind, which has done more to man navies and fill merchantmen than all the pressgangs in Europe. I have known a young man with such a passion for the sea, that the very creaking of a block stirred his imagination so that he could hardly keep his feet upon dry ground.” These sentences recurred to me as I watched the little midshipman. But for how many days was the spell of the ocean’s witchery to lie upon him? Probably, if they had head winds down Channel, he would be sick of the life and longing to be ashore in a warm bed, with his mother to tuck him up, and a good breakfast to go downstairs to next morning, before they were abreast of the Start. “Oh, my golly!” said a negro whom I met at Gravesend, selling flowers, “S’elp me, sah, as I stan’ here, I’d gib dis basket—yas, ah would—and all de close horff my back, for a good blow-out of lobscouse!” But that little middy will have to be a black man if he wants to enjoy sea-fare as my negro-friend did. A few days of dark and evil-looking pork, and salt beef out of which he might cut models of ships for his friends at home, and “duff” made of copper-skimmings, not to mention the being routed out in his watch below, and having to tumble up aloft in a night blind with storm and rain, are pretty sure to disillusion him. But his buttons are new, and his hopes are young and fresh; there is no tarnish of salt water on either as yet; so let him take his mother’s yearning, passionate kiss, and bundle into the boat and be off. She could not bear to see him row away, and the moment he went down the steps she hurried off; whilst he, to show what a man he was, squatted himself in the stern sheets, and pulled out a short wooden pipe and lighted it. In a few minutes he was out in the stream. I watched him get alongside his ship, trot up the gangway ladder, and vanish in a kind of twinkle of new brass and gilt over the side.

It is these constant comings and goings which give Gravesend its interest and its memories. One hour it is a party of people newly arrived from the bottom of the world; another it is a couple of drunken firemen tumbling into a boat, and shoving off for some lump of a steamer that lies abreast of the Obelisk or Denton Mill. But, in spite of the heaps of nautical conditions which beset it, Gravesend cannot be called wholly marine. It may be thought fishy, but it certainly is not salt. Contrast it with Deal, which it resembles in its lower streets. The wind may pipe never so merrily, but there is no shrewd briny pungency in the shrilling gusts as they sweep round the corners. The boatmen have a fresh water look. Their sou’westers and jerseys cannot deceive the practised eye. They can handle an oar capitally; but they have not the toughened and bronzed and Channel-tossed look of the fellows whom you encounter lolling in blanket trousers over the Ramsgate piers, or arguing in groups at the entrance of the Margate jetties, or heightening the picturesque appearance of the Deal and Folkestone shingle. Yet I cannot conceive of any place better calculated to delight a man of maritime studies and scenes than Gravesend. You may linger all day on the queer-looking roofed-in pier, with the old barge moored against it, and never feel weary. Hour after hour unfolds the canvas of a never-ending panorama of shipping. Picture after picture goes by—the great ocean steamship, the little ratching ketch, the sturdy old collier, the white and shining yacht, the large and loftily rigged ship, the eager tug hissing through the trembling current, and all the life and light and colour and wondrous transformations of the river take a certain character of remoteness akin to unreality, as though what you gazed at was nothing but a series of noble paintings, indeed, from the quietude that prevails about you; an atmosphere of lazy stillness broken by the muffled, rushing sound of the current sweeping under the pier, the dulled voices of men conversing outside the wooden structure, and the straining noise of boats as the tide sets the little craft chafing one another’s sides.