A plain red-brick building stands in the West India Dock Road, with the following lengthy name or description written along the front of it:—“The Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans, and South Sea Islanders.” On the day I visited this house there were three or four people standing on the doorsteps, with faces which did more in an instant to express the character of the place than could have been effected by reams of reports of annual meetings and descriptive pamphlets. They were, it is needless to say, persons of colour, and of very decided colour too: one as black as a hat, another of a muddy yellow, a third a gloomy brown. They were dressed in European clothes: they might have belonged to nations which were in a high state of civilization when the Thames was clean water, and rolled its silver stream through a land whose scanty population hung loose and unclothed among the trees; but for all that, they had the look of wild men in breeches, and the very black person needed little more than a boomerang or a bow and arrows to give him the aspect at least of an unsafe object. I had, however, but little time to inspect these men, for a commotion in the hall of the building, coupled with an assemblage of some dozen or twenty people on the street pavement, called my attention to a spectacle of real interest. This consisted of the starting of a troupe of Javanese musicians for the place of entertainment where they were then performing. There were a number of men and four women—at least, I think there were four women; yet it is possible that I may have mistaken a man for one of the other sex, for some of the men and women were very much alike, especially the men. They streamed out in a great hurry, their bright black eyes sparkling in their brown faces, the men smoking short pipes of a decidedly West India Dock Road pattern, and the women bundling along in such queer raiment that it would be as hopeless to attempt to describe its colours and cut as to catalogue the stock of a rag-and-bottle merchant. A kind of large private omnibus stood at the door, into which these strange people got, some of them climbing upon the roof; and striking indeed was the appearance of the windows of the vehicle, framing, as they did, every one of them, a dark, contented face, whilst the roof of the omnibus was crowded with blacks and whites, like the keys of a pianoforte.

“Who are those people?” said I to a Chinaman, as the omnibus rolled away.

“Hey?” answered John.

“Those people,” I said, pointing towards the retreating vehicle, “they are not sailors, are they? There are women among them.”

“No, no, not sailor, no, no,” cried the Chinaman with great earnestness, and wagging his head so violently that he nearly shook his hat off. “Music-man, not sailor; play tic-a-tic, tic-a-tic;” and here he screwed an imaginary fiddle into his throat and fell to sawing the air with his elbow.

At this moment I was joined by the secretary—a gentleman, let me say at once, who, after spending many years of his life in India, is now gratuitously devoting his services to the poor Asiatic who finds himself homeless in this great wilderness of London, often penniless, and speaking a tongue with which he may journey from Mile End Gate to Hammersmith without finding an ear capable of comprehending a word he says. This gentleman told me who those queer-looking people were, how they were in charge of a Dutch entrepreneur, and how they were “putting-up” at the Strangers’ Home because there, and at no other place in London, they were likely to meet people who, even if they did not speak their language, would impart a sense of home.

We now proceeded to inspect the building. As at the Well Street Sailors’ Home, so here, the common room, if I may so term it, is the central hall, a large place furnished with seats and tables and heated by an immense stove. Here of an evening, when it is cold or damp out of doors, the inmates of the home assemble, and the bright lamps shed their light upon as many diverse countenances and costumes as there are nationalities to the eastward of Russia and in the great oceans which wash the Capes of Africa and South America. Strange, indeed, is the admixture to a European eye: the Hindoo sitting cross-legged on a bench listening, with dusky eyes rolling in his black attenuated features, to the pigeon-English of a round-faced Chinaman; a Malay endeavouring by gestures to make himself understood by a Kanaka; a native of Ceylon smiling over the porcine gutturals of a couple of Zulus; with here an Arab reis pacing the floor in lonely dignity, or a red man of a paternity indistinguishable in his features, which seem compounded of the Nubian, the last of the Mohicans, a dash of Polynesia, with a hint of Liverpool or Bristol, spelling over a volume full of murky and eye-confounding hieroglyphs.

“When this hall is full the sight is a remarkable one,” said the secretary. “What with the hum of the strange languages—perhaps as many as twenty all going at once—together with the various faces and clothes, I assure you it needs no small effort of mind to convince one’s self that one is still in London, and that just out of doors omnibuses are rolling, small boys calling out the evening papers, and policemen standing at the corners.”

I felt the force of this, thinly peopled as the hall was, when I stood in it gazing around. Was it the strange haunting Eastern smells—vague fumes, as of a hubble-bubble recently smoked out; a lingering whiff as of curry; a thin, ghostly odour of bamboos, chillies, oil, nutmeg, and cedar-wood? or was it the turban, the pigtail, the almond-shaped eye, the black, bronze, and yellow skins of the few Asiatics who were seated in a body on a central bench, that carried my imagination out of the West India Dock Road into the tangled forests, the hot, blue heavens, the joss-houses, the sampans and junks, the rushing rivers, the jackalls, the dusky figures, the blue gowns and red or yellow shoes of the distant, spacious provinces of the sun? Hark to the sing-song chatter babbling from that Mongolian visage! What is the magic of it, that this hall, gloomy with the smoke of the great city blowing riverwards, should be transformed into a shining Eastern city, whose shores, rich with the green of tropical vegetation, are washed by a sea whose breast reflects a heaven of sapphire? The voice ceases; the spell is broken; the muffled roar of the toiling world outside breaks in and establishes one of the very sharpest contrasts in life—that of the condition of an Asiatic, fresh from the hot suns and thick jungles of his own country, plunged amid the smoke, the turmoil, the unspeakable odours of the east end of London, incapable of making his wants known, languishing in misery and cold in the gloom of railway arches or some unfrequented court, feeling what solitude is in a sense never imagined by Byron. For the Asiatic’s loneliness is that of the dumb brute; he has a language, but he might as well be voiceless, and, worst of all, he is the victim of the unnatural, ignorant, and wicked prejudice which finds in the coloured skin nothing but what is fit for derision, contempt, and cruel neglect. This was the lot of the Eastern stranger before a number of humane Englishmen banded themselves together to furnish him with a refuge. I own that the fine humanity of this institution affected me strongly as I stood looking at the knot of dark-visaged, strangely apparelled men, and considered what would be their fate if this Home were not at hand to help them, to receive them, to interpret their wants, and to assist them to return to their native countries. Time was when few tragedies were commoner than that of the finding the body of some coloured man who had made his way as a sailor or stoker to London, been robbed by the beasts of prey who wander hungrily round the dockyard gates, and had lain himself down in some corner of this opulent city to die of cold and hunger. Such horrors are things of the past, and honoured be those and the memory of those who have made them so. No Asiatic stranger need perish for the want of a friend in London now. The Home will receive him, and for a very moderate sum—which he may easily pay either from the wages due to him from the ship he leaves, or by the note advanced by the owners whose ship he joins—feed and lodge him, and spare no trouble to restore him to his own country. Hence, to a large extent, the institution contributes to its own support. But the charges it makes are so small, the losses it incurs through the new allotment or bonus notes are so frequent, and the cases of absolute destitution it deals with so numerous, that it is bound to continue to be dependent upon outside help to a certain extent; and I believe that no one who has any knowledge of the work it is doing, no one with sympathy for the helpless of his own species, but will admit that there is not an institution in existence that better deserves the gifts of the charitable than this Home for Asiatic Strangers.

But all this time I am leaving the obliging and kind-hearted secretary waiting to show me over the premises. We pass out first of all into a space of open ground at the back of the building, of which a substantial piece has been converted into a flower garden. This the superintendent of the Home, who has joined us, contemplates for a while with silent satisfaction, and then, with considerable pride, draws my attention to it.

“It has all been done within the last two or three years,” he says. “The Asiatics lend a hand, find old seeds knocking about the bottom of their chests, and plant them, but they never come to anything. They won’t grow, you know, in this climate. Here’s a sample,” he says, pointing to a row of shoots which look like the first buddings of that patriotic vegetable the leek; “they were planted three days ago by those Javanese women you saw, and this is what they’ve already come to. But I suspect they’ll end at that.”

A balcony runs at the back of the house, and along it there was stumping a John Canoe, smoking something strange, whether a pipe or cigar or cigarette or piece of cane I could not tell. He vanished through a door when we mounted the steps, which I regretted, as I should like to have examined the thing he had in his mouth.

“This,” said the secretary on our re-entering the building, “is what we call the firemen’s dormitory.” It was a large room with a bulkhead dividing it, and on either hand of the bulkhead went a row of narrow beds furnished with coarse coverlets and mattresses stuffed with fibre. There was no carpet, and I ventured to ask the reason, as the bare boards had but a cheerless look.

“Carpet!” exclaimed the secretary; “my dear sir, these Asiatics wouldn’t know what to do with such a thing. They’d pull it up and make trousers of it. You cannot conceive the strangeness of their habits and customs. For instance, to give them a table-cloth would be like ill treating them. Nothing bothers them more than a fork; and you may see them eating eggs with clasp-knives, which they pull out of their pockets.” Then seeing me eyeing the beds, he continued, “It would hardly do to give the firemen fine linen to lie in. Sir, they arrive here thick with grime, they foul whatever they touch, and it takes several days of hard bathing to clean them.”

There were several of these dormitories, each of them divided by bulkheads, uncarpeted, and containing the same kind of bedsteads, every one bearing a number at its head. The Javanese troupe occupied one of these dormitories, the men sleeping on one side of the bulkhead and the women on the other. I looked for their luggage, but could find nothing but a fiddle and an old sword. I think, if the public had seen where these musicians sleep, they would reckon the sight stranger than any other part of the performance these Eastern people were giving. There is one dormitory, however, upstairs filled with cabins similar to what they have at the old Sailors’ Home at Belvedere. These are occupied, I was told, by the better class of Asiatics.

“And who might they be?” I asked.

“Why,” I was told, “Japanese officers, stewards, Chinese carpenters, native doctors, and the like.”

These are the “dignity men.” They have a little room in which they may dine apart from the Lascars, Kanakas, John Chinamen, and the others; but, somehow, they don’t seem to value exclusiveness, for most of them will quit their table to join the pigtails and half-castes in the big eating-room downstairs, where they find a relish in their rice and fish which appears to be wanting in the dishes in the other apartment. In one of the dormitories we came across a Javanese—one of the troupe—sitting cross-legged on his bed, ill with a cold in the head. His unsmoked pipe lay by his side, and he was listlessly handling some pieces of printed calico, though the use he meant to put them to I could not divine. There is a no more melancholy object than a coloured man suffering from a bad cold in the head. I saw him shiver, and then roll his eyes—black as ebony set in orange—upon the window, and I thought to myself, “How this harmless, coloured man, who speaks nothing but Javanese, and who belongs to a country where the air is radiant with beautiful birds and fragrant with delicious fruits, must enjoy the climate of the West India Dock Road!”

We struggled to impart sympathy by several kinds of gestures and motions, but it would not do; we could not get further than alarming him, and so we left him. In another dormitory we found a Ceylon man, a Madrassee Lascar, and a Japanese. The Ceylon man was a very handsome fellow, his hair parted down the middle, and he had as fine a pair of eyes as ever I saw in the human countenance, regular features, and a wonderfully good figure. He was reading an English book, and spoke English so well that, what with his correct utterance, the colour of his skin, and his striking face, a misgiving seized me.

“Are you a pure Cingalese?” I asked.

“No, no,” cried he, with much anxiety in his manner; “my father was an English sailor!”

But the Madrassee man, in a measure, atoned for this disappointment. He was the real thing—just the sort of conformation to tumble about in a surf-boat, very black, very lean, with snow-white teeth, and a high long nose as thin as a hatchet. The secretary conversed with him in his native lingo, and it seemed to do the poor fellow good to talk. The Japanese had a wooden face, and had very little to say. Indeed, I always think that the people of his race and the Chinese view us and our works with a good deal of contempt. What a mean opinion they must have of our toys, of our paintings, in which the literal is sacrificed to the poetical; of our clothes, tea, head-dresses, coiffures, and a thousand other matters! They have a Chinese porter at the Home, who is dressed in a black coat and wears a hat. I did not speak to him, but I should judge, from observing the expression on his face when in a state of repose, that he has but a poor opinion of Great Britain. In another dormitory were a couple of Arabs mending shirts; and downstairs, in the scullery, I met a Zulu, who told me that he was a subject of Cetewayo, and had called at that King’s lodgings when he was in London, but had not managed to see his Majesty. One of the suite promised to write and appoint an hour for an interview; but no letter ever reached the youth, and the next thing he heard of Cetewayo was that he had sailed for Africa. This scullery led into a large kitchen, very well appointed, and in spick and span condition. Adjoining was the provision room, containing one large sack of rice, a quantity of smoked herrings, a jar of chillies, another jar of curry powder, and other Eastern relishes.

“The mackerel is the favourite dish with our inmates, be they of whatever nationality they will,” said the secretary. “They consider it the finest fish that is caught in European waters, and lament when the season for catching them is over.”

I asked what food they were supplied with in the Home.

“We have,” he replied, “what we call three messes. The first-class mess is sixteen shillings a week—this includes a separate cabin; the second, without a cabin, is fourteen shillings; and the third, which we term the curry and rice mess, is ten shillings. The first two messes comprise, for breakfast, fish or eggs, coffee, bread and butter; for dinner we give beef or mutton, with vegetables, and curry and rice always; tea, the same as breakfast.”

“The charge is small enough,” said I.

“But they have other privileges,” said he. “For instance, there are hot and cold water baths downstairs, for the use of which no charge is made. We also receive and take care of their money and valuables—for some of the people who come here bring real valuables, such as jewels, with them, I assure you. Since last January the amount deposited in money with us has amounted to £2,285, of which I do not scruple to say that, but for the existence of this home, the greater portion would have been stolen from its owners by the crimps and boarding-house people who haunt our neighbourhood. That room you see there is our shipping-office; captains come to us and select men for their vessels, and when the choice has been made we accompany the men to the marine offices, see them sign articles and that the advance is duly made. Indeed, we do all that we possibly can to help and protect these poor strangers.”

“What I have seen assures me of that,” said I.

“This,” he continued, as we went upstairs and entered a large cheerful dormitory, “is what we call the ayahs’ room. It is meant for native women who are brought home as nurses and discharged. Sad cases of destitution are often occurring. Not long ago a City missionary found a native woman in an empty house in Shepherd’s Bush. He brought her here, and, having learnt the name of her mistress, we went to her, and were told that the ayah was insane, that she had been kept as long as possible, had at last refused to go, and was accordingly turned out. We took charge of her for awhile, but her madness increased, and we were forced at last to send her to a county asylum, where she now remains.”

The inspection of this room exhausted all that was to be seen; so, bidding the cordial secretary farewell, and taking a lingering look at a knot of dusky men who were talking in the hall, I quitted this hospitable and most valuable institution, resolving to record all that I had heard and viewed, in the earnest hope that of those by whom this record of my visit will be read some may be induced to help an excellent charity by sending donations to the manager of the Strangers’ Home, West India Dock Road, London.

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