The Shipping Office in Tower Hill is a place where seamen, firemen, stokers, and others assemble in the hope that captains in want of crews will come and pick out the best men among them to “sign on,” as it is called. I was induced to visit it the other day by hearing a sailor complain bitterly of the filthy state of it. “Neglect,” said he, “is our lot; but the condition of that shipping office beats my time. It’s all dirt and Dutchmen, and if ye want to see something to make you reflective, just trot down the steps and take a turn round the yard the next time you’re passing that way.” When finally I did trot down the steps I found myself in a kind of courtyard, flanked on the one hand by the shipping offices—grimy doors, leading into gloomy interiors—and on the other hand by a species of shed, partitioned into stone rooms, with hard and painful seats against the walls, and unwholesome draughts of dampish wind eddying about them. It was a gloomy day—rain had fallen, and pools of muddy water gleamed here and there in the yard; the brown and stooping London sky threatened more wet, and flung a shadow that made the shipping office and its yard and its condemned-cell-like rooms under the shed an unspeakably cheerless, depressing, and miserable picture. Some sixty or seventy men stood or moved about in groups in the yard, or were seated in the cells under the shed. I was hardly prepared to witness so large an assembly, and remained near the steps for a little while surveying them. A few of them were decently attired—one or two respectably and comfortably dressed in good clothes and clean linen; but a large proportion of them were, so far as their costume went, little better than scarecrows. Some were clad merely in shirt and trousers, with their naked feet thrust into old shoes or boots; here and there was a red or blue shirt, or a figure buttoned up in such a manner as to suggest that under the ragged old coat there was no shirt at all. “And is this,” thought I, “the British sailor of the nineteenth century?—is this the original of those rubicund features, those flowing breeches, that tarpaulin hat on nine hairs, those well-polished shoes twinkling in the light-hearted measures of the hornpipe, which are offered by novelists, dramatists, and theatre lessees as accurate representations of the jolly tar we are so fond of joining in choruses about, and whom we gaze at with such patriotic enthusiasm as he hitches up his breeches, turns his quid, and smites his timbers?” Every crowd of human faces is full of variety, but no crowd that ever I looked at had the variety submitted by the countenances of these sixty or seventy men who were “waiting for a ship.” The negro’s face—flat, bland, and open-mouthed—was, of course, not wanting. Square cheeks, hollow cheeks, high cheeks; complexions black, brown, and yellow; eyes of every pattern and shade—from the small, twinkling blue of the North-country to the filmy and red-webbed optics of the gin-soaked Cockney—combined, with the different build and shapes of the men, the appearance of their clothes, the various head-coverings, to make up a truly singular scene. I stepped forward and got among a little bunch of men, of whom, addressing myself to one, I asked what sort of shelter that dirty and wretched shed and those bleak and stony cells offered in the winter, when the wind blew with an edge and the sleet and rain fell. No notice had been taken of me before, but on my making this inquiry the eyes of the whole group were fixed upon me, and half a dozen voices answered at once. The meaning of the replies was lost in the confusion, but the noise was like a signal; for I can truly say that within a few seconds of my having asked that question every man in that yard and every man that had been lounging in the cells had gathered about me, so that before I very well knew what was happening I found myself—pretty tightly squeezed—in the centre of a mass of men, the outer portions of whom pressed eagerly upon the inner to hear and see what was going forward. It was like a mutiny on a large scale, and when I looked around at the mass of faces, and tasted the tobacco-laden breath of the near people blowing hot against my cheeks, I felt that nothing was wanted to complete the suggestion of revolt but the gleam of a score of sheath-knives flourished in the air. “Give me a little room, my lads,” said I, working with my elbows; and, having freed myself somewhat, I said, “There seems no lack of men here; captains ought to find no difficulty in manning their ships.”

“They don’t want Englishmen; it’s Dutchmen they take,” shouted two or three voices.

“Here’s a man,” called out some one, pointing into the left of the crowd, “who’s been walking this yard for five months.”

“Five months, as true as the words I use is English,” bawled a hoarse voice. “But they won’t have me because my name’s Johnson. If it was Unks von Dunks I’d ha’ been woyaging o’er and o’er again in the time I’ve been kicking my heels about starving here.”

“Scoffen von Romp would do as well,” said a man near me. “Don’t matter what the name is so long as it sounds Dutch.”

“By Dutch I suppose you mean foreigners of all kinds?” said I.

“Ay, they’re all Dutchmen!” was the shout.

“But why is it that Dutchmen are preferred to Englishmen?” I asked.

The hubbub raised by this obliged me to hold up my hand and entreat silence; but it would not do. Every man’s mind was full of the grievance, and, amid the chorus of replies, I barely succeeded in catching such answers as—“Dutchmen’ll ship for two pound a month!” “Dutchmen’ll eat anything!” “Englishmen won’t put up with the messes Dutchmen’ll swallow!” “Skippers can rope’s-end Dutchmen, but they durs’n’t serve Englishmen so!” “It’s the Dutch crimps as does it!” and so forth.

It was difficult to hear these cries and watch the sea of surging heads and faces around me with unmoved gravity. There was something to touch the very dullest capacity of appreciating the ridiculous in the astonishing contrasts of physiognomies, and in the multifarious expressions which adorned the poor fellows’ countenances; but I am not sure that the appeal made to my laughter did not owe much of its force to the sorrowful element in it—to a quality of pathos lying close to humour. Many of these faces had a pinched look, that was painfully expressive of want, if not of positive starvation; and sad indeed, it seemed to me, was the sight of it in men who carried the manners of real seamen, and who appeared to me to be fit for any forecastle afloat, and for any duty that a sailor is expected to understand.

“I suppose you all come here with certificates of conduct in your pockets?” said I, when the hubbub had ceased.

Instantly a crowd of fists were thrust under my nose, filled with documents, and “Here’s mine!” and “Here’s mine!” “V. G. every one of ’em!” was roared out in twenty or thirty voices. I looked at some of these certificates, and found the letters “V. G.” (very good) endorsed on the backs of all that I examined.

“D’ye want to ship, sir?” sung out a fellow whilst I was glancing over these papers. “I’ve got two V. G. certificates in my pocket, and as I’ve not had anything to eat to-day you shall have ’em both for a couple of shillings.”

“Are certificates often sold in this fashion?” said I, of a quiet-looking man standing alongside of me.

“Sold!” he exclaimed indignantly; “what’s to hinder ’em? If a man sticks to the name that’s on the certificate, who’s to know? and so ye get men shipping themselves with false characters, no more fit for sailors’ work than if they wos greengrocers.”

“Perhaps that’s one reason why skippers and owners prefer Dutchmen to Englishmen,” said I. But this raised another storm; they shouted that more rascality went on in that way among Dutchmen than British sailors; that the reason was not that, but because, as I had heard, Dutchmen shipped for wages no Englishman would look at, and put up with food, accommodation, and treatment which no Englishman would endure, and likewise because there was a deal of underhand crimping work going on between the foreign boarding-house runners and mates and captains, and so on.

Here the emotions of these sixty or seventy men brought them pressing so heavily around me, that my anxiety to hear their statements was swamped in the labour of breathing and the struggle to liberate myself. I bawled to them to make way, as I wanted to have a look at the rooms under the shed; on which they drew back and let me out, though they followed at my heels as I passed from one room to another, talking and arguing hotly, calling marine blessings down on the heads of all Dutchmen, and wondering what good it was nowadays being born an Englishman, when even a Finn, whom, in the olden times, no sailor liked to be shipmates with, was thought a better man? The rooms were middle-sized, damp, dark, and dirty compartments, and were meant to serve as waiting-rooms for the unhappy creatures who thronged the bleak and frowsy yard in the hope of being engaged by captains. It was like being in the dungeons in the Tower of London—which, by the way, stood close at hand—to pass through these death-cold apartments and view the legends, dictated by hopeless waiting, roughly scrawled in pencil upon the walls. Dirt and soot everywhere!—on the ceilings, on the floors, on the walls, on the benches, in the very atmosphere that filled the cheerless haunt. A strip of grating ran through the floors, disclosing the outline of a hot-water pipe; but it looked, in that grave, the very corpse of a heating apparatus; and when I asked if ever these stone rooms were made warm by that old, mouldy, dirt and soot covered contrivance, the only answer I got was a loud growling laugh, as if, exquisite as was the joke, it was likewise very offensive. And this, thought I, as I stood gazing with mingled astonishment and disgust at the picture of grime, neglect, and dirt, is the great London shipping office, the medium for the vast and ever-growing port of London for the transaction of business between the masters and crews of ships! Who are these men who come here in the hope of obtaining employment by manning the fleets we are never weary of extolling as the source of Great Britain’s wealth and power, that they should be used in this manner—furnished for their long, weary, and often hopeless waiting with accommodation fouler, unwholesomer, colder, more soul-depressing than the worst prison that ever excited the horror and provoked the denunciations of the philanthropist?

“Has this place,” I asked, “been long in this condition?”

“It used to be kept a little more decent,” was the reply; “but it’s been falling from bad to worse for many a month gone. Considering the fees[A] we sailors have to pay, it’s a shame that we should have to put up with a place which no farmer who values the lives of his hogs would stow ’em in. I’ve been day after day down here, from the opening hour till the closing at four o’clock, for six weeks, hoping to be engaged; and I tell you, sir, that a man need be to be born a gutter-snipe, used to sleeping all his life under railway arches and the likes of them places, not to feel the effects of such a slum as this upon his spirits, when day after day goes by and he has to keep on waiting here for a captain to single him out. You are seeing it now in summer, when the air’s warm; think of it in winter, sir, with the slush a foot thick, and the wind blowing into those waiting-rooms fit to turn your marrow into ice.”

The Board of Trade is responsible for the conduct and keeping of this office. Have the officials of that great department any conception of the state of the place? Is it ever visited by them? Do they know anything more about it than that it is situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of Tower Hill? Nothing more disgraceful is to be found in London.

By degrees the men left me, to resume their weary trudging up and down or to draw together in groups; on which, finding that I should be able to converse without the risk of suffocation, I went up to a well-looking, decently-dressed sailor-man, on whom I had had my eye for some time previously, and asked how long he had been waiting for a ship.

“It will be three weeks to-morrow,” he replied.

“What are your certificates?”

“I have four in my pocket,” he answered, producing them; and I found that he had served in the several capacities of boatswain, sailmaker, and able seaman aboard sailing-vessels belonging to some of the best firms in London.

“How long have you been at sea?”

“Thirty years,” he replied.

“And is it possible,” said I, running my eye over his neat suit of pilot cloth, his clean blue shirt, and silk handkerchief, and admiring his unmistakably sailorly appearance, and the frank expression in his tanned face, “that in this age, when one hears so many complaints of the difficulty of procuring good seamen, that a man who has been thirty years at sea, filled responsible posts, and holds honest vouchers to his efficiency and good conduct, cannot get a ship! What countryman are you?”

“A Scotchman—an Aberdeen man.”

“Wouldn’t the last ship you were in take you again?”

“She discharged at Cardiff, and is now for sale. My wife lives just out of the Commercial Road, and that’s why I’m in London,” he answered. “I had only been home a week when I tried to get a ship again, for I’m a poor man.”

“What are you willing to ship as?”

“As anything; I’m too poor to choose, sir. I’ll go as A. B. if I can get the berth. But this hanging about is eating up all our little savings.”

“Why can’t you get a berth?” said I.

“Because the captains won’t take Englishmen,” he said.

“What are their objections?”

“Oh,” said he, “objections are easily made if they’re wanted. Captains say that English crews desert, that they’re loafers, bad seamen, expect more wages than they’re worth, and that the best of us are no better than vagrants, turnpike sailors, who’ll never work so long as there’s a police-magistrate within hail, and who’ll soger[B] when they’re at sea. That may be true of some, but it’s false if said of the rest; and, depend upon it, sir, it don’t account for eighty per cent. of the men employed in the mercantile marine being ‘Dutchmen.’ Our argument—the English sailor’s argument—is this: There are a lot of foreign boarding-house keepers in London. We’ll take one of ’em. He has, say, twenty Dutchmen in his house, who pay him, each of ’em, sixteen shillings a week. Well, sir, most of these men have no means to last their expenses much beyond a fortnight; so the boarding-house keeper or runner says, ‘Look here, my lads, you can’t stay here. I must get you a ship, and you’ll pay me five shillings apiece out of your allotment notes for doing it.’ To this they’re agreeable. The runner then goes down to a ship with his pocket full of his men’s certificates, hands them, along with a bribe, to the mate or master, who brings ’em to this office, and the Dutchmen, who’ve been told by the runner to come to Tower Hill, are called in to sign articles. It pays the runner, who gets five shillings a man for shipping them, besides his other expenses out of the allotment note, which he discounts at about fifty per cent.; and it answers the purpose of the skipper, who pockets the bribe, and comes down to find a crew all ready cut and dried for him; but it leaves us Englishmen out in the cold, kicking our heels about, starving many of us, and standing no shadow of a chance against the underhand roguery that goes on.”

“This is a grave charge to bring against captains,” said I.

“Grave or not,” he replied, “go and ask the opinion of British seamen all round the coast, and see whether or not this crimping swindle is understood by them and taken as the evil that’s filling English ships with foreigners.”

“But this kind of rascality is provided against, for the Act says that any person who receives any remuneration whatever other than the authorized fees for providing a seaman with employment incurs a penalty of twenty pounds.”

“Act or no Act,” he answered contemptuously, “it’s done every day; it’s done every hour.”

“Can’t you Englishmen catch one of these ‘Dutch’ crimps and make an example of him?”

“It’s carried on so that it’s hard to prove,” he replied. “Dutchmen won’t give evidence against one another; besides, the men sail away and are lost sight of, and there’s no seeing how to get at the runners.”

“What is the remedy, then; what is it you want?” I asked.

“We English sailors want this,” he said; “we ask that captains shall come to the Shipping Office and pick crews out of the crowd; not go and take certificates from crimps, and come down to find a crew ready beforehand, to step in as they’re called in. Give us a fair chance along with the Dutchmen. If already eighty per cent. of the crews in English ships are foreigners, what’s to happen later on when there’ll not be an Englishman found in the forecastle of a ship that flies the red ensign? Why, the whole breed of sailors’ll die out. Talk of Jack being a skulker, a scaramouch, a no-sailor! What’s the good of abusing him if you don’t give him a chance? It was said not long ago that owners meant to ship black crews, so hard did they find it to get Englishmen to act honestly by their employers. But look at this,” said he, pulling a newspaper cutting from his pocket—“look at this account of three Arabs, two Egyptians, and a negro locked up for thirty days for refusing to serve as firemen after they had signed articles; receiving three pounds apiece in money, and then striking because they wanted a month’s advance; getting it, and then refusing duty because they said they couldn’t get the allotment notes cashed; receiving the money from the captain, and still refusing duty, and threatening to cut the captain’s throat. Those were black men. Suppose they had been Englishmen? Dutchmen! why, sir, the most dreadful mutinies that ever happened have taken place aboard vessels manned with foreigners. Captains and owners know that. And does any man suppose,” he continued, speaking with great warmth, “that if England should find herself at war with foreign nations, the Dutchmen who man her merchant ships wouldn’t carry ’em into the enemy’s ports? Why, in crowding our forecastles with foreigners, sir, we’re striking the heaviest blow that could be aimed at this nation; we’re stopping all chance of recruiting the navy with seamen to fight our battles; and we’re putting our property into the hands of strangers who hate us, and who’d betray us by running away with it at the sound of the very first gun that was fired in anger.” And so saying he touched his cap, and left me to make my way out of the gloomy, dirty, melancholy haunt, followed as far as the steps that led up to the street by several men petitioning me to “do something for them,” “to get ’em a ship,” “to help them out of this starving life.”

Sailors are men of strong prejudices, and will often take wrong-headed views of things. To what extent my informant spoke the truth, those who have a wide knowledge of the inner life of the mercantile marine will judge. But certainly I cannot persuade myself that shipmasters act the part in relation to the foreign crimp which my seaman charged them with. I will go further, and assert that the shipment of foreign seamen is due, not to the British captain’s dislike of the English sailor, but to his owner’s order that he shall man the vessel with “Dutchmen” only. But these admissions must still leave the current system of crowding the English forecastle with foreigners an unmixed evil; nor do they affect the British sailor’s declarations as regards the energetic agent the foreign crimp, runner, or boarding-house keeper is allowed to be in the recruiting of our mercantile marine. The subject is one that will probably in due course command attention. It is as unreasonable as it is impolitic that the “Dutchman” should be caressed and honoured with the full confidence of British employers while the English seaman, willing to work, is left to starve or decay. From shipmasters and mates, at least, some sympathy should be expected for him, for they are largely sharing in the neglect he is visited with, and finding themselves ousted out of their berths by foreigners. The English sailor has many faults, but he certainly is not so bad but that he may be made better if something of the old good will is shown him, and something of the old helpful hand extended to him; and, let his demerits be what they will, depend upon it he is the man who should be found aboard an English ship, and that a fair specimen of him is worth as many “Dutchmen” as he has fingers.