The Uncommercial Traveller

by Dickens, Charles

  war are built, loomed business-like when contemplated from the

  opposite side of the river. For all that, however, the Yard made

  no display, but kept itself snug under hill-sides of corn-fields,

  hop-gardens, and orchards; its great chimneys smoking with a quiet

  - almost a lazy - air, like giants smoking tobacco; and the great

  Shears moored off it, looking meekly and inoffensively out of

  proportion, like the Giraffe of the machinery creation. The store

  of cannon on the neighbouring gun-wharf, had an innocent toy-like

  appearance, and the one red-coated sentry on duty over them was a

  mere toy figure, with a clock-work movement. As the hot sunlight

  sparkled on him he might have passed for the identical little man

  who had the little gun, and whose bullets they were made of lead,

  lead, lead.

  Crossing the river and landing at the Stairs, where a drift of

  chips and weed had been trying to land before me and had not

  succeeded, but had got into a corner instead, I found the very

  street posts to be cannon, and the architectural ornaments to be

  shells. And so I came to the Yard, which was shut up tight and

  strong with great folded gates, like an enormous patent safe.

  These gates devouring me, I became digested into the Yard; and it

  had, at first, a clean-swept holiday air, as if it had given over

  work until next war-time. Though indeed a quantity of hemp for

  rope was tumbling out of store-houses, even there, which would

  hardly be lying like so much hay on the white stones if the Yard

  were as placid as it pretended.

  Ding, Clash, Dong, BANG, Boom, Rattle, Clash, BANG, Clink, BANG,

  Dong, BANG, Clatter, BANG BANG BANG! What on earth is this! This

  is, or soon will be, the Achilles, iron armour-plated ship. Twelve

  hundred men are working at her now; twelve hundred men working on

  stages over her sides, over her bows, over her stern, under her

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  keel, between her decks, down in her hold, within her and without,

  crawling and creeping into the finest curves of her lines wherever

  it is possible for men to twist. Twelve hundred hammerers,

  measurers, caulkers, armourers, forgers, smiths, shipwrights;

  twelve hundred dingers, clashers, dongers, rattlers, clinkers,

  bangers bangers bangers! Yet all this stupendous uproar around the

  rising Achilles is as nothing to the reverberations with which the

  perfected Achilles shall resound upon the dreadful day when the

  full work is in hand for which this is but note of preparation -

  the day when the scuppers that are now fitting like great, dry,

  thirsty conduit-pipes, shall run red. All these busy figures

  between decks, dimly seen bending at their work in smoke and fire,

  are as nothing to the figures that shall do work here of another

  kind in smoke and fire, that day. These steam-worked engines

  alongside, helping the ship by travelling to and fro, and wafting

  tons of iron plates about, as though they were so many leaves of

  trees, would be rent limb from limb if they stood by her for a

  minute then. To think that this Achilles, monstrous compound of

  iron tank and oaken chest, can ever swim or roll! To think that

  any force of wind and wave could ever break her! To think that

  wherever I see a glowing red-hot iron point thrust out of her side

  from within - as I do now, there, and there, and there! - and two

  watching men on a stage without, with bared arms and sledgehammers,

  strike at it fiercely, and repeat their blows until it is

  black and flat, I see a rivet being driven home, of which there are

  many in every iron plate, and thousands upon thousands in the ship!

  To think that the difficulty I experience in appreciating the

  ship's size when I am on board, arises from her being a series of

  iron tanks and oaken chests, so that internally she is ever

  finishing and ever beginning, and half of her might be smashed, and

  yet the remaining half suffice and be sound. Then, to go over the

  side again and down among the ooze and wet to the bottom of the

  dock, in the depths of the subterranean forest of dog-shores and

  stays that hold her up, and to see the immense mass bulging out

  against the upper light, and tapering down towards me, is, with

  great pains and much clambering, to arrive at an impossibility of

  realising that this is a ship at all, and to become possessed by

  the fancy that it is an enormous immovable edifice set up in an

  ancient amphitheatre (say, that at Verona), and almost filling it!

  Yet what would even these things be, without the tributary

  workshops and the mechanical powers for piercing the iron plates -

  four inches and a half thick - for rivets, shaping them under

  hydraulic pressure to the finest tapering turns of the ship's

  lines, and paring them away, with knives shaped like the beaks of

  strong and cruel birds, to the nicest requirements of the design!

  These machines of tremendous force, so easily directed by one

  attentive face and presiding hand, seem to me to have in them

  something of the retiring character of the Yard. 'Obedient

  monster, please to bite this mass of iron through and through, at

  equal distances, where these regular chalk-marks are, all round.'

  Monster looks at its work, and lifting its ponderous head, replies,

  'I don't particularly want to do it; but if it must be done - !'

  The solid metal wriggles out, hot from the monster's crunching

  tooth, and it IS done. 'Dutiful monster, observe this other mass

  of iron. It is required to be pared away, according to this

  delicately lessening and arbitrary line, which please to look at.'

  Monster (who has been in a reverie) brings down its blunt head,

  and, much in the manner of Doctor Johnson, closely looks along the

  line - very closely, being somewhat near-sighted. 'I don't

  particularly want to do it; but if it must be done - !' Monster

  takes another near-sighted look, takes aim, and the tortured piece

  writhes off, and falls, a hot, tight-twisted snake, among the

  ashes. The making of the rivets is merely a pretty round game,

  played by a man and a boy, who put red-hot barley sugar in a Pope

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  Joan board, and immediately rivets fall out of window; but the tone

  of the great machines is the tone of the great Yard and the great

  country: 'We don't particularly want to do it; but if it must be

  done - !'

  How such a prodigious mass as the Achilles can ever be held by such

  comparatively little anchors as those intended for her and lying

  near her here, is a mystery of seamanship which I will refer to the

  wise boy. For my own part, I should as soon have thought of

  tethering an elephant to a tent-peg, or the larger hippopotamus in

  the Zoological Gardens to my shirt-pin. Yonder in the river,

  alongside a hulk, lie two of this ship's hollow iron masts. THEY

  are large enough for the eye, I find, and so are all her other

  appliances. I wonder why only her anchors look small.

  I have no
present time to think about it, for I am going to see the

  workshops where they make all the oars used in the British Navy. A

  pretty large pile of building, I opine, and a pretty long job! As

  to the building, I am soon disappointed, because the work is all

  done in one loft. And as to a long job - what is this? Two rather

  large mangles with a swarm of butterflies hovering over them? What

  can there be in the mangles that attracts butterflies?

  Drawing nearer, I discern that these are not mangles, but intricate

  machines, set with knives and saws and planes, which cut smooth and

  straight here, and slantwise there, and now cut such a depth, and

  now miss cutting altogether, according to the predestined

  requirements of the pieces of wood that are pushed on below them:

  each of which pieces is to be an oar, and is roughly adapted to

  that purpose before it takes its final leave of far-off forests,

  and sails for England. Likewise I discern that the butterflies are

  not true butterflies, but wooden shavings, which, being spirted up

  from the wood by the violence of the machinery, and kept in rapid

  and not equal movement by the impulse of its rotation on the air,

  flutter and play, and rise and fall, and conduct themselves as like

  butterflies as heart could wish. Suddenly the noise and motion

  cease, and the butterflies drop dead. An oar has been made since I

  came in, wanting the shaped handle. As quickly as I can follow it

  with my eye and thought, the same oar is carried to a turning

  lathe. A whirl and a Nick! Handle made. Oar finished.

  The exquisite beauty and efficiency of this machinery need no

  illustration, but happen to have a pointed illustration to-day. A

  pair of oars of unusual size chance to be wanted for a special

  purpose, and they have to be made by hand. Side by side with the

  subtle and facile machine, and side by side with the fast-growing

  pile of oars on the floor, a man shapes out these special oars with

  an axe. Attended by no butterflies, and chipping and dinting, by

  comparison as leisurely as if he were a labouring Pagan getting

  them ready against his decease at threescore and ten, to take with

  him as a present to Charon for his boat, the man (aged about

  thirty) plies his task. The machine would make a regulation oar

  while the man wipes his forehead. The man might be buried in a

  mound made of the strips of thin, broad, wooden ribbon torn from

  the wood whirled into oars as the minutes fall from the clock,

  before he had done a forenoon's work with his axe.

  Passing from this wonderful sight to the Ships again - for my

  heart, as to the Yard, is where the ships are - I notice certain

  unfinished wooden walls left seasoning on the stocks, pending the

  solution of the merits of the wood and iron question, and having an

  air of biding their time with surly confidence. The names of these

  worthies are set up beside them, together with their capacity in

  guns - a custom highly conducive to ease and satisfaction in social

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  intercourse, if it could be adapted to mankind. By a plank more

  gracefully pendulous than substantial, I make bold to go aboard a

  transport ship (iron screw) just sent in from the contractor's yard

  to be inspected and passed. She is a very gratifying experience,

  in the simplicity and humanity of her arrangements for troops, in

  her provision for light and air and cleanliness, and in her care

  for women and children. It occurs to me, as I explore her, that I

  would require a handsome sum of money to go aboard her, at midnight

  by the Dockyard bell, and stay aboard alone till morning; for

  surely she must be haunted by a crowd of ghosts of obstinate old

  martinets, mournfully flapping their cherubic epaulettes over the

  changed times. Though still we may learn from the astounding ways

  and means in our Yards now, more highly than ever to respect the

  forefathers who got to sea, and fought the sea, and held the sea,

  without them. This remembrance putting me in the best of tempers

  with an old hulk, very green as to her copper, and generally dim

  and patched, I pull off my hat to her. Which salutation a callow

  and downy-faced young officer of Engineers, going by at the moment,

  perceiving, appropriates - and to which he is most heartily

  welcome, I am sure.

  Having been torn to pieces (in imagination) by the steam circular

  saws, perpendicular saws, horizontal saws, and saws of eccentric

  action, I come to the sauntering part of my expedition, and

  consequently to the core of my Uncommercial pursuits.

  Everywhere, as I saunter up and down the Yard, I meet with tokens

  of its quiet and retiring character. There is a gravity upon its

  red brick offices and houses, a staid pretence of having nothing

  worth mentioning to do, an avoidance of display, which I never saw

  out of England. The white stones of the pavement present no other

  trace of Achilles and his twelve hundred banging men (not one of

  whom strikes an attitude) than a few occasional echoes. But for a

  whisper in the air suggestive of sawdust and shavings, the oarmaking

  and the saws of many movements might be miles away. Down

  below here, is the great reservoir of water where timber is steeped

  in various temperatures, as a part of its seasoning process. Above

  it, on a tramroad supported by pillars, is a Chinese Enchanter's

  Car, which fishes the logs up, when sufficiently steeped, and rolls

  smoothly away with them to stack them. When I was a child (the

  Yard being then familiar to me) I used to think that I should like

  to play at Chinese Enchanter, and to have that apparatus placed at

  my disposal for the purpose by a beneficent country. I still think

  that I should rather like to try the effect of writing a book in

  it. Its retirement is complete, and to go gliding to and fro among

  the stacks of timber would be a convenient kind of travelling in

  foreign countries - among the forests of North America, the sodden

  Honduras swamps, the dark pine woods, the Norwegian frosts, and the

  tropical heats, rainy seasons, and thunderstorms. The costly store

  of timber is stacked and stowed away in sequestered places, with

  the pervading avoidance of flourish or effect. It makes as little

  of itself as possible, and calls to no one 'Come and look at me!'

  And yet it is picked out from the trees of the world; picked out

  for length, picked out for breadth, picked out for straightness,

  picked out for crookedness, chosen with an eye to every need of

  ship and boat. Strangely twisted pieces lie about, precious in the

  sight of shipwrights. Sauntering through these groves, I come upon

  an open glade where workmen are examining some timber recently

  delivered. Quite a pastoral scene, with a background of river and

  windmill! and no more like War than the American States are at

  present like an Union.

  Sauntering among the ropemaking, I am spun into a state of blissful

  indolence, wherein my rope of life seems to be so untwisted by the

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  process as that I can see back to very early days indeed, when my

  bad dreams - they were frightful, though my more mature

  understanding has never made out why - were of an interminable sort

  of ropemaking, with long minute filaments for strands, which, when

  they were spun home together close to my eyes, occasioned

  screaming. Next, I walk among the quiet lofts of stores - of

  sails, spars, rigging, ships' boats - determined to believe that

  somebody in authority wears a girdle and bends beneath the weight

  of a massive bunch of keys, and that, when such a thing is wanted,

  he comes telling his keys like Blue Beard, and opens such a door.

  Impassive as the long lofts look, let the electric battery send

  down the word, and the shutters and doors shall fly open, and such

  a fleet of armed ships, under steam and under sail, shall burst

  forth as will charge the old Medway - where the merry Stuart let

  the Dutch come, while his not so merry sailors starved in the

  streets - with something worth looking at to carry to the sea.

  Thus I idle round to the Medway again, where it is now flood tide;

  and I find the river evincing a strong solicitude to force a way

  into the dry dock where Achilles is waited on by the twelve hundred

  bangers, with intent to bear the whole away before they are ready.

  To the last, the Yard puts a quiet face upon it; for I make my way

  to the gates through a little quiet grove of trees, shading the

  quaintest of Dutch landing-places, where the leaf-speckled shadow

  of a shipwright just passing away at the further end might be the

  shadow of Russian Peter himself. So, the doors of the great patent

  safe at last close upon me, and I take boat again: somehow,

  thinking as the oars dip, of braggart Pistol and his brood, and of

  the quiet monsters of the Yard, with their 'We don't particularly

  want to do it; but if it must be done - !' Scrunch.

  CHAPTER XXVII - IN THE FRENCH-FLEMISH COUNTRY

  'It is neither a bold nor a diversified country,' said I to myself,

  'this country which is three-quarters Flemish, and a quarter

  French; yet it has its attractions too. Though great lines of

  railway traverse it, the trains leave it behind, and go puffing off

  to Paris and the South, to Belgium and Germany, to the Northern

  Sea-Coast of France, and to England, and merely smoke it a little