Mudlarking

by Lara Maiklem

  Holding it tightly in my frozen fingers, I walked down to the edge of the river and began to wash the mud off: my hands were so cold, the water actually felt warm. When it was clean, I took a good look at it. It was a clear, square, flat-sided stone, a little smaller than a stamp, in a low copper alloy setting. I tilted it to catch the light. It was easier to see the engraving because it was still wet – a shield with a tiny boar inside it, standing on some curly grass. From the style of the setting I guessed it was eighteenth or early nineteenth century and some trawling around antique jewellery websites later that evening confirmed my suspicion. What a beauty! Someone had once made their mark with this, pressing it into blobs of hot sealing wax to authenticate important documents. Imagine the ship’s captain or merchant’s irritation when he went to seal his next letter or document, only to find it missing!

  Sometimes other personal items wash up: tobacco and snuff tins, pewter and bone spoons, dominoes and dice. I have a little spotted rectangle of yellowing bone, a domino, and a tiny handmade lead die that may have been knocked out of a musket or pistol ball by a sailor using whatever was to hand. Dominoes were brought to Europe from China by sailors in the eighteenth century and may have arrived in England with French prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars, who carved sets from cow bones to exchange for food while they were being held on board the prison hulks moored on the Thames.

  It was probably a sailor or an ordinary river worker who once owned the heavy nineteenth-century folding knife I found there. Perhaps he was far from home, whittling a toy for the new baby he had yet to see, when the knife slipped from his hand into the river. The blade was open when it fell and it was little more than a rusted stump when I found it. I have scores of old bone, ivory and horn knife handles from the Thames, but this one is special. The original owner must have valued his knife as he had crudely carved his mark, ‘XX’, into the rough staghorn handle. Personalised finds like this are rare and highly treasured by most mudlarks; they add a human dimension to the object and another layer to its story.

  A sailor would likely have played the Jew’s harp I found sticking out of the mud, legs first, in a pile of old ship nails. The Jew’s harp (thought by some to be a corruption of jaw harp or even juice harp) is an ancient instrument with an undefined past: some say it was brought to England from the Middle East at the time of the Crusades. But it was the perfect instrument for sailors – small, cheap, portable and virtually unbreakable – and they are found in reasonable numbers and varying conditions on the foreshore. It was only chance that I pulled on it that day and out came a small, round-headed copper alloy frame. The thin metal tongue that would have produced a twang when played had rusted away, but other than that it was in excellent condition. I finally found another earlier this year at Trig Lane and this one even has its little tongue. I probably shouldn’t have risked it, but the temptation was too great. It seemed sound enough, so I decided to pluck it gently with one finger, just once, and it let out a single, magical, flat-toned note, the first noise it had made in over 300 years.

  Trains rumble through the tunnel beneath the foreshore at Rotherhithe, but above ground it is quiet and deserted. The sky is huge and empty and past the bridges that tie it down further west the river has grown wider and more free. For the first time there is a feeling of openness and expanse. I can walk and mudlark in peace for hours on end here, sometimes without seeing a single person. But it’s not a lonely place. The silence over Rotherhithe is strangely suspended, as if the past is merely on hold and not entirely gone.

  The bones of old ships, river-slimed and rotting, lie exposed on top of the mud and emerge from the shingle and sand: large slabs and chunks of oak and elm, carved and shaped, grooved and bored with holes for the wooden pegs that once held them together like a huge wooden jigsaw puzzle. Some have large nails, bolts and hooks driven into them and notches cut out where other pieces of timber would once have slid into place, precision-fit partners now lost for ever. There are wide planks and rudders, keel pieces, deck beams and thick post-like windlasses with square holes to take the stout poles that were used to turn them. Most were left there for a purpose, reused as moorings or supports for beached ships; some parts were merely abandoned where they had fallen.

  Even the briefest visit to the foreshore at Rotherhithe will reveal something of its seagoing past. Millions of ship nails from the many vessels that were broken up and built here are scattered everywhere, among them countless copper alloy tacks that were used to nail sheets of shining copper onto ship hulls to protect them from shipworm. The first experiments in coppering hulls were made in 1761 and were so successful that the navy set about coppering its entire fleet. It gave them the edge over their adversaries, making their boats faster and allowing them to stay in the water for longer.

  When the ships were finally broken up at Rotherhithe and the copper was removed to recycle, the valueless nails were dropped in the mud. Most are fairly unremarkable, though some have marks from the tools that were used to extract them and around three in every hundred has a mark in the shape of a three-lined arrow cast into the shaft or the underside of the head. This is the Broad Arrow mark, sometimes referred to as the ‘crow’s foot’, which is the sign for the Office of Ordnance, a department created by Henry VIII to supply guns, ammunition, stores and equipment to the navy. In 1597 it was renamed the Board of Ordnance and the Broad Arrow symbol was adopted to indicate government property. By throwing a handful of marked nails into every sack or box, the authorities deterred thieves and prevented the nails from being used for non- government purposes.

  Over the years it has been used to mark a great variety of objects: mast-quality, Crown-owned trees were cut with the mark in the seventeenth century, and in the nineteenth century British jail and transportee uniforms were covered with the little arrows to mark out those wearing them. It was used all over the Empire and the colonies in a variety of styles on everything from spoons and cannon balls to milestones and postboxes. Once you’ve seen it you will start to see it everywhere and it is still being used by the War Department and the Ministry of Defence. Coppering tacks were worthless to the original mudlarks, but if I am in the mood and I need to empty my mind completely, I’ll spend a few hours picking through them, looking for crow’s foot nails. Sometimes I won’t find any. But once I found three in less than ten minutes.

  There are nails for every purpose here. Some have flattened ‘spade’ ends to slip between the grain of the wood without splitting it. There are clumps of rusty iron nails, a pile of coppering tacks fused together in the shape of the sack that once contained them and heavy handmade iron ‘rosehead’ nails with heads knocked into tiny pyramids by four final strikes of the blacksmith’s hammer. Warm-coloured copper nails that missed the recycling sack and were overlooked by Victorian mudlarks occasionally surface bright and shiny in the mud. They were used below deck where the gunpowder was stored because they didn’t spark. They also had the added advantage of not rusting. Some look as if they have never been used, while others, wrenched from beams and timbers, are tortured, curled and twisted.

  Other random ship parts lie in the mud: sail grommets (copper and brass rings of all sizes that were used to reinforce holes in canvas sails), and wooden wheels and pulleys that were once part of the rigging. Deadeyes, round blocks of wood with three holes to take the rope and keep rigging taut, sometimes push their haunted faces to the surface, and I once found a wooden belaying pin, further testament to the preserving nature of the Thames mud. It is the size and shape of a police truncheon and would have been one of many, lined up like thin starved soldiers around the deck of a sailing ship to secure loose rigging lines. Even old rope, possibly rigging, spills out of the Rotherhithe foreshore, separating and fanning out across the mud like thick tawny hair.

  The shipbuilders too left evidence of themselves and their work in the foreshore. In some places the mud is light, almost fluffy, with saturated wood shavings, planed and chiselled from the lumps of wood that were shap
ed into beams, futtocks and rudders. Their old leather boots, low at the heel and worn through in the sole, flap about on the sand and the heads of old brooms bristle to the surface. Sometimes a simple precious tool washes out of the mud, a potentially disastrous loss for the poor hard-working man who relied on it. Caulking irons, the heavy blunt chisels that were used for pushing twisted lengths of oakum between the seams of boat decks and hulls, are common, which suggests that many men were employed in caulking new ships and replacing it in old vessels. A rarer find are the eighteenth-century ship dividers that I pulled out of a thicket of ship nails a couple of years ago. They are plain, iron, and fused open as if lost while measuring out the plans for a new ship or mapping a route to a faraway place.

  Many of the exposed timbers at Rotherhithe are thought to be from eighteenth-century naval ships that once defended Britain against the French during the Napoleonic Wars. They were sold and broken up in the early to mid-nineteenth century, when the huge fleet was an expense that was no longer needed. Of the twenty-seven ships that fought at the Battle of Trafalgar, twelve were built on the Thames: nine in London, two at Gravesend and one at Sheerness. Several of them ended their days broken up on the foreshore at Rotherhithe. The most famous of them was the ninety-eight-gun HMS Temeraire, which was painted by Turner in 1838, a shadow of her former glory, being towed up the Thames by a steam tug to be reduced to scrap.

  As the ships were pulled apart, dismantled and cannibalised, everything was taken to reuse or sell. At a time when a copper penny was worth the value of the metal it was made from, copper nails and hull sheathing were particularly valuable. Bands of nineteenth-century mudlarks worked the Rotherhithe foreshore searching for copper scrap, which could make the difference between a decent meal or surviving on roadside leavings. Ships’ timbers were reused as beams in houses and to make furniture, chopped up for firewood and made into wooden blocks to pave the streets. Timbers from the Temeraire were used to make furniture and fittings for St Mary’s Church at Rotherhithe, and a piece of it was turned into a wooden leg for a sailor who had fought in the Battle of Trafalgar. Even old rope was sent into prisons and workhouses to be picked apart and turned into oakum for caulking.

  I have been told that ships sometimes made repairs with whalebones while they were at sea when wood was scarce, and there is a whalebone disguised among a line of old wooden posts at Rotherhithe. I had been walking past it for years before I learned it was there and I decided to make a special trip to find it. Even then it was hard to work out exactly which one it was, since it was the same size and shape as the other posts and the river had turned it the same sludgy brown. It was only when I started to look closely that I saw the honeycomb of tiny holes telling me it was bone and not wood.

  Other whalebones have been found at Rotherhithe: long plank-sized bones, scored and marked by the whalers’ knives; a giant vertebra; and a mystifying bone with a large nail hammered into it. Last year I found a section of whalebone as wide as my thigh lying on the mudflats on the eastern arm of the peninsula, where the thick treacherous mud protects and preserves long clay pipes and fragile old bottles. Like some of the other whalebones embedded in the foreshore that are shaped and drilled, it has a hole bored right through the middle. Maybe it had been used to repair a whaling ship that docked at Greenland Dock, which has its entrance near to where I found it. This was the main port for London’s Atlantic whaling fleet. The fleet hunted the cold waters around Greenland and brought the great beasts back to Rotherhithe, where they were rendered into barrels of oil in boiling houses that belched foul-smelling smoke into the damp river air.

  The remains of lost whales have also been found buried in the foreshore. In 2010, the partial skeleton of a fifty-five-foot North Atlantic Wright whale was found at Greenwich. Its head was missing, presumably taken for the oil it contained, and the rest of it was found deep beneath the mud. It is thought it had become stranded or was harpooned after becoming lost in the Estuary, and then dragged back to Greenwich where it was butchered on the foreshore more than 200 years ago.

  Lost whales have been documented in the Thames since medieval times. In 1658 John Evelyn described how a whale, ‘58 foote: 16 in height’, was pursued between Greenwich and Deptford and how ‘after a long Conflict it was killed with the harpooning irons, & struck in ye head, out of which spouted blood and water, by two tunnells like smoake from a chimney; & after a horrid grone it ran quite on shore & died’. In 1783, a twenty-one-foot bottle-nosed whale was captured close to London Bridge, and in 2006 a whale reached as far upstream as Westminster. She had been lost in the river for at least three days and was weak and sick, and though she was lifted by crane onto a barge and carried back downstream, she died before she reached the open sea. Her bones were treated in much the same way as those of her ancestors, stripped and drained of their oil, but this time they were laid out with care in a glass case and displayed by the Natural History Museum.

  The appearance of a whale in central London was a reminder that London Bridge is less than eighty miles upstream from the North Sea and the river a highway not just for shipping but for nature too. Flocks of gulls follow the water inland and seaweed floats in on each tide, a constant reminder of the river’s saline destination. Seals have been seen as far upstream as Richmond; I have spotted their furtive little faces bobbing in the water around the Isle of Dogs and once had to give a wide berth to a large seal that had hauled itself up onto the foreshore at Gabriel’s Wharf to warm its blubbery body in the early-morning sun. One quiet evening at Queenhithe I saw a porpoise, or possibly a dolphin, rise twice in the middle of the river. Prawns, miles from their usual saline habitat, make suicidal leaps from the waves onto the foreshore in central London, sparkling and crystal clear in the sunshine with long whiskers and black bead eyes. I rescue them when I can from the keen eyes of crows and gulls, snatching them off the foreshore and feeling their hard muscular bodies flick against the palm of my hand.

  The Thames is also home to rarities like the short-snouted seahorse – I’ve seen one washed up as far inland as Bankside – and stowaway invaders that are slowly taking over parts of the river. Zebra mussels were first found in the Rotherhithe Docks in 1824. They spread through the canals that linked their native home in the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea to the rest of Europe and arrived in London clinging to imported timber and in the ballast water of the ships that delivered it. They are now firmly established along the tidal Thames and congregate in vast numbers, as many as 100,000 per square yard. They smother native species, clog up pipes and drains, and are almost impossible to control. The estimated 10,000 yellow-tailed scorpions that live in the cracks and crevices of the walls at Sheerness Docks are less invasive. They are thought to have arrived in the eighteenth century, on ships carrying cargoes of Italian stone, and are now the largest known wild colony of scorpions in the UK.

  I’ve also seen Chinese mitten crabs, waving their furry claws and scuttling away across the mud. They came to London as larvae in the ballast of Oriental ships in the 1930s. Pollution prevented them from establishing quickly, but as soon as the Thames began to clean up the population exploded. In Asia they are an expensive delicacy, steamed and eaten with soy sauce, but in the Thames they are a threat and a menace, killing native species and weakening the riverbanks with their burrows.

  Many species of fish – dace, smelt, bass and flounder – migrate up the river using the flood tide to push them upstream, sometimes as far as Teddington, where they feed and grow before travelling back down the river to the Estuary or out to sea. But the most enigmatic and mysterious fish in the Thames is the European eel. For centuries their origins were shrouded in myth and folklore. It was commonly thought that they simply emerged from the mud or even grew from horsehair suspended in water, but in the early 1900s a Danish researcher finally learned the truth of their fantastical life cycle. He tracked their migration to the Sargasso Sea, close to the West Indies and home to the Bermuda Triangle, where eels lay their eggs. The larvae d
rift on currents back towards Europe, arriving as transparent glass eels. Once they enter the river their colour darkens and they transform into miniature forms of the adult, called elvers. They migrate upstream, through central London and past the weir and locks at the tidal head. They even leave the water to travel short distances overland until they find somewhere suitable and transform again, this time into yellow eels. They live and grow in this state for up to twenty years until they sense the urge to return to the Sargasso, changing one last time into silver eels and often leaving under the mystical darkness of a new moon.

  At certain times of the year dead elvers drape like bootlaces over the shingle. The arrival of elvers once turned the edges of the river black and triggered an ‘eel fair’, sending people rushing to the river with anything they could use to collect them in, but sadly elvers no longer return in such numbers. Although eels were one of the first fish to recolonise the Thames in the 1960s, after the river had been declared biologically dead in 1957, their numbers have been steadily falling and nobody seems to know why. They are now classified by conservationists as ‘Critically Endangered’, but despite this I have seen them curled tightly around the taut lines of fishermen, who cast their rods illegally and in secret beneath London Bridge, and I have watched as they writhe and twist around the necks of cormorants in a desperate struggle for survival. I often see early fatalities of the migration washed up on the foreshore and have many times rescued tiny gasping elvers from the shingle. I send each one on its way in the hope that it will one day return to the Sargasso Sea.

  The foreshore too is home to tiny pieces of faraway places. I have the shell of a huge Pacific-dwelling barnacle and tiny non-native cowrie shells from as far as Australia. They had fallen from hulls or arrived as ballast in the bellies of trade ships, shovelled off beaches into holds to weigh the ships down in the water and prevent them from tipping in stormy seas. The amount of ballast was adjusted according to the weight of the cargo and whatever was available locally was used. When the ships arrived in London, or were broken up or repaired, the ballast was dumped on the foreshore and became part of the rich tapestry of the Thames. I have found a lot of coral on the foreshore, and according to the Natural History Museum most of it once grew in the warm seas of the Caribbean. There’s a huge lump of it, about the width of a car wheel, at Rotherhithe, and I also know where there are secret stashes of raw carnelian and large chunks of amethyst and quartz the size of my fist.