Waiting for a Ship by W. Clark Russell — Read

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.