He loves facts and figures; he is a disciple of John Wesley; he is not from London; and he enjoys what he does—particularly because he does not have to lift a finger. How then do we burrow our way into his affections, or, failing that, gain his approval? Is the degree of labor he expects from us feasible? If it is not, then we will suffer in some subtle Wesleyan way. No brute, he.
“Are we allowed to speak to you, Mr. Partridge? For instance, may we ask questions?”
“Give me what I want, Morgan, and ye’ll have no trouble from me. By that I do not mean that I will pamper ye, and if I want, I can break your arm with this here club. But I do not want to, for one good reason. I aim to stand real high in Mr. Campbell’s estimation, and to do that I need to produce ballast. I have been put in charge of this here brand-new establishment because my dredge has always produced the most ballast. You help me, and I might be willing to help you,” said Mr. Partridge, getting up. “I will now proceed, cullies, to tell ye what to do and how to do it.”
The bucket was a thick leather bag about three feet long, with a round maw of iron a little over two feet in diameter. Fused to the iron on its underside was a steel extension shaped like an oval spoon, shallow and sharp-edged. A chain was attached to either side of the iron ring and joined in a Y to the single chain which ran, uninterrupted, in a circuit from one end of the barge to the other with sufficient slack to put the bucket on the river bottom. The chain went around a winch which dropped the bag into the water at Mr. Partridge’s end; it sank under its own weight, its leather butt tethered to a rope manipulated from the barge. A geared and pulleyed davit at the other end dragged the iron maw and its steel spoon along the bottom gathering in mud. When the bucket reached the end of the run the davit exerted a vertical pull; up it came, dripping, was swung inboard by turning the davit and hung over the ballast compartment. Then, working the rope on its butt, the bag was upended and vomited its contents. It came down, empty, ran along its chain to the winch, and went over the side again for its next meal of Thames mud.
Getting used to the job took a full week, during which Mr. Partridge did not see anything like his expected half-ton a day. He was calculating upon one bucket every twenty minutes, whereas the new team took an hour. But Mr. Partridge said and did nothing, simply sat on his chair and sucked at his pipe, a mug of rum at his feet and all the activity of the great river to occupy his attention when he was not staring contemplatively at his toiling team. A dinghy was attached to the barge by a painter, which may have meant that he rowed himself ashore at the end of the day, though he seemed to spend at least some nights on board, for he bought wood for his stove and food for his larder from two of the hordes of bum boats which plied their wares around the river; his rum and his ale came from a third.
There were knacks and tricks, his team discovered from sheer experience. The bucket was prone to lift off the bottom and had to be kept down with a pole put in exactly the right place, which was the top of the iron ring, only three inches wide. A matter of sense and feel in water owning no visibility thanks to churning mud. Four men worked the davit and rope, one man the winch, and one man the pole keeping the bucket down. The brute force was almost all on the davit, though the pole man had to be as strong as he was skillful. Mr. Partridge having done and said nothing, Richard was left to sort out the team. Jimmy Price on the winch, which required the least brawn. Bill, Will and Neddy on the davit, Taffy on the rope, and himself on the pole.
Slowly, slowly, slowly their speed increased, as did the amount of ballast in the bucket. When they achieved their twenty buckets in a six-hour day a week after they had started, a genial Mr. Partridge broke out six big tankards of small beer, a pat of butter and six one-pound loaves of fresh, yeasty bread.
“I knew ye were good when I set eyes on ye. Leave men to find their own way, I always says. I get a bonus of five pounds for every load of ballast I deliver to the Warren—ye rub my back and I will rub yours. Give me more than twenty buckets a day and I will give ye lunch—a quart of small beer and a pound of good bread each. Ye’re all thinner than ye were a week ago, cannot have that. I have a reputation to look after.” He stroked the side of his nose reflectively. “Mind, could not buy ye lunch every day.”
“We might be able to contribute funds,” said Richard. “As a Bristol man, I know the smell of that tobacco—Ricketts. Must be very expensive in Woolwich—even in London, I daresay. It may be possible for me to have some of Ricketts’s best sent to you, Mr. Partridge, if ye can give me an address. I fear that were it to go to Ceres, Mr. Sykes would have it.”
“Well, well!” Mr. Partridge looked tickled. “Find me just one shilling every day, and I will provide lunch. And send the tobacco to me at the Ducks and Drakes tavern in Plumstead.”
At first Ike Rogers and his team did not fare happily, but after a few conferences with Richard and his men they quickened their dredging and came to the same kind of arrangement with their dredgeman, a Kentishman from Gravesend.
The worst feature of the work was its filthiness. From hair of head to soles of feet, they were plastered in blackish, stinking mud; it coated the chain as it ran waist-high along the platform, it dripped from the bucket, it splashed everywhere as the bucket was emptied. By the end of that first week the brand-new barge looked the twin of any of the older rigs.
When Richard realized that once a day two of them would have to descend into the ballast compartment to shovel the gluey mud and its grisly inclusions away from the mound under the bucket, he made a decision.
“Has anybody a sore foot? A cut, a scratch, a blister?”
“Aye, me,” said Taffy. “Corn looking nasty, Da.”
“Then tonight after we wash I will give ye some of my salve, but it means that ye cannot dig until the foot is better. I am not going into that slime in my shoes. In fact, as soon as it gets a little warmer, I will ask Mr. Partridge”—avidly listening—“if we may put our shoes on his deck and work in bare feet. In the meantime, we do our turns on the shovels in bare feet.”
At least they could wash, and did so every evening the moment they were let into the Ceres orlop; for the non-Bristolians the sight of what the Thames dredge brought up was horrifying enough for them to be eager to emulate Richard—strip off, soap and wash at the pump, muddy chains, fetters and all. And they had a nice arrangement with William Stanley from Seend, who had Mikey wash their clothes during the day. Wash them all, thanks to Mr. Duncan Campbell the canny Scotch contractor.
For that worthy had issued new clothing—he did this about once a year—to the denizens of his academies four days after the men from Gloucester had arrived: two pairs of coarse, heavy linen trowsers, two checkered linen shirts of the same weight, and one unlined linen jacket. The trowsers, the Gloucester men discovered to their delight, might feel like hacksaws along their seams, but they came down past their ankles, though on Richard and Ike they were shorter. Ike’s height had shrunk several inches, but due to their newness in Ceres, no one save his Gloucester companions had noticed, and mum was the word when he switched to shoes.
Wearing trowsers, the men of ordinary height did not have to pad their fetter cuffs, and did not need to wear stockings to keep out the cold Thames winds. Richard, a dab hand with a sewing needle thanks to Lizzie Lock, obtained enough cloth off the ends of Jimmy’s trowsers to add to his own, while Ike paid Stanley a mug of gin for his offcuts and had Richard sew them on. What a wonderful invention trowsers were! Theirs were rust-colored, hard-wearing, eminently washable and differently constructed from breeches, which came only to the knees. Whereas breeches opened at the waist on a broad flap held by buttons along the waistband, trowsers opened up the front seam with buttons in a vertical row from a man’s genitals to his waist. A great deal easier to take a piss in too.
