Chasing Pirates Down the Stairs: Schooner Days MLXXI (1071)

by C. H. J. Snider

The Jolly Roger—1

WAPPING OLD STAIRS

LONDON—1952

"THE STEPS? Cawn't miss 'em, guv'nor — rayte 'longsayde , the Turk's 'Ed."

We found a passage a fathom wide in the shadow of high buildings, and a dim sign muttering, through a gag of grime "WAPPING STEPS."

Once this narrow passage had been a broad highway. Wapping Old Stairs, haunted by pressgangs in search of seamen, was where quality and commons alike took wherries to cross the Thames to Greenwich. Maybe to return years later from Greenwich's uttermost meridian, maybe to be brought back the same evening mellow with port and whitebait from the Lord Mayor's annual dinner.

The Virgin Queen may have crossed here to muddy Sir Walter Raleigh's cloak, or inspect the Pelican, returned from circumnavigating the globe. Peys [Pepys] used to pass this way on inspection trips for King Charles' navy. It was here Poll vowed to her true love in Dibden's ballad "Your trousers I'd wash and your grog I'd prepare." Perhaps here too, Marryat's Poll "see her arms a-kimbo" and told the Port Admiral where he got off.

Alexander Muir and his schooner-captain brothers, who ultimately built Port Dalhousie's drydock; known by their name for a hundred years on the Great Lakes, may have started hence for Canada. It is recorded in that pioneer shipbuilder's life-log that passing through London outward bound they saw pirates hanging in chains on the river bank. That was before the Mackenzie Rebellion of 1837—which had its crop of gibbet fruit, too.

Schooner Days, therefore, sought Wapping Old Stairs this summer as a possible point of departure for the honest Muir brothers, and in another sense, for the rogues whom they had seen dangling.

Sky showed at the end of the twilight passage between the high warehouses. A picket fence, barbed wire, and police notices denied view of London's pride, the "Starlit Thames who here had lived and loved and died, for Execution Dock was just around the corner.

The gate yielded to persuasion — also, to the consternation of four Wapping schools boys, who dove like frogs into the swirling river, leaving, unlike frogs, their clothes on the stone stairs. Or do frogs cast their skins?

"Okay, boys," I called "No cops around. All I want is to photograph the Steps."

"Please, sir," they puffed from the river, clowse the gyte. It's drarfty-like wiv' it owpen, 'cos cops might see through."

There were two flights of stone stairs, the "Old," or originals, and their successors, now also old, and called the Steps. They were parallel, but so offset that the old flight reached the water first. The older set was completely barricaded from use above. They descended to what had been a little stone jetty, the landing place of centuries ago. It was from here that the London of Marlowe and Shakespeare, of Captain Cook and Governor Simcoe, could start for cocktails on the south bank of the river, or for the South Seas or for Upper Canada or for the North Pole.

The tide was out and a bright fringe of yellow shingle showed above the Thames mud - a "hard," filled-in around the disused wharf, for the accommodation of the flat-bottomed barges and lighters serving the towering warehouses. Larger, deeper craft could not approach there. Every stone and brick and timber of their lower walls was covered with green weed, for the height of two fathoms—up to high water mark.

To narrow "beaches" such as these, with such a background — even under the filled-in archway of the Traitors' Gate at The Tower — panting Londoners drag red and green canvas chairs and sit in bathing dresses for the brief hour of low water, priding themselves on so gaining an inexpensive sun-tan from such an 'oliday at the seaside. Sun bathing is permitted. But wet bathing in the bacteria laden Thames—NO.

A recess just beyond the shorter flight of stone steps showed two iron rings below the weed line, with pendant lengths of grass-grown rope hanging like dead snakes.

"Where they drawnded the pirates," one of the boys explained, as he wrung out his swimming trunks.

He was nearly right. How nearly next week will tell.