"Prospecting" in Sailor Town: Schooner Days MLXXXXVIII (1088)

by C. H. J. Snider

IN a fog so thick that it turned the point of Scotland Yard's acetylene torches trying to drill it last Sunday bandits raided the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping Wall, cracked an English humorist over the head with a blackjack (both recovering), stripped the ladies of their jewelry and the gents of their rolls and Rolls-Royces, and melted into invisibility and an AP dispatch.

Mutatis mutandis, as we say at sea, Wapping Wall is something like the salubrious Toronto area around the foot of Cherry st., the gas works, the Don drydock and the Turning Basin.

Above is a snapshot that Schooner Days made on the Thames last August when hunting for relics of the old sailing colliers which once supplied the hub of the empire with fuel. The narrow white building in surroundings not so different from Toronto's waterfront is an ancient inn, built in 1520. That's the Prospect of Whitby.

The steps beside it are still known as the Pelican Stairs. Probably the Pelican moored there at the beginning or the end of the first circumnavigation of the world, completed by her in 1577.

The inn was known as the Devil's Tavern in 1563, but in the 18th century the biggest collier ship of the time, a "geordie" hailing from Whitby in Yorkshire, berthed there almost permanently. She had been christened the Prospect. Her master must have run up such a bill at the bar that the landlord took both his shirt and the ship's papers in payment. From that day to this the Devil's Tavern of 1563 has been known and licensed as the Prospect of Whitby.

Its patrons have included Willoughby of the Northeast Passage, 1553; Samuel Pepys, Hanging Judge Jeffreys, the pressgangs of the Royal Navy, Dickens, Dore, Turner, Whistler, Thomas, Richard, Henry, Schooner Days and a horde of greater and lesser worthies and unworthies. Captain Kidd and Gow the Pirate had nodding acquaintance with it from Execution Dock across the way. Many "moderns" have painted it since Turner's time, and many docklanders paint their own noses at it yet, besides the haut ton and beau monde.

It is no waterfront dive nor high-binding night club but a well-kept, fully licensed public house serving food and drink to:

(a) Dockers and sailors, and men doing waterfront business.

(b) Artists, tourists, curiosity seekers and explorers.

(c) People who want a good meal in rationed London at less than black-market prices—which includes both (a) and (b).

Our hope is that neither Captain Flint, the Treasure Island parrot, nor Miss Pussy Blackchin, who gave us the tipoff when we dined at the Prospect, were annoyed by the bandits.

The interrupted story of the unheeded bride and "Morning Light' will, please God, be resumed next week.

THIS IS THE PROSPECT OF WHITBY