joining the vessel at her moorings in the river.
I was to be tolerated at the Nore, but not at
Greenwich. I had about twenty companions,
who were also anxious to sail in the good ship for
a special public purpose; but that purpose, it was
decided by the board, did not begin until she got
to Sheerness. Some of the most energetic amongst
"our own correspondents" believed ttiat the
Thames, the start, and the course down the
river, were things, above all others, to be seen
and to be recorded, and some rowed after the
floating island in cockle-shell boats and barges,
while others took deceptive conveyances
overland, and found themselves in Kentish hop-
fields, listening to the flutter of birds and the
familiar crack of the September gun, when they
should have been floating on the river, and
thinking of nothing but water, tar, and Rule
Britannia. A select party attended to
directorial instructions to deliver themselves at
Stroud about four o'clock in the afternoon of
Wednesday, the seventh of September, and
were taken on board the small theatre at
Chatham in the course of the night, instead of the
great ship Leviathan, off the mouth of the Medway.
Their vessel had come to an anchor at
Purfleet about two o'clock in the day, and the
four speculative spirits who got out at the Erith
station, but took their chance of boarding the
vessel, had every reason to be satisfied with
their irregular proceeding. I was one of the
number.

The voyage from a muddy pier at Erith to
the companion-ladder of the great ship was one
of some difficulty. A leaky boat had to be
prepared with row-locks which were cut out of the
broom-handle belonging to a Kentish Arab, or
mudlark, on the beach; and the passengers
were expected not only to pay a high price for
the voyage, but to bale out their crazy craft
with a rusty pint pot. One half of the course
was performed in this manner, and the other
half in a powder-barge, which came up and
charitably rescued us. In a quarter of an hour
more we were under the sides of the great ship,
while our credentials were sent up for
examination, and passed through a black hole, like
a trick trap in a pantomime. This was one of
the cargo portholes, we were given to understand;
and it was comforting to see that emblem
of law and order, a London policeman,
standing in charge of this ship entrance.
Though blue, he did not look naval; nor did
the ship from this point of view; it had the ap-
pearance, to my thinking, of an immense floating
House of Correction.

At last we were admitted, and I found myself
standing, for the first time, on the deck of the
floating island.

I had learnt before I started, from certain
statistical records of the vessel, that her length
over all was nearly seven hundred feet; that her
length of beam was eighty-three feet; that the
length over her paddle-boxes was one hundred
and twenty feet; and that her height from the
bottom to the top of the upper deck iron was
fifty-eight feet; but all this gave me a very
faint idea of her size. My first impression, on
walking about her decks, now they were in all
the confusion incident upon her first start into
blue water, was worth more than all the
comparisons I could ever have made from bare
figures.

I was standing on a raised street that had
suddenly been built in the river. I will call it
Upper Thames-street. Upper Thames-street
after a shower of rain, and a heavy visitation
of coal-dust. There were ropes, and pulleys, and
engines craning in cargo from barges; there
were pools of water filled with rotten bunches
of deal shavings, and chips of oak wood; there
were coils of thin rope, and lines of thick rope;
casks full of ale, of herrings, of ship's provisions;
deep gulfs of holes gaping for trusses of bed
and bedding, or for careless passengers, through
the upper and lower decks far down into the
base of the huge ship; great heaps of chain
lying about amongst planks of wood, amongst
heaps of bricks, and many sacks of potatoes.
A dozen of these potato sacks took up as much
room as all the correspondents who were
refused admission, for the present, on board the
ship, and who were running madly up and down
the North Kent Railway, or dining in some
musty hotel in the ancient city of Rochester.

The state of the ship at this time was a
hopeless muddle. No common man on board
connected with the ship seemed to know where he
was, what he was doing, or to what department
he belonged. Bodies of rigging hands
pulled feebly at ropes, and uttered plaintive
sounds, but with nothing like a will, an effect,
or a sense of duty. Below there had been
a grand early dinner in celebration of the
successful towing of the Great Ship Company's
whole capital thus far down the river, and many
supplementary banquets were still being spread
and devoured in the chief saloon. The enterprise
was at rest, having passed all the dangers
of Discount point, near the Blackwall bend in
the river, and it stood motionless with its dark
hull, its bare rigging, and its five short funnels,
for glasses to be levelled at it from the Kentish
hills, or for groups of men and women to watch
as they walked along the swampy Essex marshes.
Most of the visitors had departed by train to
London, with a view of returning at different
hours of the night. These were unruly lodgers,
who availed themselves early of the latch-key
privilege, and the watermen who clung round
the ship, like floating barnacles, had reason to
congratulate themselves on a splendid harvest.

The first great difficulty I had to contend
with was to find my berth; the next great difficulty
was to find a bedroom steward to help me.
I was to be known by a certain number. I
was to eat according to that number, and to sign
wine-tickets with the same arithmetical signature.
That number was 645, which represented
a first-class berth, and as night approached I
thought it advisable to seek for it. There was
nothing very unreasonable in this, although the
bewildered bedroom steward seemed to think
so. If it had been any other number than 645