banks, like weeds—our own was a "supervision
boat"—and they, as they reported
"all right!" flashing their hidden light on
us, and we flashing ours on them. These duty
boats had one sitter in each: an Inspector:
and were rowed "Ran-dan," which—for the
information of those who never graduated, as I
was once proud to do, under a fireman-waterman
and winner of Kean's Prize Wherry:
who, in the course of his tuition, took
hundreds of gallons of rum and egg (at my
expense) at the various houses of note above and
below bridge; not by any means because he
liked it, but to cure a weakness in his liver,
for which the faculty had particularly
recommended it—may be explained as rowed by
three men, two pulling an oar each, and one
a pair of sculls.

Thus, floating down our black highway,
sullenly frowned upon by the knitted brows
of Blackfriars, Southwark, and London, each
in his lowering turn, I was shown by my
friend Pea that there are, in the Thames
Police Force whose district extends from
Battersea to Barking Creek, ninety-eight men,
eight duty boats, and two supervision boats;
and that these go about so silently, and lie in
wait in such dark places, and so seem to be
nowhere, and so may be anywhere, that they
have gradually become a police of prevention,
keeping the river almost clear of any great
crimes, even while the increased vigilance on
shore has made it much harder than of yore
to live by "thieving" in the streets. And as to
the various kinds of water thieves, said my
friend Pea, there were the Tier-rangers, who
silently dropped alongside the tiers of shipping
in the Pool, by night, and who, going to the
companion-head, listened for two snores
—snore number one, the skipper's; snore number
two, the mate's—mates and skippers always
snoring great guns, and being dead sure to be
hard at it if they had turned in and were
asleep. Hearing the double fire, down went
the Rangers into the skippers' cabins; groped
for the skippers' inexpressibles, which it was
the custom of those gentlemen to shake
off, watch, money, braces, boots, and all
together, on the floor; and therewith made
off as silently as might be. Then there were
the Lumpers, or labourers employed to unload
vessels. They wore loose canvas jackets with
a broad hem in the bottom, turned inside, so
as to form a large circular pocket in which
they could conceal, like clowns in pantomimes,
packages of surprising sizes. A great deal of
property was stolen in this manner (Pea
confided to me) from steamers; first, because
steamers carry a larger number of small
packages than other ships; next, because
of the extreme rapidity with which they are
obliged to be unladen for their return
voyages. The Lumpers dispose of their
booty, easily, to marine store dealers, and the
only remedy to be suggested is that marine
store shops should be licensed, and thus
brought under the eye of the police as rigidly
as public-houses. Lumpers also smuggle
goods ashore for the crews of vessels.
The smuggling of tobacco is so
considerable, that it is well worth the while of
the sellers of smuggled tobacco to use
hydraulic presses, to squeeze a single pound
into a package small enough to be
contained in an ordinary pocket. Next, said
my friend Pea, there were the Truckers—less
thieves than smugglers, whose business it was
to land more considerable parcels of goods than
the Lumpers could manage. They sometimes
sold articles of grocery, and so forth, to the
crews, in order to cloak their real calling,
and get aboard without suspicion. Many of
them had boats of their own, and made money.
Besides these, there were the Dredgermen,
who, under pretence of dredging up coals
and such like from the bottom of the river,
hung about barges and other undecked craft,
and when they saw an opportunity, threw any
property they could lay their hands on
overboard: in order slyly to dredge it up when
the vessel was gone. Sometimes, they dexterously
used their dredges to whip away
anything that might lie within reach. Some of
them were mighty neat at this, and the
accomplishment was called dry dredging.
Then, there was a vast deal of property, such
as copper nails, sheathing, hardwood, &c.,
habitually brought away by shipwrights and
other workmen from their employers' yards,
and disposed of to marine store dealers, many
of whom escaped detection through hard
swearing, and their extraordinary artful ways
of accounting for the possession of stolen
property. Likewise, there were special-pleading
practitioners, for whom barges "drifted
away of their own selves"—they having no
hand in it, except first cutting them loose, and
afterwards plundering them—innocents,
meaning no harm, who had the misfortune
to observe those foundlings wandering about
the Thames.

We were now going in and out, with
little noise and great nicety, among the
tiers of shipping, whose many hulls, lying
close together, rose out of the water like
black streets. Here and there, a Scotch, an
Irish, or a foreign steamer, getting up her
steam as the tide made, looked, with her great
chimney and high sides, like a quiet factory
among the common buildings. Now, the
streets opened into clearer spaces, now
contracted into alleys; but the tiers were so
like houses, in the dark, that I could almost
have believed myself in the narrower
byeways of Venice. Everything was wonderfully
still; for, it wanted full three hours of flood,
and nothing seemed awake but a dog here
and there.

So we took no Tier-rangers captive, nor any
Lumpers, nor Truckers, nor Dredgermen, nor
other evil disposed person or persons; but
went ashore at Wapping where the old
Thames Police office is now a station-house,
and where the old Court, with its cabin