Iain Sinclair - Downriver

The Captain asked Christopher Dix, a pilot of thirty-four years’ experience, to scour the riverside drinking dens for ‘runners’: family men, far gone in drink, who would sail to Newcastle, but no further. Purcell, the stoker, was — even by the long standards of his craft — outrageously drunk. Skewed, damaged, blotto. He stank of doom. Wharf rats backed away from his reeling shadow. He rambled incontinently. Two strong-stomached runners supported him up the plank to the Bywell Castle . (Do or Die? Pass the bottle .)

The first collision came when the Bywell Castle ’s propeller inflicted a cut on the port chine of a barge that drifted across her path as she ran on the ebb tide from the outer Millwall Dock. This was a sober rehearsal. Grander sacrifices were required. The collier dutifully aligned herself with the High Victorian demand for drama (and with our desire to write about it). Panther-feasting poetasters, trained for years on stock drownings and suicide sonnets, let rip in a flood of privately printed chapbooks. The gross weight of public sympathy was forcing the boats together (like the mating of pandas) before they so much as let their hawsers drop on the quayside. All that good will could not go unrewarded: 640 deaths was the most reliable estimate. Rescue services can justify themselves only among the dying. The health and security of any society is measured in regular cathartic doses of mayhem. The Alice was split and its human cargo spilled into the water.

The account of what happened after the sinking belongs to Purcell. The strange incident in the cutter. Purcell and Mullins (a Somerset runner) pulled downstream for Erith. They trawled for corpses — finding four, including a young woman, ‘ warm and supple as though she was still alive ’. They were in awe of a tall stranger, handsome, flame-bearded, who sat with them, though they did not know him, nor where he came from. The men spoke later of his enveloping ‘boat cloak’ and the stovepipe hat that he clutched to his head. His hair was unusually long. Certainly, his manner was that of‘a gentleman’. He spoke only once — sharply — in warning to Purcell: ‘Hold your row.’ The keel scraped on the slipway. The boatswain crossed himself. Moonlight. Two gas lamps illuminated the landing place. The stranger had vanished. And was never seen again. Neither among the crowd giving statements, nor in the Yacht Tavern, nor even at the Inquest.

Purcell. The bodies taken from the cutter and placed in a handcart. A constable painstakingly entering the particulars into his notebook. Age, height, weight, clothing. Mullins carried an old man, more dead than alive, on his back to the tavern. ‘Better to have let him ride in the cart,’ said Purcell. ‘They’ll measure his length before the night’s out.’ They took brandy and later beer. Purcell seemed strangely elated. Said he had spilled some silver in the bottom of the cutter. Returned to the river; alternately lifting a pint pot and a lantern. He found a halfpenny down among the scuppers. Was visibly shaken. His dampened moleskin trousers bulging comically over his engorged member.

Before dawn he had accused the Captain and the pilot of being drunk. These were serious charges. ‘Take care what you say, man.’ ‘Boozed, sir? Every blood bung. Soaked — all of us.’ Purcell: shivering in shirt, moleskins, calico cap. Borrowed a jacket off Harris the confectioner, got some warmth from the fishtail burners: ‘a pleasant yeasty smell’. Accepted cake and ginger beer. Returned. This time he was not followed. The body of the young woman on the landing stage, under a policeman’s cape. Her feet and her ankles uncovered. ‘Warm and supple.’ Hot brandy to her lips. ‘Boozing all the afternoon long, guv’ nor. As I’d report before my Maker.’ He had the skirts up, bruised her white thighs with his thumbs. Sniffing at her — a dog — for warmth, for the smell of life. He would not look in her face. Rolled her. They thought he was after jewellery, hidden coins. It was worse. Or: it was the only human reaction. He let down his trousers. ‘A call of nature,’ he claimed. To piss back into the river. Turn spirit to water. He climbed on her. Mounted. Entered. Spent. They drew a bucket to pitch over him. Mullins put a fist in his mouth. The cur! He spat blood. Tobacco juice. Called out, justified. Daughter! He believed there was life in her still.

Harrison recalled the navigation lights crossing over the headland. ‘Like lamps on a hansom.’ Margaret, or Tripcock Ness. ‘There was singing from a multitude of voices.’ The ship’s orchestra. The dancers inherit the party. A bass viol floated away on the tide: an inflatable curate. A varnished torso. The bow fetched up in Gravesend. Bodies drifted ashore between Frog Island and Greenhithe. The victims chose an unlucky hour to enter the water. They were discharging the sewage from both the north and the south banks into Barking Creek. Outflow. Mouths open, screaming. Locked in a rictus. Rage of the reading classes. Public demand for the immediate provision of swimming pools for the worthy poor. Let them learn breast-stroke. Letters to The Times . Eels suture the ragged wounds. Good, traditional fare, served in public houses: The Angel, the Mayflower, Town of Ramsgate, White Swan, Blacksmith’s Arms. Begetting potency. Lead in the pencil. Oil on troubled water. Tanned, condom-skinned sliders. Toyed with (forked aside) by fastidious matrons. Ripe green: catarrh. ‘Two continuous columns of decomposed fermenting sewage, hissing like soda water with baneful gasses, so black that the water is stained for miles and discharging a corrupt charnel-house odour.’

Later. The city vermin, pouring out of excursion trains (‘Derby Day’, hampers, buttonholes), tramped the marshes, grinding down the tussocks. Pickpockets, inebriates, ladies’ men, gay girls. Sensation seekers rowing in pleasure boats to the beached wreck, the afterpart of the Alice ; breaking off pieces of wood, relics to carry home. Watermen fought each other with oars and boat hooks: five shillings for each body recovered. Eyes lost. Traumatic injuries. Ruffians, far gone in drink, drew their shivs on the constable guarding the site; swore to slit any bluebottle who got in their way.

Lines of sleepers. False claimants (legions of Tichbornes) searched the corpses in the dockyard. Crocodile tears, intimacies. They felt for earrings. They assessed the silk of undergarments. They moved among the dead, weeping and stuffing their carpetbags. By night, inconvenient stiffs from other locations were added to the platform of the unburied. Numbers rose, confusing the statisticians. Foul murders were ‘inspired’ by this golden opportunity. It was as if the graves opened in sympathy. The dead multiplied as they lay in state. They coupled in fertile embraces.

Madness on madness. Dig them under. Hide them. War rockets fired over Plumstead Marshes: the feeble and transient shock of magnesium flares. Spirit photographs. The darkness floods back, covering the ground in decent obscurity. Afterimages. The sad legend: little pale-blue flowers with purple leaves, Rubrum lamium , grew only over the graves of criminals. Tender, unobtrusive. A starry carpet, visible ( there ) for a single instant of trust.

Wilder and wilder stratagems. The idea of the cannons. The heavy artillery of the river defences put, at last, to use: sixty-eight-pounders with a range of 3,000 yards; muzzle-loaders, firing 250-lb shot, to rock the casemates. It had been suggested by W. Aldridge (plumber, house decorator, wholesale oilman) that gunfire would bring some of the bodies swimming to the surface. ‘ I have seen it tried and have seen a body rise almost perpendicular. The cannon are there as the internal part decomposes gas is formed which renders the body lighter and then the concussion makes it rise all my household with my self, have wept over this sad affair .’