It is the morning of the first day and the bare ground terrifies him. Just an uneven patch of briny silt, pebbly here and there and rank with weeds.  The Clyde laps against an uncertain shoreline.  Rotted bladderwrack and the bones and feathers of a cormorant mark the limit of the most recent high tide. Tam feels foolish and naked, with all the busy commerce in the Firth and the bustle of other boat yards, quays and manufactories to the West.  Here is where Tam will lay his first keel.

The Irishmen he hired the day before have begun fencing off the lot, as much to hide it from the neighbours as shelter from the elements.  Older than Tam and fresh off the boat, they seem willing enough as labourers.  They prattle in Irish as they work.  Tam suspects the Micks disrespect him but he cannot tell.

He tries to visualise the bare lot as it will be, its future space.  Cleared and levelled. Stacked logs, stock, a steam box.  Men working: together, with purpose, to a plan.

It was what Tam left Alloa for, after all.  To make something of himself. 

He learned his trade in the Duncanson’s dockyard there but Alloa’s trade won’t bear another boatyard.  When his father died, Tam, as a younger son, got no useful portion of his very limited estate. He took what little there was going and, with  his own wit and skill, he headed West.

He visualised the progressive steps the ground-ways would pace out the slipway of his future. 

The ground and ways would need carefully levelled, three degrees below the horizon, so that the hull will slip sweetly between the shores when the chocks and shore ways are finally knocked away.  It will ease towards the tide on its rough cradle and break surface, lifting itself at last from its cradle and float.  It will be buoyant, fast and nimble.

For now though, that launch is not much better than a dream : an ambition embodied only in a pouch full of coin, a line of credit and this feud lot, its only current assets the rough offcuts the Irish are using to throw up the fence.

*

The stink of the town assaulted him as he stepped off of the boat : assaulted then excited him.  That and the crowds.

Tam Niccol was no stranger to quaysides or to crowds but the roads at Cartdyke had a busyness and intensity unknown in Alloa.  Back in Clackmannanshire, the trade was workman-like, methodical.  Tobacco, transhipped from Greenock via Glasgow was smuggled to the Netherlands. Coal and salt and beer and whisky, glass were the licit cargoes.  It was a fine enough harbour but the Forth was pointing the wrong way, a channel flowing back towards the Old World.  The Clyde ports of Cartsdyke and Greenock, on the other hand, were focussed on the New World. 

Barques and brigs and schooners, coasters, fishing boats and lighters, East Indiamen, bustled on the Tail o the Bank. On the quayside: rum, sugar, cotton, coconuts.  Salt cod from Nova Scotia[i].  Logs of oak, elm and yellow pine from Quebec and deal from the Baltic floated in the timber pools. Herring was cured and packed for export to the slave plantations of the West Indies[ii]. Irish immigrants, gaels, lascars, swedes and dutchmen milled on the shoreside streets.  A funk of scents and fragrances blended with the babble of voices, foreign words, shouts and constant squawk of gulls.  The shoreline already had its fringe of boatyards competing for the trade. Better a tradesman in a boom-town than tied to a single yard in an East Coast port. 

But when the wind turned, the rum and coconuts gave place to the reek of  lums and middens.  Coal smoke belched from the rows of tenements and hovels. The unpaved streets were littered with rotting matter. Faeces was heaped alongside doors, under windows, below stairs and in the closes. Pigs and rats and feral dogs scavenged scraps. To the reek of shit, soot and corruption was added the smell of rotting seaweed[iii] and the guff of unwashed bodies.

Cartsdyke & Greenock bustled with folk.  The Tail o the Bank was as far up-river as the East Indiamen and the big Atlantic ships could go. All the trade goods of the Glasgow merchants had to be off-loaded here and transhipped to smaller coasters for the final leg of their journey to the Broomielaw, a process which exposed the cargoes to damage, pilfering and increased handling costs and offered the towns’ growing population rich pickings from handling, security and theft… along with the normal service industries associated with a busy port.

From the day of his arrival, Tam knew there was silver to be earned here.  And easily.  If he could figure out how.

*

It wasn’t to be helped.  A twenty foot loft was all Tam could afford on the small advance he had.  Less than half the length of the boat his yard will be capable of. Shorter, even, than the keel Joshua was proposing.

The Englishman is marking lines on the floor of the loft in chalk: sheer lines, body lines, waterlines.  Joshua knows what he is doing – he knows this boat – but he is canny about sharing his plans. 

Joshua is twice Tam’s age and already half-way broken with consumption.  He abandoned his wife and bairns in Suffolk, he says to send them back remittances but it takes a lot of drink to ease his cough.  God knows who told him Cartsdyke was a drier climate.

Tam watches as Joshua taps nails into the floor-boards along the chalk lines.  Station marks.  Buttock lines. Diagonals.  He knows his trade but the offsets are scribbled code in a notebook that he carries and keeps close.

Tam met the man at Cairds.  They had talked boats – the traditional designs of Fife and Norfolk. Tam knew something, though not enough, about Scaffies.  It was Joshua told him of the Norfolk Wherries, fast, shallow draught, ideal for the task they had in mind.

To accommodate sufficient paying passengers, Tam thought the boat would need to be about  30 ft. in length.  Shallow draught due to the shoals and shallows between Greenock and Glasgow.  Capable of powering by sail or oars when wind and tide were uncooperative.

What Joshua suggested was 28ft on the keel, 8 ft on the beam and 8 tonnes burthen.  It would draw 4 ft of water[iv]. Clinker-built and wherry-rigged, like the boats he knew from Norfolk.  Longitudinal benches, between the transom and the mast, would accommodate passengers and their baggage.

It seemed ideal: Tam offered the dying man a partnership.

Because of the size of the loft, the boat would have to be laid out in two overlapping sections: fore and aft. With no single lay-out, and Joshua’s tightness with the offsets, there was nothing to be done but trust the Englishman with Sandy’s money and Tam’s future.

*

The atmosphere inside the pub is thick with the smell of stale beer, piss, tobacco smoke and rancid sweat. 

“I have a proposition for you,” Sandy Rennie said.

Tam wondered how much this would cost him.  He took a sip of rum, then presented his listening face.  “Ay?” he said.

Tam had to lean forward to hear above the babble of Scots and Irish voices and, providentially, so that Sandy didn’t have to speak too loud.  Propositions are better heard in private.

“You’re a sound enough ship-wright, Tam.  How would you like to set up on your own?”

“Leave Caird’s yard you mean?”

“Ay well, I’ve an idea for a boat but I can’t be doing with Caird’s prices.”

“You want me to do it for you on the cheap?”

“You’ll make more silver than you would building it for the wages he gives you.”

“ But it’s just one boat?”

“Maybe two.  Maybe more. It’s a start.  Where’s your faith, man?”

And there’s the thing: the courage to step forward.

“What size?”

“Maybe 30 passengers?”

“Decked.”

“No.”

“Rig?”

“Fast. Shallow draught.”

“Not for the fishing, then?”

“No.  Here’s the thing.  It’s a long trauchle up the coast to Glasgow.  If folk could get a fast boat to the Broomielaw, back and forth in a day or two, I reckon there’s a good trade in that.   Regular sailings.”

But the Clyde is shallow at low tide. “Shallow draught. Ay.” Tam said.

“But fast enough to do the distance on the flood or on the ebb.”

“Ay.  With a following wind.” Tam had his doubts but it might be possibile.

“What d’you say?”

After two years, Tam wasn’t chuffed with Caird’s wages or the cheap Irish labour he was expected to work with: barely skilled, with thick Ulster Scots accents.

“Can I think about it?”

“Not for long,” Sandy said. “I’ll get another round.”

Tam knew of an unused bit of waterfront towards the East end of the town.  He had his tools, his contacts and a wee bit silver.  Greenock’s febrile market brooked no guilds or cartels and besides, a wee boat – and that would be his story – was no competition with the likes of Caird.  And there was Joshua’s smart idea of a boat.

Sandy set  down another round with the look of a man expecting an answer.

“I’ll need a bit upfront and you pay for all the timber.”

“Staged payments.  Ay.  Agreed.  You show me a design.”

“I’ll show it you.  And a bill of materials.  We can work the rest from there.  Agreed?”

Sandy spat into the palm of his hand, offered it to Tam across the unsupped drams.  They shook on it but, when the time came, Tam could only show Sandy a sketch and his bill of materials was guessed at. The detail was still all in Joshua’s head.

Tam guessed, proposed a lump-sum price of £100 and Sandy, as expected, beat him down to £90.  It was only then that Tam had real reservations.

He told the foreman at Caird’s he was away but couldn’t say where to. The gaffer was pissed off at his leaving and that had to be some kind of a compliment.

*

By the time the first mouldings are ready, the lot has been cleared and fenced, the ground ways laid and a steam box set up on the right side of the yard.  Tam kept on two of the Irish as labourers but they will only last till they get a better offer.  In the meantime, Tam sounded out  carpenters he had some time for, offered them more money than Caird paid if they would start with him and see the boat launched.

It is a fine May morning, bright above the Firth,  A wee chop on the water: wind against the ebb tide.

Two of the carpenters are sawing an American white oak log, either end of a cross-cut saw.  Already Tam and the boys have the keel out of a longer piece of stock, filch cut it to form two length and scarfed them together at the mid-point, treenails driven through the scarf to fix the fayed ends tight together.

There is more work than labour he can afford, so Tam is on the tools himself, cutting the heel into his oak keel with an adze, savouring the bite of the steel into the fine oak, clearing splinters as he goes.  He has already formed the head that will be scarfed onto the stem once it is formed.

His third man, Davie, is tending the coals on the steam box.  Already, steam rises to be carried away on the offshore wind.  When the keel is dubbed and faireed, they will form the stem  across the form they built from Joshua’s mould.

Everything feels precarious. Measure twice, cut once, they say, but for a boat every cut must be pre-planned, deliberate: seams watertight, strakes faired and feathered into place.

A flock of gannets are diving for herring just off the beach. Tam rests a second, admiring the  simple suddenness of them: soar and decision, white flash, white splash.  Whilst Tam approaches his meat like a wild cat, canny, sleekit, terrified.

Notes.

[i] Re-exported to the West Indies

[ii] By 1790, Greenock’s Customs House was clearing 45,000 barrels of herring a year, servicing 129 herring busses that employed about 1500 men. The Clyde season for herring was October – January. 

[iii] that the high tide swept up onto the High Street in regular inundations

[iv] Fly-boats | Clyde River and Firth (dalmadan.com)