“Port,” the bowman shouts.
Tam Niccol looks up from the broadsheet he bought in McPhun’s.
The Helen Niccol heels a bit to port, increasing the waterline, the luff sail filled by a brisk Easterly and the ebb-tide dragging the water beneath her keel downstream at a fair skelp, On the starboard bench, the real Helen Niccol, though she was born Helen Muir, is evidently uncomfortable as the fly-boat bumps along with alarming speed, almost 6 miles an hour Tam estimates. Geordie Scott on the tiller keeps a weather eye and the lad on the bow looks out sharp sharp for shoals, for, forebye bearing the boat at a pace down the firth, the ebb is stripping the water from under them,
Wee Helen and Katie gaze out through the raised visor, a hinged strake above the gunnel which allow passengers to enjoy the views. Less nervous than their mother, the girls fidget and conspire, enjoying the rush of the wind and the flap of the sail. Dumbarton Castle passes on the North shore. Half way there.
Tam notes the quick swig the other crewmen take from their jugs before stepping forward to lower the gaff. Passengers shuffle back on their benches as the sail is lowered and worked around to the other side of the mast. Quickly, surprisingly efficiently given how much they have had to drink, the crewmen hoist the sail again as Geordie eases the head towards the South shore, weaving the boat like a needle along the channel. Poor judgement will have them run aground.
The damned burgesses of Glasgow have been lobbying to have the channel deepened for decades now. It is a proposal that Tam’s elected representatives in Greenock work to stymie at every turn. Any improvement in the channel between Cartsdyke and the Broomielaw is a threat to the trans-shipment trade, allowing bigger ships to unload directly at the warehouses of the bigsy Glasgow merchants.
The crew settle back, crouching beneath the sail and the passengers relax again.
Besides Tam, Helen and the girls, there are 12 others: mostly Glaswegians and Greenockians with a couple of bonnet-lairds in cocked hats returning to the Highlands after a stravaig to the big city. There would have been more but Tam put his foot down when Geordie tried to overload the boat. Out of respect to Sandy Grieve, he would have said nothing if Helen and the weans hadn’t been aboard: his boats were seaworthy enough. He was less successful dissuading Geordie and the crew from selling whisky to those passengers rash enough not to have brought enough of their own. Tam, himself, was abstinent today, reading his paper but acutely aware of how fu’ the rest of the boats complement had become since leaving the Broomielaw.
Tam returned his attention to The True Briton. Since the last time Tam read a broadsheet, the winds of politics had evidently changed. Whereas, a few months before, the wee Corsican Usurper was an Atheist, Deist, Villain, Hypocrite, Thief, Adulterer and Assassin, since the king capitulated and signed a peace, the upstart Jacobin was the Wonderful person presiding over the Affairs of France, an Astonishing Person and a military genius. Tam noted, with disappointment, in The Sun, that Madam de Beauharnais had been transformed from a raddled harlot to a keen botanist. Gilray’s lampoons will be the poorer for the peace[i].
The trip up-river on yesterday’s flood tide had been intended to be business: a matter of banking sufficiently removed from the gossip of Greenock. But Helen, more than half aware of the money Tam had made selling the tenements he owned on the King’s Highway to Rab King, insisted they made it a family excursion, hoping, no doubt, Tam would be sufficiently chuffed and flush to entertain her.
Whilst Tam saw to his business, Helen and the girls, in their Sunday best, trolled the shopping streets looking for luxuries and finery. Helen bought shoes on the Trongate and stockings on the High Street, fancy provisions from the groceries on New Street[ii]. It wasn’t that every such luxury couldn’t be got in Greenock if you knew who to ask, so he supposed it was the experience of actually buying it in a shop that he was paying a premium for. Still though, he was interested in the stockings.
They stayed the night in one of the new hotels but, despite the girls (maternally coached) pleading, Tam insisted on catching the ebb-tide back to Greenock.
Reading through the change in tone in The True Briton, Tam hoped the peace might bring down the cost of labour. He has another boat, much like the Helen Niccol, on the cradle in his yard at Cartsdyke. This one is for John Fairlie. The futtocks have been scarfed in place, the keelson laid, the binding strake installed, the garboard fitted to the rabbet line. Now his men should be bending the sheer-strake in place. Soon they will begin scantling the boat in earnest, driving the copper nails through the lands of plank after plank, roving each nail in place, methodical, meticulous.
These days, he employs 10 carpenters plus a come-and-go of labourers. Sails and rigging are manufactured elsewhere in the town.
When the war with France intensified and the British fleet got bruised – but not defeated – in Copenhagen, the going rate for carpenters rose to 15/- a week. The Navy was Britain’s bulwark after all and bulwarks cost. But, despite the bounties paid to fishers and the exorbitant fees for speed, Tam’s customers, the flyboat operators[iii] and the herring fishers, hadn’t the deep pockets of the Admiralty and Tam, through a lack of foresight he deplored, did not have space enough to expand the size of his hulls.
Meanwhile, the hairsts have failed for two years running and the cost of corn is rising./
Since the war began, Tam has been squeezed between rising wages, rising prices and material costs and a ‘reasonable’ price for an 8 ton wherry. If it wasn’t for the value of the silt beneath his yard, Tam would as well throw in the towel.
But there is silver in the silt beneath is yard. At least, he hopes so.
The cronies on the Town Council are fretting at the trade they will lose to Glasgow if it were a freeport and the river deepened[iv]. This year the shysters have secured an Act of Parliament to establish a Harbour Board and build a new deep water harbour for fifty thousand pounds excluding land. The board, of course, are all the usual swicks.[v] They have tasked their architect to design a harbour, at the Bay of Quick (to suit their personal interests), capable of handling up to 120 vessels of 200 tons burthen. Their other option, mooted previously, was to build a new harbour here, at Cartsdyke[vi].
The decision is not yet made but Tam kent fine the value of a working boatyard on the Cartsdyke foreshore if the decision went against the Bay of Quick. Reason enough to play the busy fool and keep on building boats for nothing.
So, build he does – flyboats and scaffies – though his customers in the Flyboat trade are already under the cosh from the Council and the Parish. Tam’s wherries did the business right enough: Broomielaw to Greenock in 4 hours with a flood tide and a following wind[vii]. If they had wind and tide in their favour, they moved at a fair skelp, exhilarating[viii]. But the operators reputation wasn’t helped when stotious skippers in the fog rowed for hours at the Broomielaw with their anchor still embedded in Glasgow mud[ix]. The Council (for its own reasons, of course) were critical of drunkenness, profanity and lewd behaviour on the trip back and forth.
Either way, there was still a good margin in the trade. John Fairlie was content to double down and buy another boat for a price that washed its face and allowed Tam to cling on to the yard a few more months despite the terms of trade.
Tam misses the salacious innuendo about the Countess de Beauharnais.
And what’s wrong with a bit of drunkenness, profanity and lewd behaviour, provided it stays on the boat? But of course, it doesn’t stay on the boat. It stots ashore into the sewer that is Greenock, a sewer without sewers, visible to the ‘fine’ townsfolk until it dissolves into the throng of mariners and dock labourers and harbour whores on which they feed.
“Father?”
Wee Helen is perjink in her Sunday pinafore.
“Da?”
“Mother says to call you father.”
“You can call me Da.”
The child checks back across her shoulder. “Mother is sleeping.”
And yes, Helen has dozed off despite the pitch and buffet of the boat. She dozes off a lot, especially since wee Katie was born, as if the world deserved no attention.
“Ay. So, she’ll not hear you call me Da.”
Helen smiles but seems unconvinced.
“Is your sister OK?”
Katie was squatting down below the gunwhale now, chatting to one of Geordie’s crew.
“Catherine is speaking to the drunk sailors. I don’t like drunk sailors.”
“I’ve an eye on them, Helen.”
“Have you? Looks like you’re reading your paper to me.”
“One eye on them, one eye on the world, I promise.”
“And what’s in the world that’s more important than a drunken sailor?”
The girl has a point. The machinations of Princes and Consuls. Their effect on the terms of trade. How do you explain those to a six year old girl?
Then the boat stalls with a jolt and a crunch. Helen has couped back against the deck, cracking her head off of the planking. She shrieks and begins to wail. Katie has fallen into the arms of a drunken sailor. Helen has fallen from her bench.
“Fuck me, Tearlach!” Geordie shouts from the transom.
The Clyde silt grinds against the hull. Startled passengers assess their situation. Some laugh.
Already Tearlach and the rest of the crew are dropping over the side as Tam scoops up Helen, cradling her head.
“Shhh,” he says. “It’s alright, he says, smoothing her blonde hair.
“No, it’s not, Da. I hate your bloody boats!”
Geordie’s voice behind him. “What’s up Tam. Too good these days to get your feet wet? Get your breeks off and lend a hand.”
Notes:
[i] This Dark Business, Tim Clayton, Abacus
[ii] Fixed shops were still quite rare in the 1770s but were growing in number aimed at the increasingly prosperous middle ranks. Little attention was paid to display and most shops were little more than rooms in tenements. But as population grew so did the number of shops. Then as now, similar shops tended to cluster. The south side of the Trongate, the main shopping area, had a range of shoe shops, while across the street convenient for the College were a number of booksellers, such as Brash & Reid’s and Robert McPhun’s. For cutlery and hardware people would head for the Saltmarket, for hosiery, to the east side of the High street. New Street, soon to become King Street, had a cluster of grocery and provision shops. Glasgow Story.
[iii] John Fairlie, Malcolm Campbell and Andrew Rennie
[iv] Prior to 1801, laden vessels generally had to load or unload using lighters whilst moored at the Tail o the Bank.
[v] George Robertson & Walter Ritchie (Baillies),James Simpson, Hugh Crawford, David Colqhoun, John Scott, John Hamilton, Alexander Dunlop, Archibald McGowan.
[vi] John Rennie estimated the cost of a harbour at the Bay of Quick at £92,265, in part due to the objections of existing property owners. The Cartsdyke option was estimated to be £35,500. R.M. Smith The History of Greenock 1921
[vii] The other way took longer and there was no headway in either direction without aid of wind and tide. Sometimes they got no farther than Bowling on the day. In the worst cases, the passengers had to get out and push.
[viii] About 5 miles an hour.