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Updated: June 26, 2025
When the few boat-builders and shipwrights in the colony had leisure, they employed themselves in building boats for those that would pay them their price, namely, five or six gallons of spirits. It could be no matter of surprise that boats made by workmen so paid should be badly put together, and scarcely seaworthy.
They were all very polite, voluble, and enthusiastic; and their discourse was interlarded with English boating terms, and the names of English boat-builders and English clubs. I do not know, to my shame, any spot in my native land where I should have been so warmly received by the same number of people. We were English boating-men, and the Belgian boating-men fell upon our necks.
It has a population of some 5,000, and in ordinary years does a good trade in tiles and bricks, tanned leather, and smith's work, besides sending wood to Los Pasages for the purposes of the boat-builders.
As they swim past the spot where the boat-builders are at work, they, from their elevated position, can look down on their spout-holes, and even see them wink! The huge creatures, slowly gliding on, pass under a beech-tree growing by the water's edge, so near that their heads are almost brushed by its drooping branches.
The two boat-builders rowed several times a couple of miles up and down the river in the course of the week, bringing home, after each excursion, a tolerable supply of cat-fish.
Ham carrying me on his back and a small box of ours under his arm, and Peggotty carrying another small box of ours, we turned down lanes bestrewn with bits of chips and little hillocks of sand, and went past gas-works, rope-walks, boat-builders' yards, shipwrights' yards, ship-breakers' yards, caulkers' yards, riggers' lofts, smiths' forges, and a great litter of such places, until we came out upon the dull waste I had already seen at a distance; when Ham said,
Since no human memory can retain the great-grandmothers of three cities, we are practically as well off as if we had no great-grandmothers at all. But in Oldport, as elsewhere, the spice of conversation is apt to be in inverse ratio to family tree and income-tax, and one can hear better repartees among the boat-builders' shops on Long Wharf than among those who have made the grand tour.
At these grave words, more fear-inspiring from being spoken by Captain Gancy, work is instantly suspended, the boat-builders dropping their tools as though they burned the hands that grasped them. For some minutes the alarm runs high, all thinking their last hour is at hand.
Before she got to them she was caught between two huge barges and received a vigorous crushing. We got her on the ways, and, part way along, the ways spread and dropped her through, stern-first, into the mud. It was a pretty tangle, a job for wreckers, not boat-builders.
There were corporations of weavers, potters, carpenters, arrow-makers, bow-makers, smiths, boat-builders, and other tradesmen; and the past religious organization of these is suggested by the fact that certain occupations assume a religious character even to-day.
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