In Mother Shaftoe’s part of town, that kind of willingness to do a day’s hard work for bread and money was taken as proof that the Irish race lacked dignity and shrewdness. And this did not even take into account their religious practices and all that flowed from them, e.g., the obstinate chastity of their women, and the willingness of the males to tolerate it. The way of the mudlarks (as the men who trafficked through Mother Shaftoe’s bed styled themselves) was to voyage out upon the Thames after it got dark, find their way aboard anchored ships somehow, and remove items that could be exchanged for bread, money, or carnal services on dry land.
Techniques varied. The most obvious was to have someone climb up a ship’s anchor cable and then throw a rope down to his mates. This was a job for surplus boys if ever there was one. Dick, the oldest of the Shaftoes, had learnt the rudiments of the trade by shinnying up the drain-pipes of whorehouses to steal things from the pockets of vacant clothing. He and his little brothers struck up a partnership with a band of these free-lance longshoremen, who owned the means of moving swag from ship to shore: they’d accomplished the stupendous feat of stealing a longboat.
After approaching several anchored ships with this general plan in mind, they learned that the sailors aboard them-who were actually supposed to be on watch for mudlarks-expected to be paid for the service of failing to notice that young Dick Shaftoe was clambering up the anchor cable with one end of a line tied round his ankle. When the captain found goods missing, he’d be sure to flog these sailors, and they felt they should be compensated, in advance, for the loss of skin and blood. Dick needed to have a purse dangling from one wrist, so that when a sailor shone a lantern down into his face, and aimed a blunderbuss at him, he could shake it and make the coins clink together. That was a music to which sailors of all nations would smartly dance.
Of course the mudlarks lacked coins to begin with. They wanted capital. John Cole-the biggest and boldest of the fellows who’d stolen the longboat-hit upon another shrewd plan: they would steal the only parts of ships that could be reached without actually getting aboard first: namely, anchors. They’d then sell them to the captains of ships who had found their anchors missing. This scheme had the added attraction that it might lead to ships’ drifting down the current and running aground on oh, say, the Isle of Dogs, at which point their contents would be legally up for grabs.
One foggy night (but all nights were foggy) the mudlarks set off in the longboat, rowing upstream. The mudlark term for a boat’s oars was a pair of wings. Flapping them, they flew among anchored ships-all of them pointed upriver, since the anchor cables were at their bows, and they weathercocked in the river’s current. Nearing the stern of a tubby Dutch galjoot -a single-masted trader of perhaps twice their longboat’s length, and ten times its capacity-they tossed Dick overboard with the customary rope noosed around his ankle, and a knife in his teeth. His instructions were to swim upstream, alongside the galjoot ’s hull, towards the bow, until he found her port side anchor cable descending into the river. He was to lash his ankle-rope to said cable, and then saw through the cable above the lashing. This would have the effect of cutting the galjoot free from, while making the longboat fast to, the anchor, effecting a sudden and silent transfer of ownership. This accomplished, he was to jerk on the rope three times. The mudlarks would then pull on the rope. This would draw them upstream until they were directly over the anchor, and if they hauled hard enough, the prize would come up off the riverbed.
Dick slopped away into the mist. They watched the rope uncoil, in fits and starts, for a couple of minutes-this meant Dick was swimming. Then it stopped uncoiling for a long while-Dick had found the anchor cable and gone to work! The mudlarks dabbled with rag-swathed oars, flapping those wings against the river’s flow. Jack sat holding the rope, waiting for the three sharp jerks that would be Dick’s signal. But no jerks came. Instead the rope went slack. Jack, assisted by brother Bob, pulled the slack into the boat. Ten yards of it passed through their hands before it became taut again, and then they felt, not three sharp jerks, exactly, but a sort of vibration at the other end.
It was plain that something had gone wrong, but Jack Cole was not about to abandon a good rope, and so they hauled in what they could, drawing themselves upstream. Somewhere along the flank of the galjoot, they found a noose in the rope, with a cold pale ankle lodged in it, and out came poor Dick. The anchor cable was knotted to that same noose. While Jack and Bob tried to slap Dick back into life, the mudlarks tried to pull in the anchor. Both failed, for the anchor was as heavy as Dick was dead. Presently, choleric Dutchmen up on the galjoot began to fire blunderbusses into the fog. It was time to leave.
Bob and Jack, who’d been acting as journeyman and apprentice, respectively, to Dick, were left without a Master Rope-Climber to emulate, and with a tendency to have extraordinarily bad dreams. For it was clear to them-if not right away, then eventually-that they had probably caused their own brother’s death by drawing the rope taut, thereby pulling Dick down below the surface of the river. They were out of the mudlark trade for good. John Cole found a replacement for Dick, and (rumor had it) gave him slightly different instructions: take your ankle out of the noose before you cut the anchor cable.
Scarcely a fortnight later, John Cole and his fellows were caught in the longboat in broad daylight. One of their schemes had succeeded, they’d gotten drunk on stolen grog, and slept right through sunrise. The mudlarks were packed off to Newgate.
Certain of them-newcomers to the judicial system, if not to crime-shared their ill-gotten gains with a starving parson, who came to Newgate and met with them in the Gigger. This was a chamber on the lower floor where prisoners could thrust their faces up to an iron grate and be heard, if they shouted loudly enough, by visitors a few inches away. There, the parson set up a sort of impromptu Bible study class, the purpose of which was to get the mudlarks to memorize the 51st Psalm. Or, failing that, at least the first bit:
Have mercie upon me, o God, according to they loving kindenes: according to the multitude of thy compassions put awaie mine iniquities.
Wash me throughly from mine iniquities, and clense me from my sin. For I knowe mine iniquities, amp; my sinne is ever before me.
Against thee, against thee onely have I sinned, amp; done evil in thy sight, that thou maiest be just when thou speakest, and pure when thou judgest.
Behold, I was borne in iniquitie, and in sinne hath my mother conceived me.
Quite a mouthful, that, for mudlarks, but these were more diligent pupils than any Clerke of Oxenford. For on the day that they were marched down the straight and narrow passage to the Old Bailey and brought below the magistrate’s balcony, an open Bible was laid in front of them, and they recited these lines. Which, by the evidentiary standards then prevailing in English courts, proved that they could read. Which proved that they were clergymen. Which rendered them beyond the reach of the criminal courts; for clergymen were, by long-hallowed tradition, subject only to the justice of the ecclesiastical courts. Since these no longer existed, the mudlarks were sent free.
It was a different story for John Cole, the oldest of the group. He had been to Newgate before. He had stood in the holding-pen of the Old Bailey before. And in that yard, below that balcony, in the sight of the very same magistrate, his hand had been clamped in a vise and a red-hot iron in the shape of a T had been plunged into the brawn of his thumb, marking him forever as Thief. Which by the evidentiary standards then prevailing, et cetera, made it most awkward for him to claim that he was a clergyman. He was sentenced, of course, to hang by the neck until dead at Tyburn.