A night on the river, by A Special Correspondent

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

This report, published in 1873, describes a journalist joining the Thames river police on a night patrol among the ships moored on the river in London.

At eleven o’clock on Thursday night I stepped down into a long open galley at the Wapping police station, and took my seat in the stern beside Inspector Dawlish, with two constables at the oars and a third crouched in the bows with a dark lantern. The river police, he told me, have kept watch upon the Thames since the year 1798, when the merchants grew tired of losing their cargoes to thieves.

We rowed downstream with the tide, keeping close beneath the black hulls of the colliers and timber ships, so close that I could hear the creak of their cables. No man spoke. The oars were muffled with rags so that they made no sound. Twice the inspector raised his hand and the galley drifted while he listened; once it was only a dog, and once a ship’s watchman singing to himself to keep awake.

Near Limehouse a small boat slid out from behind a lighter loaded with sugar. The lantern was opened upon it in an instant, and showed two men with three sacks between their feet who swore that they had been fishing. They were taken in tow. The inspector remarked, as calmly as if he spoke of the weather, that a sack of sugar fetches eleven shillings at the receivers’ shops, and that a good night upon the river may be worth more to such men than a month of honest labour.

(a) Since what year have the river police kept watch on the Thames? (b) Why were the oars muffled with rags? (c) What does the men’s claim that they had been fishing suggest?