Parliamentary Papers

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1860 edition. Excerpt: ... landing or shipping their-mails and passengers at the pier; and this was not from the storm, although it was very severe at the same time, but from a large quantity of timber which had been broken down from the contractors' scaffolding, and was floating near the pier. The fear of the steamers paddle wheels getting entangled in the timber, induced the managers to signal the packet to Ramsgate. During the same five years there have been two cases of the French packets going to the Downs. The noble chairman asked me as to cases of steamers landing their passengers from boats since the Admiralty pier was used. The only case which, upon inquiry, I have heard of is, that of a Belgian boat from Ostend, which might have gone alongside the pier, but preferred the inner harbour, and went in when there was not water enough to enable her to get close to the quay, and therefore the mails were taken in boats to the foot of the ladder. Bar and sluicing. I find my evidence to be correct, as to bar before the erection of the new sluices being occasionally above the high water of neap tides, so that there was a dry passage quite across the harbour. Capiain Smithett (perhaps the best informed man on the subject of Dover and the mail packets), informed me that before the powerful sluices were applied, the harbour has been totally totally inaccessible for 21 consecutive days; and it is in the remembrance of many that the Appendix B. mails and p.issengers were frequently landed into boats in the bay, or the boats were run-aground upon the beach, and the passengers, male and female, transferred to men's shoulders. The miseries of a landing at Dover in those days were notorious and proverbial. Up to 1837 the harbour was blocked up at nearly every neap tide during the...