Owen Pell

A barge-captain of the Lower Thames, working the reaches where the river still does London’s heavy work, and one of the practical names by which the city remembers how its freight actually moves.

Owen Pell is a barge-captain of the Lower Thames, one of the working names by which London remembers how things move through it. He belongs to the reaches where the river still does the city’s heavy work, carrying the freight that the roads cannot take cheaply and the carts cannot take at all: stone, iron, machine parts and bulk stores. In a system thick with port-reeves, customs clerks, harbour notices and inspections, a barge-captain holds no office, yet the capital could not keep its yards supplied without men of his kind.

On the lower river his name carries the particular respect given to a man whose cargo arrives. Quay men say he reads a congested reach as a clerk reads a ledger, that he is calm and difficult to hurry, and that he would rather lie a tide at anchor than argue a heavy hull through a crowded approach. He keeps his manifests in good order, having learned that the regulated river punishes impatience with delay and that a heavy cargo held for inspection costs more by the hour than a light one.

Companies meet him when something heavy must go downriver or up it without passing through a dozen hands on the road: a crated engine, a salvaged load, a consignment its owners would like delivered before rumour catches up with it. He is not a smuggler and does not care to be mistaken for one. He will carry what his papers name, charge for the tides it costs him, and expect passengers to keep clear of his winches.

In person

In person, Owen Pell is enormous: a man of forty-seven standing some six foot four, broad, thick-necked and heavy in the stomach, with huge arms and the build of a working strongman grown heavier with age. He is bald on top, with a horseshoe of coarse dark-grey hair and massive ginger-grey mutton-chop whiskers on an otherwise clean-shaven face. That face is broad and battered, the nose flattened and the skin weathered reddish-brown; a black patch covers his right eye, the left is pale grey, and two fingers are missing from his left hand. He dresses for the water in a tar-black river coat or vest over a thick, dirty-cream knitted jersey, an orange-brown neckerchief, broad leather belt, dark trousers, huge river boots and wrist guards, sometimes with a wool cap. An iron-shod boat hook, towing rope, mooring chain, brass river horn, chronometer, chalk tally board, folding knife and compact pistol are his working kit, and he is most at home among barge machinery, gauges, winches and the brass load and draught instruments of his trade.