For many years the dockyard was associated with the name of Pett, a name famous in naval matters, and it was on one member of the family, Peter Pett, commissioner at Chatham, that most of the blame for the unhappy De Ruyter catastrophe most unjustly fell. Somebody had to be the scapegoat for all the higher failures, and poor Pett went to the Tower. But not all people agreed with the choice, as we may see from these satirical lines which were very popular at the time: “All our miscarriages on _Pett_ must fall; His name alone seems fit to answer all. Whose Counsel first did this mad War beget? Who would not follow when the Dutch were bet? Who to supply with Powder did forget Languard, Sheerness, Gravesend and Upnor? _Pett_. _Pett_, the Sea Architect, in making Ships Was the first cause of all these Naval slips; Had he not built, none of these faults had bin: If no Creation, there had been no Sin.” [Illustration: Rochester Castle.] The river here is a very busy place, and is under certain circumstances quite picturesque. There is a weird blending of ancient and modern, of the dimly-comprehended past and the blatant, commercial present, along Limehouse Reach, with its tremendous coal-hoists, and its smoking stacks, and its brown-sailed barges and snorting tugs—with the great masses of Rochester Castle and Cathedral looming out behind it all. Limehouse Reach is, indeed, an appropriate name, for all along this part, especially in the suburbs of Stroud and Frindsbury, the lime and cement-making industries are carried on extensively. Throughout a great deal of its length the Medway Valley is scarred by great quarries cut into the chalk hills; for it is chalk and the river mud, mixed roughly in the proportion of three to one and then burned in a kiln, which give the very valuable Portland cement, an invention now about a century old. [Illustration: Rochester Cathedral] Rochester itself is a quaint old place, standing on the ancient Roman road from Dover to London, and guarding the important crossing of the Medway. It can show numbers of Roman remains in addition to its fine old Norman castle, and its Cathedral with a tale of eight centuries. The town stands to-day much as it stood when Dickens first described it in his volumes. The Corn Exchange is still there—“oddly garnished with a queer old clock that projects over the pavement out of a grave, red-brick building, as if Time carried on business there, and hung out his sign;” and so are Mr. Pickwick’s “Bull Hotel,” and the West Gate (Jasper’s Gateway), and Eastbury House (Nuns’ House) of “Edwin Drood”; also the famous house of the “Seven Poor Travellers.” CHAPTER FOUR _Gravesend and Tilbury_ The dreary fenland district which stretches from the Isle of Grain inland to Gravesend is that so admirably used by Dickens for local colour in his novel, “Great Expectations.” Some of his descriptions of the scenery in this place of “mudbank, mist, swamps, and work” cannot be bettered.