Mare’s shipbuilding yards on the shores of Bow Creek, near its entrance to the Thames, started in a very small way, but within seventeen years it extended until it was employing nearly 400 hands. In 1845, a large portion of the Essex side of the yard was a marsh, covered with water at high tide. By 1854 it was one of the principal shipbuilding yards in the world. The wages of the workmen at Blackwall averaged for eighteen months £5000 per week, and some weeks it was £1600 more. The yards of Messrs. Green, Messrs. Scott Russell, Messrs. Dudgeon, Messrs. Maudslay, Messrs. Samuda, Messrs. Yarrow, and Messrs. Thorneycroft, to mention only a few, besides a host of smaller builders, employed their thousands of hands; but never a keel is laid there now. The banks of the river which rang to the stroke of the shipwrights’ hammers are silent; the slips are unoccupied or devoted to other uses, the furnaces are cold; the machinery is sold or dismantled, and fragments of it may yet be seen rusting ingloriously on the scrap-heap. Dawn now brings no activity to the shipbuilding yards of the Thames, and dusk adds nothing to their stagnation. Steam-ship repairing work is nearly all that London river sees now. If, as sailors say, ships have spirits that return to the yards where the vessels were built, when those ships are lost or broken up, there must be many homeless phantoms haunting the banks of the historic stream, seeking rest and finding none, and perchance, as did certain of the ships they represent, going down the river with the tide never to return: a ghostly fleet bearing many mysteries which shall not be solved till the day when the insatiable sea is called upon to surrender all it has taken captive. The general superiority of iron screw steamers over those of wood led to the introduction of a number of types designed to meet the requirements of special trades. James Hodgson, who, in addition to the _Sarah Sands_, built the _Antelope_, the first iron screw steamer to leave Liverpool for the Brazils, introduced the tubular type of iron vessels. _The Carbon_, a vessel of this type, was built by him for the Eastern Archipelago Company in 1855. In the construction of this boat he proposed to dispense with the ordinary side frames altogether.