Ship of Fools and Slow Boat to Hell: The Literary Voyages of the Gravesend Barge

At the opening of The Cobler of Caunterburie (1590), the narrator makes a momentous decision: though he arrived at Billingsgate intending to hire a tilt boat, he instead decides to join the `crue of madde companions he spots waiting aboard the two-penny Gravesend barge. Their subsequent journey eastward on the Thames sparks a tale-telling competition à la The Canterbury Tales, with Chaucerian pilgrims reimagined as passengers travelling along one of early modern Londons most trafficked waterways. Though the journey from Billingsgate to Gravesend might be made aboard other vessels, a common barge shuttled back and forth in continuous motion along this twenty-some-mile stretch of river. Leaving Gravesend at low water and London at high water, the barge moved with regular irregularity at the turn of every tide. On occasion, the Gravesend barge also ventured into the realm of imagination, and this chapter charts its most significant literary voyages. That people of all estates might rub shoulders on the Gravesend barge makes it a suitable setting for the neo-Chaucerian tale-telling contests that feature not only in The Cobler of Caunterburie, but also in the highly derivative Tincker of Turvey (1630); this same social variegation provokes conflict rather than merriment, however, in John Foxes Book of Martyrs when John Browne sits too close to a priest (1570; expanded 1583). Sometimes, the Gravesend barge is a veritable ship of fools and or floating den of inequity attested, for example, by the title page to John Awdelays Fraternitye of Vacabondes (1575), where the legendary Cock Lorel affirms that his `knaves can be found aboard. At other times, it provides the stage for literary transactions: it is from this vessel that one `Pasquil (quite possibly Thomas Nashe, who mentions the barge with some frequency throughout his writings) purportedly penned A Countercuffe Given to Martin Junior (c. 1589), and an undated manuscript poem playfully reports of stationer John Day that `The grave consell of gravesend barge Gevethe [him] a privilege large to print the text of The Prick of Conscience. Elsewhere, this public ferry is the slow boat to hell. In Thomas Dekkers Newes from Hell (1606; later expanded as A Knights Conjuring, 1608), the Knight of the Post begins a journey to the underworld in the Gravesend barge, and this same vessel later reappears on the Acheron, where it is equated with Charons boat (an image apparently so apt that Dekker could not resist recycling it in If It Be Not Good, the Divel Is in It, c. 1610).