By Pike and Dyke

CHAPTER I

THE "GOOD VENTURE"


Rotherhithe in the year of 1572 differed very widely from the
Rotherhithe of today. It was then a scattered village, inhabited
chiefly by a seafaring population. It was here that the captains
of many of the ships that sailed from the port of London had their
abode. Snug cottages with trim gardens lay thickly along the banks
of the river, where their owners could sit and watch the vessels
passing up and down or moored in the stream, and discourse with
each other over the hedges as to the way in which they were handled,
the smartness of their equipage, whence they had come, or where
they were going. For the trade of London was comparatively small
in those days, and the skippers as they chatted together could form
a shrewd guess from the size and appearance of each ship as to the
country with which she traded, or whether she was a coaster working
the eastern or southern ports.

Most of the vessels, indeed, would be recognized and the captains
known, and hats would be waved and welcomes or adieus shouted as
the vessels passed. There was something that savoured of Holland
in the appearance of Rotherhithe; for it was with the Low Countries
that the chief trade of England was carried on; and the mariners
who spent their lives in journeying to and fro between London and
the ports of Zeeland, Friesland, and Flanders, who for the most part
picked up the language of the country, and sometimes even brought
home wives from across the sea, naturally learned something from
their neighbours. Nowhere, perhaps, in and about London were the
houses so clean and bright, and the gardens so trimly and neatly
kept, as in the village of Rotherhithe, and in all Rotherhithe not
one was brighter and more comfortable than the abode of Captain
William Martin.

It was low and solid in appearance; the wooden framework was
unusually massive, and there was much quaint carving on the beams.
The furniture was heavy and solid, and polished with beeswax until
it shone. The fireplaces were lined with Dutch tiles; the flooring
was of oak, polished as brightly as the furniture. The appointments
from roof to floor were Dutch; and no wonder that this was so, for
every inch of wood in its framework and beams, floor and furniture,
and had been brought across from Friesland by William Martin in
his ship, the Good Venture. It had been the dowry he received with
his pretty young wife, Sophie Plomaert.

Sophie was the daughter of a well-to-do worker in wood near
Amsterdam. She was his only daughter, and although he had nothing
to say against the English sailor who had won her heart, and who
was chief owner of the ship he commanded, he grieved much that
she should leave her native land; and he and her three brothers
determined that she should always bear her former home in her
recollection. They therefore prepared as her wedding gift a facsimile
of the home in which she had been born and bred. The furniture
and framework were similar in every particular, and it needed only
the insertion of the brickwork and plaster when it arrived. Two of
her brothers made the voyage in the Good Venture, and themselves
put the framework, beams, and flooring together, and saw to the
completion of the house on the strip of ground that William Martin
had purchased on the bank of the river.