West Dock
As you reach the wharf you are overwhelmed by a welcoming riot of colour and movement, sounds and smells. The air is spiced with the coarse shouts of dockers. These great barrel-chested stevedores, hulking brutes with rippling muscles haul the cargo ashore. Most workers are stripped to the waist, their tanned torsos glistening with sweat and alive with snaking tattoos. Glowering foreman curse and cajole their crews to greater speed and effort. You watch as a swinging crane like a great siege engine lifts a net bulging with sacks of grain into the hold of a waiting vessel. An armada of gallerys and long boats pass back and forth from ship to shore, ferrying passengers and cargo back and forth.
The wharf is littered with goods, row on row of barrels and tea chests, towers of stacked crates and teetering piles of well-packed sacks, each container boldly stamped with the symbol of a trading house. Rich robed merchants strike hurried transaction for the traders to sign. Other harried clerks check manifests and make inventories before engageing teams of eager porters to carry goods either to the warehouses or to waiting queues of covered wagons and horse-drawn carts that provide carriage into the city.
Foot passengers hail hansom cabs and sedan chairs or depart on food followed by troops of broad backed bearers toting small vessels shuttling finished materials from the workhouses, tanning houses, smelters and mills of the Southside to the craftsman's workshops and merchant houses of the North.
Just back from the wharf stand long-raised warehouses and storerooms of the traders. These vast barns with shingle roofs are built on thick piles in case of flooding the doorways guarded by uniformed men from the Brotherhood of the Blade.
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