Think of some of our street names—­Malabar Street, Amoy Place, Nankin Street, Pekin Street, Canton Street.  And John Company has left its marks.  You pick up hints of the sea here as you pick old shells out of dunes.  We have, still nourishing in a garden, John Company’s Chapel of St. Matthias, a fragment of a time that was, where now the vigorous commercial life of the Company shows no evidence whatever of its previous urgent importance.  Founded in the time of the Commonwealth as a symbol for the Company’s men who, when in rare moments they looked up from the engrossing business of their dominant hours, desired a reminder of the ineffable things beyond ships and cargoes, the Chapel has survived all the changes which destroyed their ships and scattered the engrossing business of their working hours into dry matter for antiquaries.  So little do men really change.  They always leave their temples, whether they lived in Poplar or Nineveh.  Only the names of their gods change.  The Chapel at Poplar it was then, when this shipping parish had no docks, and the nearest church was over the fields to Stepney.  Our vessels then lay in the river.  We got our first dock, that of the West India Merchants, at the beginning of last century.  A little later the East India Dock was built by John Company.  Then another phase began to reshape Dockland.  There came a time when the Americans looked in a fair way, sailing ahead fast with the wonderful clippers Donald McKay was building at Boston, to show us a tow rope.  The best sailers ever launched were those Yankee ships, and the Thames building yards were working to create the ideal clipper which should beat them.  This really was the last effort of sails, for steamers were on the seas, and the Americans were actually making heroic efforts to smother them with canvas.  Mr. Green, of Poplar, worried over those Boston craft, declared we must be first again, and first we were.  But both Boston and Poplar, in their efforts to perfect an old idea, did not see a crude but conquering notion taking form to magnify and hasten both commerce and war.

But they were worth doing, those clippers, and worth remembering.  They sail clear into our day as imperishable memories.  They still live, for they did far more than carry merchandise.  When an old mariner speaks of the days of studding sails it is not the precious freight, the real purpose of his ships, which animates his face.  What we always remember afterwards is not the thing we did, or tried to do, but the friends who were about us at the time.  But our stately ships themselves, with our River their home, which gave Poplar’s name, wherever they went, a ring on the counter like a sound guinea, at the most they are now but planks bearded with sea grass, lost in ocean currents, sighted only by the albatross.