oat
is navigated for hire without a licence, and so on.

Detective-Inspector Helden and his staff of the Criminal Investigation
Department of the division are the most dreaded enemies of the river
thieves. Time was, when the "light-horsemen" of the river were in their
heyday, that L25,000 worth of property was stolen annually. That has
been reduced to less than a couple of hundred pounds--a comparatively
trivial, insignificant figure.

It is to both branches of the river police that those who use the river
owe this complete immunity from theft. Every man of the C.I.D. in the
division has a complete knowledge of thieves and receivers on whom it is
necessary to maintain constant surveillance. Marine store dealers and
old metal dealers are kept in close touch, for it is to them that the
odds and ends of ship equipment might be taken by a dishonest sailor or
watchman.

One of the most famous of river thieves was a man whom the public knew
as "Slippery Jack." He made a rich harvest until he was laid by the
heels. Almost naked, and his skin greased lavishly, he would slip aboard
likely-looking craft in search of plunder. If he were disturbed, he
would dodge away, his greased skin aiding him if anyone attempted to
seize him. He was tracked down one evening to Blackfriars, where he
backed his boat into midstream and turned at bay with a vicious
sheath-knife. Only after a fierce struggle, in which the police did not
escape scot free, was he arrested. His exploits cost him ten years'
penal servitude.

It was the detective branch of the Thames Police that solved the
complicated mystery of a supposed case of murder which attracted much
public attention at the time. The full facts have never been made
public, and may be interesting.

In August, 1897, the body of a naked man was found floating near the
Tower Bridge. A line was woven tightly round the body, arms and neck,
and a doctor stated that the body must have been in the water about
three weeks, that death was due to strangulation, and that he thought it
impossible for the man to have tied the rope round himself, though it
must have been tied before death.

A woman identified the body as that of her husband, Von Veltheim--he who
shot Woolf Joel in Johannesburg and was later sentenced at the Old
Bailey for the blackmail of Mr. Solly Joel--and a jury brought in a
verdict that "death was caused by strangulation whether amounting to
murder the evidence fails to show."

Her