Norsemen navigated the Tyne
centuries ago. The keel is a tubby, grimy-looking craft, rounded fore
and aft, with a single large square sail, which the keel-bullies, as the
Tyne watermen are called, manage with great dexterity; the vessel being
guided by the aid of the "swape," or great oar, which is used as a kind
of rudder at the stern of the vessel. These keelmen are an exceedingly
hardy class of workmen, not by any means so quarrelsome as their
designation of "bully" would imply--the word being merely derived from
the obsolete term "boolie," or beloved, an appellation still in familiar
use amongst brother workers in the coal districts. One of the most
curious sights upon the Tyne is the fleet of hundreds of these
black-sailed, black-hulled keels, bringing down at each tide their black
cargoes for the ships at anchor in the deep water at Shields and other
parts of the river below Newcastle.

These preliminary observations will perhaps be sufficient to explain the
meaning of many of the occupations alluded to, and the phrases employed,
in the course of the following narrative, some of which might otherwise
have been comparatively unintelligible to the general reader.

[Picture: Coal Waggons]

[Picture: Wylam Colliery and Village]

CHAPTER II.
WYLAM AND DEWLEY BURN--GEORGE STEPHENSON'S EARLY YEARS.

The colliery village of Wylam is situated on the north bank of the Tyne,
about eight miles west of Newcastle. The Newcastle and Carlisle railway
runs along the opposite bank; and the traveller by that line sees the
usual signs of a colliery in the unsightly pumping-engines surrounded by
heaps of ashes, coal-dust, and slag; whilst a neighbouring iron-furnace
in full blast throws out dense smoke and loud jets of steam by day and
lurid flames at night. These works form the nucleus of the village,
which is almost entirely occupied by coal-miners and iron-furnacemen.
The place is remarkable for its large population, but not for its
cleanness or neatness as a village; the houses, as in most colliery
villages, being the property of the owners or lessees, who employ them in
temporarily accommodating the workpeople, against whose earnings there is
a weekly set-off for house and coals. About the end of last century the
estate of which Wylam forms part, belonged to Mr. Blackett, a gentleman
of considerable celebrity in coal-mining, then more generally known as
the proprietor