Skeleton crew A 19th-century cartoon produced in support of a campaign highlighting the risks of transporting explosives by canal. By the late Victorian era, Britain’s waterways were widely regarded as dirty and dangerous places, staffed by inebriated boatmen
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One Friday night in March 1809, a working boat fully loaded with brandy, rum and 10 barrels of gunpowder travelled down the Paddington Canal on its way to the countryside, manned by a crew of four. A few miles out of London, two of the boatmen fancied a nightcap and decided to steal some of the liquor on board.
Moving quickly by the flickering candlelight of a lantern, they bored a hole in one of the gunpowder barrels by mistake. It immediately caught fire and, in the words of a newspaper reporting on the incident, “blew up with a most dreadful explosion”. The two thieves were killed in an instant, and the resulting blaze spread into a nearby field, burning down three haystacks. Incredibly, one boatman asleep in the cabin escaped unharmed, as did a lad on the towpath beside the canal. The culprits had become the victims of their own crime.