The River as Battleground (Daylight Hours, 2 September 1666)

The fire pressed westward along the Thames, and the river that had always protected London now showed its limits. By mid-morning on Sunday, 2 September 1666, the water between the burning City and the safer south bank had become a scene of desperate commerce. Where watermen had once plied their trade with the practiced rhythm of daily labor, craft of every description now swarmed—wherries, sculls, lighters, private barges—loaded beyond any safe draft with citizens and their possessions. The Thames was a working artery, not a floodwall, and it could not hold back what the wind drove forward. John Evelyn, observing from the river that evening, reported that it was ‘covered with barges and boats making their escape piled with goods.’

Samuel Pepys, having delivered his report to Whitehall before dawn, returned to the river in full daylight. He had rowed through darkness to wake the King; now he saw what that warning had not prevented. The watermen, reading the emergency with instincts honed by a life of supply and demand, named prices that would have seemed criminal twelve hours before. Pepys recorded without editorial comment, but his diary entry tells its own story: the river had become a marketplace of last resort, and the currency was survival. A man might pay everything he had to reach Bankside, and find no shelter when he arrived. Pepys himself wrote of being on the water ‘up and down, it still encreasing, and the wind great,’ and noted that ‘all over the Thames, with one’s face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops.’

The watermen of London numbered in the thousands, organized in a hierarchy of licensed freemen and unlicensed laborers, their trade governed by ancient statutes and daily competition. On this Sunday, the distinctions collapsed. Every man who could pull an oar found himself in demand. The licensed watermen who held official rights to carry passengers between the City stairs and the south bank watched their monopoly dissolve. Unlicensed men, boys, anyone with access to a boat, pushed into the traffic. The result was not liberation but congestion. The river narrowed where the bridges constricted it, and Old London Bridge with its nineteen piers became a choke point where boats jammed against each other and passengers waited with the flames behind them.

Bankside and Southwark lay outside the City wall. They offered the nearest safety. But safety was relative. The goods piled on the south shore had no protection beyond their distance from the fire. No municipal authority registered what arrived or guarded against theft. The value of a man’s possessions now depended on what he could carry, what he could pay to transport, and what remained when he reached the other side. Pepys, who would later send his own goods by water, understood the calculation. The river was a gamble he intended to take.

The royal response had begun to coalesce by late morning. Charles II, roused from sleep, had ordered the Duke of York to the scene. James represented the highest authority the Crown could deploy. He brought soldiers, courtiers, and the implicit threat that military methods would now replace the failed civil administration. Thomas Bloodworth, the Lord Mayor, had abandoned his post after the early hours. His refusal to pull down houses had proved both unpopular and ineffective. The Duke’s arrival signaled a change in command. It did not immediately change what was possible.

The soldiers who accompanied James were not firemen. They were infantry, trained to stand in line and discharge muskets, to hold ground or to take it. Their assignment now was different: to create firebreaks by demolition, to pull down houses ahead of the flames, to use force where persuasion had failed. The tools at their disposal were inadequate to the scale of the emergency. The fire had spread too far, too fast. By the time the Duke’s party reached the streets near the riverfront, the flames had outpaced any systematic approach to containment.

The Thames itself offered the most obvious barrier. Fire could not cross open water. This was received wisdom, and London’s geography seemed to favor it. The river bent through the City in a broad curve, providing a natural moat along the entire southern edge. Yet the fire did not respect this logic. It traveled not by water but by air—sparks and embers carried on the strong easterly wind that had persisted through the dry summer. The wind drove the flames westward and northward, but it also lofted burning debris across the river’s surface. Fires broke out on the south bank, ignited by material that sailed over the water on the wind’s current. The barrier leaked.

More critically, the fire’s advance along the riverfront threatened to outflank any defense that relied on the Thames as a stopping point. Thames Street, the broad thoroughfare that ran parallel to the river, was lined with warehouses and wharves that stored the goods of London’s trade. These buildings—many recently constructed or rebuilt after earlier fires—contained the most combustible concentrations in the City: tar, oil, hemp, spirits, the accumulated cargo of a maritime empire. The fire found this fuel and fed on it with an intensity that made human intervention seem futile. By evening, Evelyn would report ‘the whole City in dreadful flames near the water-side; all the houses from the Bridge, all Thames-street, and upwards towards Cheapside, down to the Three Cranes, were now consumed.’

The effort to fight from the water began in desperation and continued in confusion. Naval resources represented the most sophisticated technology available for moving large quantities of water. The Royal Navy maintained dockyards downstream at Deptford and Woolwich. Ships at anchor in the river carried pumps designed to clear bilge water from their holds. These pumps—chain pumps, hand-operated mechanical devices—could move water more efficiently than the leather buckets that formed London’s standard fire-fighting equipment. The Admiralty, alerted to the emergency, ordered seamen and equipment to the scene.

What followed illustrated the gap between institutional capacity and operational reality. The seamen who arrived from the dockyards were skilled men, accustomed to working together under command. But a ship’s pump was designed for a ship’s deck: a stable platform with clear access to the water below and to the fire above. The riverfront of burning London offered none of these conditions. The wharves that jutted into the Thames were themselves afire or threatened. The streets behind them were narrow, obstructed by falling timbers and panicked crowds. Houses built out over the water on wooden jetties brought the flames directly above the river’s surface.

The pumps required a crew to operate, a source of water to draw from, and a clear aim at the fire. The Thames at low tide exposed mudflats that made approach difficult. At high tide, the current ran strong and the water level rose against the wharves, but the fire did not wait for favorable conditions. The seamen who struggled with their equipment found themselves fighting the flames and the geometry of a city never planned for such emergency.

Contemporary accounts suggest that some naval pumps were brought into action on the riverfront, their crews working in shifts as the heat intensified. The water they threw was not negligible. But the scale of the fire had already exceeded what localized application could achieve. A pump might save a single building, a short stretch of wharf. It could not address the conflagration that had spread across dozens of streets and advanced faster than any runner could carry news of its progress.

The critical failure came at Thames Street itself. Here, if anywhere, a determined stand might have checked the fire’s advance along the water. The street was wide by medieval standards, a route for carts bringing goods to the wharves. Its buildings, though densely packed, were not the narrow timber-framed houses of the interior lanes. Many were stone-built warehouses, substantial structures that might have resisted if properly defended. But they were full of the materials that fed the fire, and their proximity allowed the flames to bridge any gap. The street’s lower end, near Pudding Lane, had a wharf called Rothersgate, a node in the network of trade that now fueled the conflagration.

The decision to use gunpowder for demolition at Thames Street represented the most drastic measure yet attempted. Blowing up houses to create firebreaks had been proposed and rejected in the early hours, when Bloodworth still held command and property rights seemed inviolable. Now, with the Duke of York’s soldiers on the scene and the fire’s advance threatening to make those rights irrelevant, the method was tried. Gunpowder, carried from military stores or salvaged from ships’ magazines, was placed in selected buildings and ignited.

The result was not the controlled clearance that the tactic theoretically promised. Gunpowder demolition required preparation: holes drilled in bearing walls, charges calculated for the structure’s weight and materials, timing that allowed the crew to withdraw safely. The fire allowed none of this deliberation. Men working with powder in burning buildings faced immediate risk of premature ignition from falling embers or radiant heat. The explosions that resulted were often partial, bringing down a wall or facade while leaving enough combustible structure to continue burning. The noise added to the general terror. Debris scattered fresh fuel across adjacent streets.

More fundamentally, the demolition at Thames Street came too late to create an effective barrier. The fire had already spread beyond the point where any single break could contain it. To the west, flames advanced into the heart of the City. To the north, narrow lanes carried sparks toward Cheapside and the great commercial district. The riverfront itself, the supposed line of defense, was compromised by wind-driven embers that crossed to the south bank and by the impossibility of maintaining any continuous position against heat and smoke.

The human cost of these hours is difficult to quantify with precision. The death toll of the Great Fire would later be reckoned as surprisingly low—officially, only a handful of verified deaths, though the true number was certainly higher, especially among the poor whose disappearance left no documentary trace. But the immediate suffering was visible to every witness. Pepys, moving between river and court, recorded people carrying what they could save, boats so loaded they seemed in danger of swamping, the general confusion that prevailed where order had once governed.

The watermen who profited from this chaos were also men who risked their lives and craft in conditions that no fare could adequately compensate. The river in fire and smoke was dangerous: burning debris fell from above, heat distorted judgment, the press of other boats created collision and capsize. Some watermen worked through the day and into night, ferrying passengers until they could no longer row. Others, calculating the odds, refused to approach the burning bank at all, or demanded payment in advance from passengers they suspected could not pay. The market did not produce virtue.

By afternoon, the character of river traffic had begun to shift. The initial panic of flight was supplemented by more organized efforts at salvage. Men with commercial interests in the threatened district—merchants, warehousemen, factors for overseas traders—hired boats at premium rates to remove goods from storage before the flames reached them. This was not simple self-preservation but calculation: the value of a cargo of spices or textiles, weighed against the cost of its transport and the probability of finding it intact on the south bank. The river became a conduit for capital flight as well as human escape. Pepys, hearing reports of wealth at a colleague’s house, ‘got a cart; and thither, and there brought my money all away’ by water to safer ground.

The royal authorities attempted to impose order on this traffic. The Duke of York’s presence carried with it the apparatus of military command: messengers, orders, the theoretical power to compel obedience. But the practical difficulties of controlling movement on the river were immense. There was no single point of authority, no chain of command that reached every boat and every waterman. The King’s soldiers could clear a street, guard a wharf, perhaps impress men for labor. They could not direct the thousand individual decisions that determined what crossed the Thames and what remained behind.

The fire’s behavior on the riverfront also confounded any simple military response. Fire, unlike an enemy army, did not concentrate its force where it could be met. It spread by accident and opportunity, finding the path of least resistance through a city built without fireproofing in mind. The wind was the decisive factor, and the wind could not be commanded. The Duke of York and his officers could direct demolition, order men to stand and fight, threaten punishment for desertion. They could not make water flow uphill or air stand still.

As afternoon wore on, the inadequacy of the river as a theater of operations became impossible to ignore. The pumps, where deployed, were running dry or breaking down. The crews, exhausted by hours of labor in intolerable heat, were replaced by fresh men who found the situation no more manageable. The demolition at Thames Street, continued at desperate cost, produced gaps in the streetscape that the fire simply circumvented. The south bank, receiving the flood of refugees, showed its own vulnerability as sparks ignited scattered fires that required attention and diverted resources.

Pepys, in his diary entry for this day, recorded his own movements with characteristic precision: to Whitehall, to the river, back to his house, then to the Tower to observe the fire’s progress from relative safety. His perspective was that of a man with access to power and means to protect his own interests. But even his privileged position offered no clear view of what was happening or what could be done. Smoke obscured the skyline. The noise of burning and collapse made communication difficult. The rapid spread of the fire defied any attempt to map its progress with confidence.

The Tower of London, where Pepys went to observe, stood outside the City wall to the east, apparently safe from immediate threat. From its height, he could see the extent of burning: the column of smoke that rose above the City, the glow that indicated active fire, the dark patches that might mean destruction already complete or areas not yet touched. But this vantage offered no tactical insight. The fire was too large, too distributed, too driven by wind and fuel to be comprehended as a single event. It was many fires, joining and separating, advancing and lingering, consuming the dense fabric of the medieval City at a pace that made any response seem belated.

The river continued its double life as lifeline and obstacle. Those who reached the south bank with their goods faced an uncertain future. No organized relief existed, no authority to register losses or promise compensation. The goods piled on Bankside lay exposed to weather and theft. The refugees who guarded them were themselves without shelter or sustenance. The emergency had produced a population of displaced persons that London’s institutions were not designed to accommodate. Evelyn observed the exodus through the City gates, ‘which for many miles were strewed with moveables of all sorts, and tents erecting to shelter both people and what goods they could get away. Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle!’

The contrast with normal operation was stark. On an ordinary Sunday, the Thames would have carried reduced traffic: some commercial movement, the passage of those with business between banks, the leisure boats of those who could afford them. Watermen would have competed for fares with regulated aggression. The river would have been a working waterway, predictable in its rhythms. Now it was a scene of breakdown, its normal functions suspended or distorted beyond recognition.

The naval involvement in fire-fighting, however inadequate, represented a significant commitment of national resources. The Royal Navy was England’s premier military institution, the foundation of its international power. To divert its men and equipment to a city fire was to acknowledge that the emergency exceeded local capacity. Yet the navy’s tools were not suited to the task. Sea power, the dominant strategic fact of England’s recent history, could not be translated into fire power in London’s streets. The pumps that cleared bilge water from warships were not designed to throw continuous streams onto burning buildings. The seamen who operated them were not trained for urban combat against an enemy that had no position to take and no line to break.

The failure at Thames Street illustrated this mismatch most clearly. The attempt to create a wet barrier by demolition and water application required coordination between military engineers who placed the powder and naval crews who manned the pumps. In practice, this coordination was imperfect or absent. The explosions created confusion as much as clearance. The water that followed was insufficient to wet the debris or protect adjacent structures. The fire, driven by wind and feeding on the concentrated combustibles of riverside warehouses, simply found another path.

By evening, the position on the riverfront was untenable in any organized sense. The Duke of York had moved inland, following the fire’s advance into City streets. The soldiers who remained on the wharves were engaged in piecemeal efforts: to save what could be saved, to check flames where they could be reached, to assist in evacuation of those still trapped on the burning bank. The river traffic continued, but with a desperate rhythm that acknowledged no master. Watermen still plied for fares, but the distinction between commerce and charity, between exploitation and rescue, had become impossible to maintain.

The physical transformation of the riverfront was already apparent to those who could observe it. Buildings that had stood for generations were collapsing into the Thames or collapsing inward, their timbers consumed, their stone facades cracking from heat. The wharves that projected into the river burned from above and below: from flames that reached them from the street, from embers that fell on their decks, from radiant heat that made the water itself seem to steam. The smell of burning permeated everything—tar and hemp and spices, the particular odors of commerce now become the universal odor of destruction.

Pepys, returning to his house in the evening, found his own possessions still at risk. He had sent his wife and servants to prepare for removal. The goods he valued—his books, his papers, the accumulated materials of his career—were packed for flight. The river that might carry them to safety was the same river that had proved insufficient to stop the fire’s advance. The contradiction was personal as well as structural: the Thames was the only escape route available, and it was an escape route that led to no certain destination.

The night that followed would bring new phases of emergency. The fire, unchecked by the efforts of daylight, would continue to advance in darkness, when the wind often strengthened and the visual cues that guided fire-fighting disappeared. The river, in darkness, would become more dangerous still: boats colliding in smoke, watermen lost in confusion, the south bank itself threatened by fires that had crossed in the afternoon and might spread in the night. The pattern of inadequate response, of heroic effort and systemic failure, would continue.

The fire, unchecked by water or demolition, turns inland from the riverfront.