This narrative depicts a collier brig lying aground on a beach in shallow water, at low tide. Coal is being 'whipped' out of its hold in baskets, using the large iron pulley suspended from a jeer or whip footed on her deck, and tipped down a chute over the side into a cart waiting in the water below. A man mounted on a cart-horse in the central foreground carries a metal bucket of coal in his right hand and a long horse-whip over his shoulder (possibly a visual pun on the process being shown), from the ship towards the cart on shore to the right, which is waiting its turn to be loaded. The horses all have colourful ruff-like padding behind their working collars in blue, yellow or red. The ridden horse also has a red cockade on the headband of its bridle. Other shipping has been depicted in the distance, the vessel to the right apparently being another brig, though over-scaled for the type.

The scene shown is a frequent subject in coastal marine art of the late-18th and early 19th centuries, though more commonly in watercolours and drawings. The north-eastern, 'cat-barks' employed in the coal trade were capacious, flat-bottomed and solidly built precisely for the purpose of 'taking the ground' to load and unload in this way, in places without deep-water quay installations. By around 1800 they were mainly brigs, as here, especially smaller ones, rather than ship-rigged (three-masted) which was the case with those that became famous for Captain Cook's use of them in his three Pacific voyages (1768-80), again because of the same roomy and sturdy characteristics. Their origins partly lay in more 'fluyt-sterned' Dutch types captured in the three Anglo-Dutch wars of 1651-74.