This narrative depicts a collier brig lying aground on a beach in shallow water, at low tide. Coal is being 'whipped' out of her hold in baskets, using the large iron pulley suspended from a jeer or whip footed on her deck, and tipped down a chute over her 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 are all have colourful ruff-like padding of some sort 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, especially in watercolours and drawings. The north-eastern, cat-bark brigs 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.