SOME STIRRING TALES OF THE SEA HEARD AT THE PILOTS' CLUB
OF all the clubs in New York, I know none where a man who values the real things of life may spend a pleasanter hour than at the Pilots' Club, far down on the lower water-front, looking out of lofty windows in one of those great structures that make the city, seen from the bay, a place of wonderful fairy towers.
Here on the walls are pictures that call up thrilling scenes, as this painting of pilot-boat No. 11 (they call her The Phantom), rescuing passengers from the Oregon, helpless in the great storm of 1886, sixty miles beyond Sandy Hook. We shall find men sitting about these rooms, smoking and reading, who can tell the story of that night in simple, rugged words that will make the water devils dance before us.
Look at them! These are the pilots of New York, greatest seaport in the world, with its tidy annual total of twenty-odd millions in tonnage entered and cleared, against fifteen millions for London. These are the boys (some of them nearing seventy) who bring the mighty liners in and take them out, who fight through any sea at a vessel's blue-light bidding, and climb her fortress sides by a slamming whip-lash ladder that shames the flying trapeze. And this in trim derby hat (sometimes a topper), with gloves and smart necktie, and some New-York "Heralds" tucked away in a coat-tail pocket.
Look at them! These are the boys who stay out when every other floating thing comes in, who face an Arctic rigor when masts are barrel big with ice, and ropes like trees, and when climbing to a steamer's deck is like skating up an iceberg. These are the boys who know, through fog and darkness, the call of the whistling buoy that sings at the mouth of Gedney's, and can say "Good morning" to every bobbing juniper-spar that marks the long ship lane (red lights on starboard buoys, as you come in, white lights on port buoys), who know the way even when the glass and iron lamp-frames are all but sunk with ice—west-northwest and a quarter west for a mile and a half, till the beacon lights of Waackaack and Point Comfort line out straight on the Jersey shore, then west by south until the Sandy Hook light lines with the old South Beacon, then a short way northwest by west and a quarter west until the Conover Beacon lines with Chapel Hill, and so on straight to the Narrows.
These are the boys who know every rock and shoal in this most treacherous bay, with its thirteen lighthouses, its two light-ships, and its eighty danger spots, marked by nun-buoys, bell-buoys, electric-light buoys, whistling buoys, all familiar to them as their own homes.
Great boys they are for story-telling, these pilots, and by the hour I have listened to their memories of the sea. Two things made deep impression on me (so do we of less heroic lives take note of weakness in the strong)—one, that many pilots cannot swim (the same is true of deep-sea divers), the other, that pilots, even after years at sea, may be victims of seasickness like any novice. Pilot Breed, for instance, as trusty a man as stands at a liner's wheel, assured me that every time he goes out for duty he goes out for torture, too. And he does his duty and he bears the torture, so that after all we must count this rather strength than weakness.
THE RESCUE OF THE OREGON'S PASSENGERS.
"How can you do your work," I asked, "if you are in such distress?"
"Because I have to," he answered, with a wistful smile. "You know sailors are often seasick, but they go aloft just the same and work—because they have to. You could do it yourself if you had to. And yet," he added, half shutting his eyes, "I've many a time been so bad when we've tossed and tossed for days and nights on the watch for vessels that I've come pretty near to dropping quietly overboard and ending it."
This he said without any special emphasis, yet one could see that it was true.
"Why don't you give up the life?" I suggested.
"Perhaps I would," said he, "if I could do as well at anything else. Besides—"
Then came the queerest reason. His father, it seems, a pilot before him, had suffered from seasickness for thirty-seven years, and then for thirty years more had been quite free from it. "Now," said Breed, "I've been a pilot for twenty-two years, so I figure if I stick to it fifteen years more I may be like my father after that, and have no more trouble."
Think of that for a scheme of life!
Presently another pilot joined us, and set forth a remarkable experience. "I was taking the steamer Lahn once," said he, "through a heavy fog, and the captain and I were both on the bridge, anxious to locate the light-ship. You know she lies eight miles off the Hook, and gives incoming vessels their first bearings for the channel. Of course we didn't expect to see her light—you couldn't see anything in such weather—but we listened for her fog-horn. How we did listen! And presently we heard it. You get accustomed to judging distances over water by the sound, and I put that light-ship at five miles away, or thereabouts, and I wasn't far wrong. Well, we headed straight for it, and heard the fog-horn all the time for about a mile. Then it suddenly stopped.
"'Hullo!' said I. 'What's up?'
"'Confound those light-ship people,' growled the captain. 'I'll make complaint against them for stopping their horn.'
"'Wait a little,' said I, and kept listening, listening for the horn to blow again, and all the time we were running nearer to the shoal. Pretty soon we slowed down, and went on a couple of miles, then another mile. It seemed as if we must have reached the light-ship, and the captain was in a state of mind.
"Then suddenly the fog-horn sounded again, not four lengths away, sir, and the queer thing is it had been sounding the whole blamed time—we got positive proof of it afterward—only we hadn't heard it. The explanation was that we had passed through two sound zones—that's what the scientific people call 'em—and I can tell you those sound zones make considerable trouble for pilots."
To this perplexing statement the others nodded grave assent, and Breed capped the tale with a sound-zone story of his own. It was just off quarantine, and he was turning a liner to bring her up to dock when another liner came along, also running in. Breed gave the signal three times for the other liner to port her helm, and she signaled back three times for him to port his. By good luck each vessel did the right thing, and they passed safely, but neither pilot heard the whistle of the other, and each made angry complaint that the other had failed to whistle: yet witnesses testified that both had whistled, and each one swore that he had.
The truth was, according to the gentlemen who explain acoustic puzzles, that these two steamers happened to be placed there down the bay like two people in a whispering gallery, who cannot hear each other where they are, but would hear plainly if they moved further apart or drew closer together, so as to be in the foci of sound. Thus it was that distant vessels heard both sets of whistles, although there was a nearer region where these were inaudible.
Investigation has shown that these sound zones frequently establish themselves at sea (they vary in extent with wind and tide), so that the sound of horn or bell may be heard for a mile or two, and then become inaudible for, say, two miles, and then become audible again, almost as plainly as at first, for several miles more. The theory is that the sound-waves somehow go skipping over the sea, like a flat pebble over a mill-pond, in long jumps, and that a vessel under the highest part of one of these jumps is out of the sound influence, but will come into it again by going ahead a certain distance or going back a certain distance. Whether this explanation be the true one or not, the facts are abundantly vouched for, and are believed to explain various collisions and wrecks that have long been looked upon as mysteries.
"There are lots of queer things about our business," reflected an old pilot. "Now, you take steamers, they're just as different as people; each one has her own ways, and most likely her own partic'lar kind of crankiness. They talk about twin steamers, but there's no such thing. You can have 'em both made in the same yard, with every measurement alike, and they'll be as different, sir, as—as two violins. Why, I never saw a craft that'd sail the same on both tacks; they're always harder on one than the other. And as for compasses—well, I don't suppose there's ever two that came into this port with needles pointing just the same way. They all lean a shade one way or the other, same as watches."
"Lean a shade!" put in another man. "I've known 'em to lean a whole lot. I've known a steamer's compass to point plumb northeast instead of north. And that time we nearly went on the rocks by it. We were coming along past Fire Island, and the night was pretty thick. I felt something was queer and wouldn't go below, although the captain wanted me to. I kept looking up, looking up, searching for the north star, and pretty soon I made it out, or thought I did, through a rift in the blackness.
"'Hold on!' said I to the captain, 'something's the matter with your compass. There's the north star ahead of us, and it ought to be abaft the bridge.'
"'North star nothing,' said the captain. 'You're tired, man; you need a rest. Now, you just turn in for an hour, and I'll run her.'
"'You'll run her on the rocks,' said I, 'inside of fifteen minutes unless you pull her out of here. I tell you that compass is crazy.'
"Well, sir, he began to get scared when he saw me so positive, and a little later he pulled her out—just in time, too, for we were right on the breakers of Long Island, thanks to that lying compass. I've heard it's the magnetic sand at Shinnecock that devils compasses. You know there's acres and acres of it along there."
This led to a discussion of magnetic sand, and it was edifying to see how well informed these pilots are in the latest advances of science.
They set forth, for example, the clear advantage of literally pouring oil upon furious waters, and were all agreed that the foam of a spent wave, spreading around a life-boat, will often protect her against a succeeding wave. The foam seems to act like oil in preventing a driving wind from tossing up the surface—getting a hold on it, one might say.
"Taking it altogether," I asked, "do you men regard a pilot's life as very dangerous?"
It was Breed who answered: "Taking it altogether," said he, "I regard a pilot's life as about the most dangerous going. Here's a little thing to show you how fast they go, these lives of pilots. When I was received as apprentice there were eighteen other apprentices ahead of me, and the only way we could get to be pilots was through somebody dropping out, for there were never more than just so many licenses issued. Well, when I had been an apprentice for three years the whole eighteen had been received as pilots, and there were seven vacancies besides. That makes twenty-five dead pilots in three years, and most of 'em killed. Why, in the blizzard of 1888 alone ten of our boats were wrecked."
At this there was a solemn shaking of heads, then stories of the taking off of this or that gallant fellow. There was Van Pelt, one of the strongest men in the service—a pilot from a family of pilots—killed by the stroke of a tow-line—a big hawser that snapped across his body like a knife when the towing-bitts pulled out, and cut him clean in two.
Then there was that Norwegian apprentice, who was lost when they tried to send a small boat after Denny Reardon on the Massachusetts, in the storm of November, 1897. The Massachusetts was loaded with lions, tigers, and elephants—the whole Barnum & Bailey show—and Reardon had just got her safely over the bar. There was a fierce sea on that night, and Reardon waited at the steamer's side—waited and peered out at the flare-up light, while the boys on the New York tried to do the launching trick. And in one of the upsets this Norwegian chap was swept astern and churned to death in the screw-blades.
A PILOT-BOAT RIDING OUT A STORM.
Then there was Harry Devere, a Brooklyn pilot, who happened to be out in the cyclone of 1894, miles from land, in the little pilot-schooner, with its jaunty "17" on the canvas. There they were, riding out the storm, as pilot-boats do (facing it, not running), when up loomed a big West Indian fruiter, burning a blue light forward, which meant she was in sore need of a man at the wheel who knew the dangers in these parts. The old ocean was killing mad that night, air and water straining in a death struggle, and already four pilots had been carried on by liners, carried on to Europe because there was no human way of putting them off.
To start for that vessel now was madness, and every man in the pilot-crew knew it, and so did Devere. But he started just the same. He said he would try, and he did—tried through a cyclone that was sweeping a whole heaven of snow down upon the bellowing sea as if to smother its fury. Down into this they went, three of them, and somehow, by a miracle of skill, got the yawl under the vessel's lea. Then smash they were hurled against the iron side, and Devere sprang for the rope ladder—a poor, fluttering thing. He caught it, held fast, and the next moment was torn away by a great wave that cast him back into the waste of waters. And so he perished.
You ought to hear them tell these stories!
On the whole it seemed clear there is danger enough in this calling for the most extravagant taste. And the chief danger is not this boarding of vessels in storms, nor yet the dancing out of tempests in cockle-shell craft, where a steamer would scurry to shelter; neither of these, but the everlasting peril of being run down. That is a danger to break men's nerves, for always, night and day, the pilot-boats must lie in the swift track of the liners—right in the track, else they will pass unseen—and it must be known that this is a narrow track, a funnel for the ships of all the world, which pass ceaselessly, ceaselessly, converging from all ports, diverging to all ports, in storm, in fog, in darkness, and there the pilot-boats must lie, flying their square blue flags by day, burning their flare-up lights every fifteen minutes by night, waiting, waiting, in just such strained suspense as a man would feel before the rush of a silent locomotive, sure to kill him if he does not see it, before the rush of many silent locomotives which come while he sleeps, while he eats, perhaps while he prays.
And constantly in the pilot records is this laconic entry: "No. 8 run over and sunk; all hands lost." "No. 11 run over and sunk; one man saved, the rest lost." "Pilot-boat Columbia cut down by a liner; ten men lost." No chance for heroic struggle here, no death with dramatic setting and columns in the papers, but a stupid, blundering execution while the men rest helpless on weary bunks, lulled by the surging sea—"run over and sunk."