The burying-ground of wrecks! What a sight from the rugged height back of the water! Here are blackened, shapeless hulks from the great river fire of 1900, when red-hot liners drifted blazing to these very flats. Here is the ferry-boat River Bell, decked with flags in her day, and danced on by gay excursionists, now thick with mud and slime, her deck-beams spongy under foot, her wheel-frames twisted like a broken spider's-web. Here are the half-sunken halves of some ice-barge, cut clean in two by a liner. Here, heaving with the tide, is an aged car-float with a watchman's shanty on it, heaped with its rusted boilers, its anchors, cranes, gear-wheels, cables, pumps, a tangle of iron things that were once important. Here is a scuttled tug-boat that has been in a law-suit (and the mud) for years. Here is a coal-barge, wedged open and sunk by her owner to steal the insurance money. Wrecks spread all about us, and above them rise the masts and cranes of pontoons and pumping-craft, that seem, in the shadows and desolation, like things of evil omen guarding their prey.
Night is coming on. Lights show in the great city across the river. Ferry-boats pass. Lines of barges pass. Whistles sound. The waves splash, splash against the wrecks, touching them gently, one would say. But nobody else cares. Nobody comes near. Nobody looks. The divers go home. The wrecking-crews eat and turn in to sleep. A rat squeals somewhere. These helpless, crippled hulks are alone in the night, and they grind, grind against decaying stumps. They are wrecks, they are dead, they are buried—and yet they can move a little in the mud!
III
AN AFTERNOON OF STORY-TELLING ON THE STEAM-PUMP "DUNDERBERG"
WHEN there is difficult diving to be done in the East River, or in any river where the tide runs strong, you will see the wrecking-boats swing idly at anchor for hours waiting for slack water, the only time when divers dare go down. And often there is half a day's waiting for half an hour's work, and often a week goes by on a two hours' job, say, in full midstream, where not even the most venturesome beginner will stay down more than twenty minutes at the turn, lest he be swept away, ponderous suit and all, by the rush of the river. It's start your patch and leave it to be ripped open by the beating sea; it's get your chain fast nine weary times, and have it nine times torn away over night by some foolish, bumping tug-boat; in fact, it's worry and aggravation until the thing is over.
Also, this is the time of times, if you can get aboard, to make acquaintance with the wreckers, to pick up lore of the diving-suit and tales of the divers.
It was bad weather when we, on the sturdy old Dunderberg, were busy at a wreck off the Brooklyn shore, not far from Grand Street ferry (I had as much to do with lifting this wreck as the pewter spoons stuck around the little cabin). It wasn't much of a wreck anyhow—only a grain-boat—but it had my gratitude for stubbornly refusing to come up. And so we had hours to spend down in the cabin aforesaid, which could barely hold cook-stove and dining-table, but managed to be parlor and bedroom besides; also laundry on occasions. The Dunderberg, I should explain, was originally a mud-scow, but for good conduct and an injury to her nose had been changed into a steam-pump. She could suck her forty tons of coal an hour out of a wreck with the best of them. And she traveled with four pontoons, no one of which could touch her in table fare, especially coffee.
Late one afternoon, when the rain was drizzling and the swinging brass lamps lit, we sat about on wooden stools (and some were curled up in bunks along the walls) and listened to the talk of Atkinson and Timmans and Hansen, who had seen and done strange things in their time.