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?"