AFTER all has been said that may be about our admirable fire-engines, and endless stories have been told of gallant fights made by the engine lads for life and property, there remains this fact: that New York possesses a far more formidable weapon against fires than the plucky little "steamers" that go clanging and tooting about our streets. The fire-boat is as much superior to the familiar fire-engine as a rapid-fire cannon is superior to a rifle. A single fire-boat like the New-Yorker will throw as much water in a given time as twenty ordinary fire-engines: it will throw twelve thousand gallons in a minute—that is, fifty tons; or, if we imagine this great quantity of water changed into a rope of ice, say an inch thick, it would reach twenty miles.
Suppose we go aboard her now, this admirable New-Yorker, and look about a little. People come a long way to see her, for she's the largest and finest fire-boat in the world. Pretty, isn't she? All brass and hard wood and electric lights, everything shining like a pleasure-yacht. Looks like a gunboat with rows of cannon all around her—queer, stumpy little cannon, that have wheels above their mouths. Those are hose connections, like hydrants in a city, where they screw fast the rubber lines. She has twenty-one on a side; that makes forty-two "gates," as the engineer calls them, without counting four monitors aloft—those things on the pilot-house that look like telescopes with long red tails. It was the monitors, especially "Big Daddy," that did such great work against those North German Lloyders, in their drift down the river, in 1900, with decks ablaze and red-hot iron hulls. We shall hear all about that day if we sit us down quietly in the fire quarters ashore and get the crew started.
Stepping over-side again, here we are in the home of the fire-boat crew. It's more like a club than an engine-house. No horses stamping about, no stable; but pictures on the walls, and men playing cribbage or reading, and nobody in a hurry. Plenty of time for tales of adventure, unless that gong takes to tapping.
And here comes Gallagher, sliding down yonder brass column from the sleeping-rooms. He's the lad who did fine things in that great fire at the Mallory pier—saved a man's life and made the roll of honor by it. We'll never get the story from him, but the other boys will tell us.
"INTO THIS STREET OF FIRE, BETWEEN THE TWO PIERS, STEAMED THE BIG FIRE-BOAT, STRAIGHT IN, WITH FOUR STREAMS PLAYING TO PORT AND FOUR TO STARBOARD, ALL DOING THEIR PRETTIEST."
If ever fire-boats proved their value, it was that night in May, 1900, when Pier 19, East River, caught fire, with all its length of inflammable freight. Close to three o'clock in the morning it was, and a hurricane from the northeast was driving the flames toward land. Before the engines could start, a fire-wave had leaped across South Street and was raging down the block. And another fire-wave had leaped across the dock between Pier 19 and Pier 20, setting fire to a dozen barges and lighters moored there, and to the steamship Neuces of the Mallory line. And presently all these were blazing, some with cargoes of cotton and oil, blazing until the lower end of the island looked out of the night in ghastly illumination, a terrible picture in red and black. They say it was bright enough that night half a mile away for a man to pick up a pin.
There is no harder problem for the engines than these fierce-driven water-front fires that sweep in suddenly shoreward, for they must be taken head on, with all the smoke in the firemen's faces, and water often lacking, strange to say, although the river is so near. For the fire-boats, however, the advantage is the other way; they attack from the rear, where they see what they are doing, and can pump from a whole ocean. Besides that, they attack with so formidable a battery that no hook-and-ladder corps is needed to "break open" for them. The three-inch stream from Big Daddy alone will tear off roofs and rip out beams like the play of artillery; and if that is not sufficient, the boys have only to hitch on the four-and-a-half-inch nozzle and set the two pumps feeding it five thousand gallons a minute, or twenty tons of water. Under that shock there is no wall built of brick and mortar that will not crumble.
When the New-Yorker came up on this memorable night the fifth alarm had sounded and things were looking serious. Piers 19 and 20 were in full flame, and every floating thing between them. Into this street of fire steamed the big fire-boat, straight in, with four streams playing to port and four to starboard, all doing their prettiest. She went ahead slowly, fighting back the flames foot by foot, on pier and steamship and kindling small craft that drifted by in fiery procession. And the air in the men's faces was like the breath of a furnace!