A few days after the surrender, people along the water-front noticed a great movement of vessels. The big Fall River Line and other Sound steamers moved down the Upper Bay in long procession, with some steamships seized at the wharves.
They were full of troops. Some of the vessels towed railroad floats with flat cars on which were lashed cannon so big that even from the shore the eye could perceive their unusual size. Other craft towed strings of small scows, and still others towed floating derricks.
The flotilla passed down the Upper Bay, but it did not go out through the Narrows. It disappeared in the narrow water-way of the Kill von Kull that winds between Staten Island and the mainland of New Jersey, and connects with the Lower Harbor through Raritan Bay.
The story of the mysterious flotilla spread quickly through a city whose lack of newspapers made its apprehensive curiosity only the more keen. Robbed of its news and bulletin service, the people, without any conscious plan, had organized a news service of their own. They had fallen back on the primitive method of circulating information from man to man.
New York’s “Bush Telegraph”
Within twenty-four hours of the suppression of the liberty of its press, the highly modern, highly artificial city had in operation the same form of news-transmission that has so often puzzled and even awed travelers in savage lands. Under the sky-scrapers the “bush telegraph” carried its messages with almost the same astonishing swiftness as in the jungle.
It was done by hasty whispers and by furtive conversation, for among the Orders and Regulations that were promulgated daily there was a little warning that severe punishment would be inflicted on any person who “spread false news, communicated the movement of land and sea forces, made noises or uttered outcries of a nature to disturb troops, or inspected, sketched, photographed or made descriptions of views on land or sea without authority.”[156]
There were enough ominous elasticity and inclusiveness in this Order to cover almost any exchange of words. Yet men, even though they were mortally afraid while they did it, could not resist the human impulse to transmit anything that they learned.
The news merely puzzled the great mass of the population. Accustomed all their lives to turn to their newspapers for knowledge about everything, they were quite helpless with their one means of enlightenment shut off.
To Open the Harbor