They were driving the porgyman then, but she was fated. Once we began to get her she came back to us fast enough, and once she was astern she troubled us no more. After the porgyman we passed a big white yacht, evidently just up from the West Indies after a winter’s cruise. She looked a model for a good sailer, but there was no chance to try her out, for they had her under shortened sail when we went by.
There was a New York blue-fisherman on our weather bow bound for New York, too, and the 148 way we went by her was a scandal. And farther on we drove by a big bark––big enough, almost, to take us aboard. They were plainly trying to make a passage on her, but we left her too. Then we passed another yacht, but she wasn’t carrying half our sail. Her hull was as long as ours, but she didn’t begin to be sparred as we were. We must have had ten feet on her main-boom and ten feet more bowsprit outboard, and yet under her four lower sails she seemed to be making heavy going of it. It’s a good yacht that can hold a fisherman in a breeze and a sea-way. We beat this one about as bad as we beat the blue-fisherman. As we went by we tried to look as though we had beaten so many vessels that we’d lost all interest in racing, and at the same time we were all dancing on our toes to think what a vessel we had under us. It was that passage we held the north-bound Savannah steamer for seven hours. Her passengers stood by the rail and watched us, and when at last we crowded our bowsprit past her nose, they waved their handkerchiefs and cheered us like mad.
“When we get this one loosened up a bit and down to her trim, she’ll sail some or I don’t know,” said our skipper. He stood in the cabin gangway then and filled his boots with water, but he wouldn’t take in sail. Back behind us was another seiner. 149 We could just make out that they were soaking it to her too. The skipper nodded his head back at her. Then, with one hand on the house and the other on the rail, he looked out from under our main-boom and across at the steamer. “Not a rag––let the spars come out of her.”
One thing was sure––the Johnnie was a vessel that could stand driving. She didn’t crowd herself as she got going. No, sir! The harder we drove her the faster she went. Laying down on her side made no difference to her. In fact we were not sure that she wouldn’t do her best sailing on her side. But it hadn’t come to that yet. She was standing up under sail fine. Most of them, we knew, would have washed everything off their deck before that. And certainly there would have been no standing down by the lee rail on too many of them with that breeze abeam.
Going up New York harbor, where we had to tack, the Savannah steamer could have gone by if she had to, but big steamers slow down some going into a harbor, and we holding on to everything made up for the extra distance sailed. The wind, of course, was nothing to what it was outside, and that made some difference. Anyway, we kept the Johnnie going and held the steamer up to the Battery, where, as she had to go up North River, she gave us three toots. The people on the Battery 150 must have had a good look at us. I guess it was not every day they saw a schooner of the Johnnie’s size carrying on like that. Billie Hurd had to pay his respects to them. “Look, you loafers, look, and see a real vessel sailing in.”
There was a sassy little East River towboat that wanted to give us a tow, but our skipper said it would be losing time to take sail off and wait for a line then. The tug captain said, “Oh, no; and you can’t dock her anyway in this harbor without a tug.”
“Oh, I can dock her all right, I guess,” said our skipper.
“Maybe you think you can, but wait till you try it, and have a nice little bill for damages besides.”
“Well, the vessel’s good for the damages, too.”
That towboat tailed us just the same, but we had the satisfaction of fooling him. The skipper kept the Johnnie going till the right time and then, when the tugboat people thought it was too late, he shot her about on her heel and into the dock with her mainsail coming down on the run and jibs dead.