In my previous chapters I have described nearly every phase of Lake shipping, with the exception of one, which, while not being vitally concerned with the story of our fresh-water marine, is still one of the most interesting, and perhaps the least known of all. That is the “inner life” of one of our Great Lakes freighters; the life of the crew and the favoured few who are privileged to travel as passenger guests of the owners upon one of these steel monsters of the Inland Seas. In more than one way our Lake marine is unusual; in this it is unique.
Recently one of the finest steel yachts that ever sailed fresh water came up the St. Lawrence to the Lakes. Its owner was a millionaire many times over. With his wife he had cruised around the world, but for the first time they had come to the Lakes. I had the fortune to converse with him upon his yacht about the craft of other countries, and as we lay at anchor in the Detroit River there passed us the greatest ship on the Inland Seas—the Thomas F. Cole; and, addressing his wife, I asked, “How would you like to take a cruise on a vessel like that?”
The lady laughed, as if such a suggestion were amusing indeed, and said that if she were a man she might attempt it, and perhaps enjoy it to a degree, and when I went on to describe some of the things that I knew about “those great, ugly ships,” as she called them, I am quite sure that all of my words were not received without doubt. This little experience was the last of many that proved to me the assertion I have made before—that to nine people out of ten, at least, our huge, silent, red ships that bring down the wealth of the North are a mystery. They are not beautiful. Freighted low down, their steel sides scraped and marred like the hands of a labourer, their huge funnels emitting clouds of bituminous smoke, their barren steel decks glaring in the heat of the summer sun, there seems to be but little about them to attract the pleasure seeker. From the distance at which they are usually seen their aft and forward cabins appear like coops, their pilot houses even less.
The Mesaba Ore Docks.
Yet fortunate is the person who has the “pull” to secure passage on one of these monster carriers of the Lakes, for behind all of that uninviting exterior there is a luxury of marine travel that is equalled nowhere else in the world except on the largest and finest of private yachts. These leviathans of the Lakes, that bring down dirty ore and take up dirtier coal, are the greatest money-makers in the world, and they are owned by men of wealth. The people who travel on them are the owner’s guests. Nothing is too good for them. Each year the rivalry between builders is increasing as to whose ships shall possess the finest “guests’ quarters.” Behind the smoke and dirt and unseemly red steel that are seen from shore or deck, a fortune has been spent in those rooms over the small doors of which one reads the word “Owners.” You may climb up the steel side of the ship, you may explore it from stem to stern, but not until you are a “guest”—not until the “key to the ship” has been handed to you, are its luxuries, its magnificence, its mysteries, clearly revealed.
My telegram read:
“Take my private room on the Harry Berwind at Ashtabula.”
It was signed by G. Ashley Tomlinson, of Duluth. The Berwind is one of the finest of Tomlinson’s sixteen steel ships and is named after one of the best known fuel transportation men on the Lakes—a vessel that can carry eleven thousand tons without special crowding and makes twelve miles an hour while she is doing it. I reached the great ore and coal docks at Ashtabula at a happy moment.
The other guests had arrived, seven in all—four ladies and three gentlemen, and we met on the red and black dock, with mountains of ore and coal about us, with the thundering din of working machines in our ears, and out there before us, enshrouded in smoke and black dust, the great ship that was to carry us for nearly a thousand miles up the Lakes and back again. It was a happy moment, I say, for I met the seven guests in this wilderness of din and dirt—and six of them had never been aboard a freighter in their lives. They had heard, of course, what lay beyond those red steel walls. But was there not a mistake here? Was it possible——