WATER LIFE AROUND NEW YORK.
BY JULIAN RALPH.
What an odd thing a boatman's dream of the water life around New York would be if all the vessels and craft of every kind should take to themselves grotesque shapes and characters, as familiar objects are apt to do in human dreams! We have had some great and notable water parades in our harbor—the last and greatest being that queer hooting and tooting procession of many kinds of craft that swept around the war-ships of ten or a dozen great nations at our Columbus celebration in the early summer of 1893. But the boatman's dream of which I was thinking would be far stranger than that, because the Columbian naval review included only the handy, easily manageable steam-craft of New York, like the steamships and steamboats and tugs and tow-boats. It left out all the really queer floating things that have such shapes as to almost turn a dream into a nightmare.
The dreaming boatman of whom I am thinking would see great water-giraffes, which would really be our floating grain-elevators; and a myriad sea-spiders transformed from our darting tug-boats, and great groaning mother-gulls dragging large coveys of helpless babies in their wake Those would be the tow-boats with their long trains of canal-boats. Turtles he would see by the score—huge flat, almost round turtles—some red, some white, some brown. Those would be the ferry-boats,-which really do look just like great sea-turtles when you are looking down upon their flat backs from a high place like the Brooklyn Bridge. Like fearful black ocean sharks would be the Atlantic steamers—long and thin—out of whose way every other moving thing flies when they approach. Our huge and towering palace boats of the Sound would turn into great white elephants, trumpeting as if they had all caught cold in their long snouts. And we shall see that many another animal and creature would easily appear to the troubled dreamer without greatly altering the shapes of the queer craft that have grown out of nearly three hundred years of needs and developments in the water-life around New York.
THE CANALLERS ON THE EAST RIVER.
I suppose that the reader has heard that almost every Chinaman in this country comes from the water population near Canton. That must be a wonderful phase of life, where so many hundreds of thousands of persons are actually born upon the water, to live out their lives upon the water, and to die upon the water. They form a river population housed in boats that make up a city far more peculiar than Venice—a floating city of stores and work-shops, boarding-houses, amusement places, saloons, and all the rest. We have nothing of the sort around New York. The nearest approach to that condition is to be seen in the large docks on the East River near the Battery, and one at Communipaw on the New Jersey shore, where the canal-boats collect with the boatmen and their wives and children aboard them. There one sees by the kitchen smoke-stacks above the cabin roofs, by the lines of drying linen on the decks, by the sight of women sewing and knitting under cooling awnings, and by the views of children and cats and dogs playing upon the boats—by all these things one sees how truly the canal-boats are floating homes as well as merchant vessels. At night the sounds of singing and fiddling—sometimes the nasal notes of house organs—tell more of this strange water life. Some of the cabins of these canal-boats are quite attractive. They show dainty white lace curtains in the tiny square windows, carpets on the floors, boxes of flowers upon the cabin roofs, and cleanly, neatly clad mothers and little children. This is not the rule, however, and we see enough, whenever we visit the canallers, to show that there is at least some reason for their being generally regarded as a rude and rough class.
Yet, apart from these canallers, we have enough persons who live on the water to form what would be called a city out West. They are mainly men who sleep in bunks and eat in the cabins of tug-boats, steam passenger boats, freighters, and the like. A few women are among them—stewardesses of passenger boats and the wives of the captains of the other sorts of vessels. Of course I do not include here the men on the ships that sail the ocean. Their homes are really at sea. I only refer to the scores of thousands of persons who live upon boats that may be called the horses of the harbor, because they tie up regularly every night at certain piers, and every morning are sent to work, here and there, at this place or that, to carry goods or passengers, or to haul other boats. It is doubtful whether many children are born in these shifting homes, but there is no doubt that very many girls and boys sleep upon them, and are sent from them to the city's schools, and, later, to the factories and shops to earn their living.
Of all the uncommon forms that boats take, the newest, instead of being strange and complicated like most nineteenth-century inventions, are almost as simple as anything that floats. Only rafts of logs are more simple than what we call our "car-floats." They are the newest type of boats we know, and have come into being because New York city is on an island, with only a few railroads crossing to it from the mainland. The other great and little railways, which bring and take goods and people to and from New York, all stop on the opposite shores of our harbor, in New Jersey, Staten Island, and Long Island. Since the cars of one railroad often have to go past the city upon the other roads, these "floats" are used to transport them around our island, so that goods from Boston or Sag Harbor, for instance, can be sent around New York to the tracks of the roads that will carry them to San Francisco without unloading or reloading. The floats that carry these cars are merely boxes, the shape of great dominoes, with railroad tracks laid upon them. Some carry six freight-cars, some carry eight, and some carry ten cars. Tiny little propellers that we call "tug-boats" are warped or hitched alongside of these clumsy floating boxes, where they look as a little kitten would appear beside a big St. Bernard dog, or as a locomotive would look beside a house. But our queer, snorting, fussy little tug-boats march away with every floating thing to which they are hitched—even dragging huge Atlantic steamships at their sides—because they reach deep down into the water, where their big screws, driven by very powerful engines, obtain a mighty hold. Because our tug-boats are so small, and yet so strong, they are able to move swiftly when they have no burdens to carry. In the boatman's dream that I spoke of they would seem like those water-spiders that many of us have seen darting hither and thither on the top of placid pools. But there is one reason why they are not at all alike—that is, that the water-spiders are as silent as death, while the tug-boats are the most noisy, saucy, boisterous of make-believe animals—always gasping, and snorting, and whistling, and thrashing about as very little people are often apt to do.
