Chapter 11

The current has hardly slackened when the long gate begins to roll to. The last passenger has to edge himself through sideways, at some peril of his packages if not of himself, and at the tender mercy of the gate-keeper. Not the last would-be passenger, however; for a frantic form is seen to dart through the narrow and tortuous pass from the street and fling itself upon the closed barrier, appealing in eloquent indignation to the inexorable Cerberus, and then gazing, with face against the lattice, in imbecile despair at the receding boat. Simultaneous with the thud of the shutting gate is the clank of chains and the rattle of clamps and clogs, as of the striking off of fetters and handcuffs, an asthmatic jingle of a bell somewhere in the body of the boat, a slight slush of revolving paddle-wheels, and the great brute, as steady as a spirit-level and as powerful as a battering-ram, separates itself from the dock like the opening blade of a penknife. You recall the good old days when there were no cruelly-humane gates, and when this stage of the proceeding was marked by a wild leap of belated forms across the widening chasm, with now and then the souse of a miscalculating passenger into the yeasty brine. The scene is less picturesque and exciting now, but it is decidedly more satisfactory.

If you have a wise regard for your sanitary well-being, you will remain on deck, alike to saturate your lungs with torrents of oxygen and to let your weary eye and mind disport themselves like sea-gulls on the broad waters of the bay. What so fresh and cool and clean and still and sparkling and in perfect contrast to the stern and stony and resounding streets! As you lean over the taffrail, looking down into the clear, gliding wave, you can readily conceive why the poor unfortunates to whom life has become a stern and stony street are so often tempted to bury their sorrows in that great calm grave.

I never grow tired of watching the wake of the vessel. It revives some of my earliest impressions,--all the more if it be upon the venerable Wiehawken, or James Rumsey, or some other veteran of the Hoboken line, that used to convey me across the Hudson in my childish days. A ferry-boat then meant to me a country boy's visit to the great city, or, a little later, a city boy's holiday-excursion to the Elysian Fields. The long vibrations of the laboring boat bring back the old thrill of excited expectation. Even the discordant clank of the dock-gear is musical in memory's ear. And at any time of life there is a real fascination in watching the smooth and soapy track unrolling behind us, with its sharp division-line in the centre and its upturned depths of glossy green.

Every harbor has its characteristic features. The harbor of New York gives, first of all, the impression of amplitude. This means not only plenty of "elbow-room" upon the water, but of shore-room. The depots of a continent could be conveniently clustered here, and its fleets perform their tactics. There was nothing mean in Nature's mood when she planned the harbor of New York. And, after all that mellow time and consecrating tradition, the traveller's enthusiasm, the poet's fancy, and the painter's sleight have done for the beauties of the Bosphorus, the Bay of Naples, the harbor of Rhodes, and other "fine old ports" and "gems of the first water," I know of few more picturesque effects, whether of color or of grouping, than that which the North-River ferry-boat affords its passengers as midway in the stream they look up the broad palisaded river, or down the islanded bay, or across on either side at populous and steepled shores, on a golden October afternoon or in the breezy light of a winter morning. Here is, at least, none of the monotony of charm, like the stereotyped features of a placid and passionless beauty, which characterizes your standard harbor-scenes. New York may not be as classic or correct as her languishing rivals on the Hellespont or the blue waters of the Mediterranean, but she has the fascination arising from mobility of feature, endless variety of expression, and vivacity of mood. One who daily crosses the North River for a year will have seemed to belt the globe and voyaged through all zones. He will have danced upon the sparkling waves of the AEgean, groped through the fogs of Liverpool, sweltered in the sultry glare of Tunis, skirted the ice-clad shores of Scandinavia, sickened in the surges of the Channel, lain glassed in the watery mirror of the China Sea. And he will have observed striking features peculiar to this latitude of the Atlantic coast. I recall an atmospheric effect in springtime resembling a light pearl-colored mist, which had none of the qualities of a fog, but rather lent a weird transparency to the air. It gave the impression of sunlight faded or washed of its golden particles, or of a picture drawn on pearl. There was a statuesque stillness about the water, a near and yet a far look about the entire scene, which imparted a sense of unreality, almost of the supernatural.

I have spoken of fogs on the river. Their prevalence differs greatly in different years, also their density and darkness. The East River, from its narrowness, its crowded condition, and its rapid current, is far more obstructed by them; but the Bridge has changed all that. The fogs are to be charged to the serious discount of suburban life; still more the snow-storms, which are more deadening to sound and less capable of illumination. But the use of electric light and the vast capacities of the steam-whistle and fog-horn, not to speak of the more than Indian expertness to which a pilot's eye and ear can be trained, have reduced the inconvenience to a minimum. There is, however, to the imaginative traveller a compensating, albeit an awful, charm. It is like exploring some dim and echoing cave resounding with an organ-concert played by Titans on the very instruments of AEolus himself. The whole river makes one think of a vast shell, full of the boomings and sighings of an infinite sea.

But such experiences on the North River are rare, even in times of fog or snow. For the most part the climate of New York harbor is singularly clear, and its autumns are beginning to be recognized as a meteorological masterpiece. And its vast and varied commerce offers exhaustless entertainment for one who has an eye for the picturesque or a sympathetic imagination for the living freight.

As we look up and down the bay we realize how thoroughly steam has cleared the water of sails, sadly to the sacrifice of beauty. Here and there, however, there is a lingering sloop or schooner, engaged in river- or coasting-trade. Decidedly old-fashioned they look, like the white turban and neckerchief of our grandmothers. As they lie off there, nestling so confidingly in the arms of the great river-god, we seem to get a glimpse of a simpler and serener age, when life glided rather than pushed, waited on the heavenly influences and trusted not its own impulse. I know that the life of a deck-hand will not bear a very close examination for aesthetic purposes. But, as I watch these vessels drifting down through the golden afternoon, or cheerily beating up against the tide on a breezy morning, the man at the wheel is a very model of unconscious grace and almost effortless ascendency; and his shipmates, grouped about him like floating lotos-eaters, have ever a touch of the fine old Ulyssean vagrancy. Now and then there stands out before the breeze and the sunlight a great canvassed ship, like some living thing fluttering and glowing and careering under their thrilling touch. And sometimes a fleet of sailing-yachts, more beautiful and swift than sea-gulls, will hover on the horizon.

It is with something of sadness, if not of regret, that we turn our eyes from these lovely and now almost phantom forms to the monstrosities of steam navigation. I think we are passing through a sort of saurian epoch in this age of steam. When we have outgrown this clumsy, noisy, perilous agent, and have adjusted ourselves to electricity or some still more subtile and commodious force, we may be able to restore somewhat of the graces of form and motion. And we shall then look back upon the hideous and awkward craft of this day very much as we now gaze upon a reproduction of the misshapen and unwieldy monsters of the palaeozoic ages. The river swarms with ferry-boats. Was ever utility attained at so great a sacrifice of taste? Their model must have been a toad with a stick thrust through it (three of which, so impaled and hung up in the sun to dry, Luther recommended as the best cure for all manner of "pestilent humors"). At any rate, the difference between their aspect and that of the sail-boat is that of a beetle and a butterfly. The acme of ugliness is reached in the freight ferry-boats, floating fragments of railroad, whose cars look like the joints of a monstrous creeping worm.

No one, however, can complain of any want of variety in these steam-craft, whether in size or in shape, from the rather stately steamships to the little tug-boats that shoot to and fro like gnats upon the surface of a pool. I say _rather_ stately, for the high and graceful hull of the steamer comes to a lame and impotent conclusion in its squat chimney, like a large-faced man with a mayhemed nose, and in its toy masts and rigging, like a stout woman with curl-papers or a thin wisp of ringlet. When two or three of these steamships are together down the harbor, their white volleys of smoke often present quite a lively picture of a naval engagement. The little puffing pilot-boats have a trick of getting in the way of us ferry-voyagers, like fussy custom-house officers among the newly-landed passengers from the ocean-ferries. There is generally a tug, perhaps with a slow convoy, to be waited for or circumnavigated ere the "slip" can be entered. And they run so close in-shore that the pilot has to be wary, and in some cases to emerge with a series of unearthly steam screeches, lest he step upon one of them with his great "horseshoe" of a ferry-boat. The steam-yacht is the most graceful as well as agile of the species, as certainly it ought to be when as much money is sometimes put into one as would buy a Raphael or build a Grecian temple. The steam-yacht has doubtless a thousand comforts for the owner above the sailing-yacht, but we, whose interest in them is an outside and aesthetic one, cannot help saying, "O Utility, what crimes are committed in thy name!"

There is no beauty, but a deal of attraction, in the great flotillas of linked barges and canal-boats which slowly pass like floating and vulgar Venices. If, as is often the case, they lie across the track, we shall have plenty of opportunity to observe at our leisure their still life. I have always thought that canal-life--by reason of its amphibiousness, its phenomenal slowness, its monotony amid endless change, its solitude amid busy and peopled scenes which it is always touching but never entering--must be a unique existence, a _modus vivendi_ quite apart from other human experiences by land or sea. A distinct type of character and of habit cannot fail to be evolved, which it might be well for ingenious novelists at their wits' ends to study, even though it required a trial of patience and a tribulation of stomach and cuticle for a voyage or two. Dickens saw its possibilities, and made it an episode in Little Nell's wanderings, and I am rather surprised that he did not work the vein farther.

The river-barge is freighted for me with pleasant memories. Like Cleopatra's,

From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense.

There are not many of them now that carry passengers, but in my boyhood they were a common vehicle of travel on the Hudson, several of these shapeless and unwieldy tubs being lashed to the sides or dragged at the stern of a tow-boat. They are identified with summer vacations in the country, than which a boy's memory holds no more honeyed recollections. The hours before "turning in" (the very fact of an abnormal night and bed was a joy to the juvenile mind, despite the incessant and unearthly noises of the live-stock on board) were spent in wandering among the mountains of "produce," inhaling the savor of Orange County butter and baled hay and meal-bags, and listening to the plaintive bleat of comfortless calves and desolate sheep. As night drew on, I would select some snug little nook, where I could lie and dream as we glided along the still and starlit river, through the Highlands, perhaps, or the Palisades. The charm was mainly, of course, in the spell of youthful fancy and expectancy, which touched and transfigured the homely scene, as the moonlight touched and transfigured the silent river. But I associate it all with the barges, and shall ever see in those uncouth craft

Argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.

In summer the excursion-boats add picturesqueness and a festive air to the river, with their gay bunting and bands of music and salutes with bell or steam-whistle, and, above all, their eager throngs of Sunday-school children or the liberated denizens of foul and narrow streets. At times the shipping along the docks and over the bay will blossom with the flags and streamers of all nations, hung fore and aft and extending in fluttering lines down the rigging, imparting a gala aspect to the scene and perhaps thrilling one with patriotic or historic memories. Perhaps we are crossing at the moment when the great Sound-steamers are pushing out from their piers. We feel quite humiliated on our lonely ferry-boat as these leviathans of nautical architecture sweep past us with an imperious curve far out into the stream, and then move steadily and statelily down the middle of the river, like an "ugly duckling" of mammoth proportions. One never gets over the sensation of that sight, nor its impressions as a type of our century,--a vast floating hotel, carrying the population of a village and the luxurious appointments of a palace, gliding as smoothly and noiselessly as an Indian's canoe, and propelled by an internal force apparently as vital and secret as that which moves the Indian's arm.

Yonder comes an ocean-steamer, long, low, and black, with a tri-color flag at the stern, slowly and puffily tugged by a little pilot-boat. The decks literally swarm with figures in all sorts of outlandish garb,--gray and blue stuffs, long shaggy ulsters, Scotch caps and plaids, gay kerchiefs on the women's heads and necks. Some lounge, smoking or gibbering, over the taffrail, other groups sit picturesquely on their large rude boxes, but most of them are suggestively silent and statuesque. And well they may be, for it is the moment of fate to the poor emigrant as much as for Columbus when he approached the shore of a new world. A new world, indeed, in far more than the geographical sense; a new life, or at least a new attempt to live; old things passed away, and all things to be new--except himself. A great wave of homelessness in the wide world, and perhaps of sickness for the old home, sweeps over the poor exile's heart. All is so strange, and so sternly independent of their forlorn and insignificant selves. Perhaps they are being unladen from the ship, shunted down the gang-plank along with their chests, packed on a transfer-boat like so many imported cattle, only not with the care or tenderness with which a drove of Holsteins or Jerseys would be handled. A squad of emigrants, just landed on the wharf and waiting to be transferred to the emigrant-train for another week's voyage by land to the ends of the continent, is one of the most pathetic sights in this world, especially if they are foreign to our speech and dress and modes of life. How wistful and helpless and strayed they look!--a bit of still and stranded life in the sweep and roar of a world that must seem to them as wild and as soulless as the ocean they have just left. How unconsciously they group themselves in picturesque attitudes, which no artistic eye could improve upon! Their staves, their dangling bundles of coarse canvas or of tied-up handkerchiefs of various colors, their quaint and often grotesque attire, their silent posture and vigilant eyes, their sheep-like dependence on their guides, combined with a watch-dog solicitude for their miserable traps, their household groupings and varied ages, from the baby born on shipboard to the old grandfather come to lay his rheumatic bones in the soil of a strange land,--I have stood and watched it all many and many a time, ere I hurried on to my day's business or to my happy home; and the work has seemed more significant, and the home more sweet, for that sight. Surely one need cut only a little way into life here in order to touch its profoundest mysteries and its most far-reaching suggestions.

One who has known New York for a generation or two cannot fail to be struck with its changed appearance as seen from the ferry-boat. It used to lie as low and flat as a whale's back, with perhaps a harpoon sticking out here and there,--to wit, a steeple. The steam elevator has proved quite an Aladdin's Lamp in its magical feats of architecture, by developing a vertical in place of a lateral growth of buildings. The best building-lots are now in the air, and to be had without ground-rent. Troy had to raise its successive Iliums, Ilioses, and Trojas, at intervals of ages, and tear or burn each one down before erecting the next. But we propose to save the Schliemanns of the future a world of trouble by building our various New Yorks simultaneously, one on top of the other. Accordingly, the city is becoming crowded with towering and clumsy structures, especially on the elevated ridge which runs along Broadway from the City Hall to the Battery, giving it the appearance of an uncouth acropolis. All over the town manufactories and public buildings of colossal size stand, like megatheria, knee-deep in a jungle of houses. The campaniles of modern industry rise slim and tall into the air. The great buttresses and towers of the Brooklyn Bridge loom above the house-tops. Grain-elevators, which "take the wind out of the sails" of Noah's Ark, lie stranded on the docks. The poetic and picturesque "forest of masts" has fallen before the march of progress and the axe of steam almost as thoroughly as the primeval woods. The low and open piers have been enclosed, some of them with considerable architectural effect, giving a trim and bandbox look to the river-side.

The transformation is even more marked on the adjacent shores. As I remember Jersey City and Hoboken in my boyhood, they were only small clusters of buildings, with a ferry-house at the water's edge. Now they have crept along from the Palisades to the Kill van Kull, overflowed the Bergen Hills, reared giant structures which rival New York's in monstrosity, and extended their railroad-wharves and steamship-piers over the Arcadian haunts of the Elysian Fields and the primitive meadows of Communipaw and Paulus Hook. And on the East River Brooklyn, joined to New York by its Siamese ligament of the Bridge, seems the bigger twin of the two. The contrast at night is still more striking. The river and the town are brilliant with electric lights, where formerly twinkling lamps or gas-lights made darkness visible. These have the effect of stars of the first magnitude; and the great Bridge, seen on a dark night from the South Ferry, with its lights at regular intervals, suggests that Orion must have slipped his belt.

Crossing the ferry by night was always a favorite experience with me. In sultry weather one can nearly always get a whiff of freshened air, perhaps from the sea; and the quiet is not less reviving to the heated brain. Nowhere does the night seem more "stilly," or the sense of seclusion more profound, than in the middle of the broad bay on a midsummer night before or after the theatre-goers have crossed. The cities, veiled in moonlight or dim in the star-light, seem to be breathing peacefully in giant slumber. The prosaic features of the scene are hidden, the ragged outlines softened, and the smoke and din indistinguishable. It seems hardly possible that these dream-like masses, with their sparkling lights, like reversed heavens, are the rude, restless, discordant gehennas which they sometimes seem to us by day. And yet I realize the awfulness and vastness of these great living creatures far more than in the belittling and disillusionizing daylight. The anchored or passing vessels only add to the sense of seclusion,--the former with a solitary lantern at the stern, the latter perhaps a galaxy of many-colored lights. On a dark night it has the effect of a discharge of Roman candles arrested in mid-career. The other ferry-boats have a comical appearance as they whirl and whiz past us. If in the daytime they are deplorably like pumpkins with a stick thrust through them, at night they remind us of grotesque lanterns made out of those same pumpkins with illuminated slits and slashes.

I find no small entertainment and suggestion in watching the manoeuvres of the skilful pilots. A novice might hastily conclude that it was a simple matter to steer a boat from one side of the river to another. But let him try, and see where he will bring up. The process is as nice a one and as scientific as a game of billiards. The exact stage of the tide and volume of the current, the velocity and direction of the wind, the ice on the river, the approaching or anchored vessels, and all of them in their mutual relations, have to be calculated with mathematical precision, especially in entering the narrow slip: so that the directest way is often the longest way around. Is there not here an object-lesson for those who would live wisely in this narrow transit which we call life? Keep your eye upon the one point to which you know the higher powers call you; but do not think that you are going to march straight there by force of will, or straight there at all. You are in a world full of cross-purposes and counter-currents and side-winds, of accumulated conservatisms and masses of mere inertia and oppositions which straddle or shoulder themselves across your path. You will probably wreck your undertakings, and will certainly waste your strength in needless collisions and shovings aside, unless you take all these things into account. The capacity to do this is wisdom, as distinct from knowledge or right intentions, in any sphere of life. Herein is practical statesmanship, effective reform, everything which has to do with human wills and the course of this world.