Blow the Man Down - A Romance of the Coast

Now the first land we made is call-ed The Deadman,

The Ramhead off Plymouth, Start, Portland and Wight.

We sail-ed by Beachy,

By Fairlee and Dungeness,

Until we came abreast of the South Foreland Light.

--Farewell and Adieu.

With starboard engine clawing her backward, and the port engine driving

her ahead, the Montana swung her huge bulk when she was free of the

penning piers. The churning propellers, offsetting, turned her in her

tracks. Then she began to feel her way out of the maze of the traffic.

The grim, silent men of the pilot-houses do not talk much even when they

are at liberty on shore. They are taciturn when on duty. They do not

relate their sensations when they are elbowing their way through the

East River in a fog; they haven't the language to do so.

A psychologist might make much out of the subject by discussing

concentration sublimated, human senses coordinating sight and sound

on the instant, a sort of sixth sense which must be passed on into the

limbos of guesswork as instinct.

The man in the pilot-house would not in the least understand a word of

what the psychologist was talking about.

The steamboat officer merely understands that he must be on his job!

The Montana added her voice to the bedlam of river yawp.

The fog was so dense that even the lookout posted at her fore windlasses

was a hazy figure as seen from the pilot-house. A squat ferryboat, which

was headed across the river straight at the slip where her shore gong

'was hailing her, splashed under the steamer's bows, two tugs loafed

nonchalantly across in the other direction--saucy sparrows of the river

traffic, always underfoot and dodging out of danger by a breathless

margin.

Whistle-blasts piped or roared singly and in pairs, a duet of steam

voices, or blended at times into a puzzling chorus.

A steamer's whistle in the fog conveys little information except to

announce that a steam-propelled craft is somewhere yonder in the white

blank, unseen, under way. No craft is allowed to sound passing signals

unless the vessel she is signaling is in plain sight.

Captain Mayo could see nothing--even the surface of the water was almost

indistinguishable.

Ahead, behind, to right and left, everything that could toot was busy

and vociferous. Here and there a duet of three staccato blasts indicated

that neighbors were threatening to collide and were crawfishing to the

best of their ability.

Twice the big steamer stopped her engines and drifted until the squabble

ahead of her seemed to have been settled.

A halt mixes the notations of the log, but the mates of the steamer made

the Battery signals, and after a time the spidery outlines of the first

great bridge gave assurance that their allowances were correct.