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.