Beach-combers, shore-huggers—mere Abraham’s men—will tell you the poetry is gone out of it all, and will, with much damning of their eyes, and shifting of their quids, and hitching of their tarry trousers, try to persuade you that steam has ruined the genuine sailors of story and of song. But this is mere transpontine nonsense, for above and beyond everything he who commands a ship, smoker or sailer, as it may chance, must first of all be a seaman. The demands of modern sea life have increased the responsibilities of the mariner, and in like measure the professional attainments required are deeper, broader, and higher than ever before.
What the task of hauling out is, you may best judge by noting the bulk to be moved, for you can never measure properly the enormous dimensions of these great steamers until you see them looming in their true proportions above the walls, and undwarfed, as they are in the open, by the frame of sea and sky. The bulwarks tower like the walls of a fortress; the enormous decks sweep with a sheer knowing no broken curve; the wheel-house lifts its windows above the life-boats, swarming sternward like a school of pilot-fish; still higher the bridges, often double-tiered, span and grip the sturdy stanchions; and dominating all, the elliptical funnels rake jauntily, and the yardless spars taper till they fine away at their shining trucks into graceful coach-whips.
Shipshape and Bristol fashion, point-device in paint and polish, the massive hull glides over the quiet waters of the basin; you catch the sheen of gleaming brasses, of glistening air-ports, of glazed white, and lacquered black. Obedient as a broken colt to the touch of the helm, quick in response as a high-bred dog in a leash to the guiding hawsers, she moves calmly—fit exemplar of strength rightly tempered by even will—toward the sharp turn where the gateway opens to the river. Winches chatter noisily; windlasses clink, clink musically; capstans rattle with slacking cables; jets of steam dart viciously; ripples stream sternward to the bubbles of the foamless wake; the tremulous minor, more a wail than a song, of the docking gangs working the warps, answer the cheery “Yo heave-ohs” of the people on shipboard; and the quick, sharp orders from the bridge are echoed by high-pitched answers from the mates, watching with wary eyes everywhere. One screw turns clumsily ahead, the other circles astern, and then the ship swings easily, rounding the jagged corner in the hedge of stone with a gentleness leaving feet to spare. The bow and stern enter fairly, straight as a mason’s level, the open gateway; a strain is taken on the line leading from the quarter to the pier end; a moment of rest, of expectation, succeeded by one of doubt, follows, and then the hail rings out blithely from the after-whaleback, “All clear, sir.”