Our southern lumber is brought us by handsome three and four-masted schooners, which take northern lumber and ice on the return voyage. The other day two schooners, on their maiden voyage, white and trim as yachts, were at the lumber wharf, the Break of Day and the Herald of the Morning.
Our coal comes in the usual long ugly barges. One or two small excursion steamers connect us with the nearer coast towns, forty miles distant, and every day all summer, the one large passenger steamer which connects us with the big coast cities, comes to or from our town. She takes her tranquil way between the river hills, not without majesty, while the water draws back from the shores as she passes and the high banks reverberate to the peaceful thunder of her paddles. Like other river towns, we have now a fleet of motor boats, in use for pleasure and small fishing.
Traffic on the river shrank immensely with the forming of the Ice Trust, which holds our ice-fields now only as a reserve. We see three or four tall schooners at a time now, where we used to count the riding lights of a dozen at anchor in the channel.
The greater part of our fleet of tugs is scattered. The Resolute and Adelia,—dear me, even their names are like old friends—the Clara Clarita, the City of Lynn, the Knickerbocker, and the trim smart twin tugs, Charlie Lawrence and Stella, have gone to other waters. The Ice-King plies now in the coast-wise trade. Our lessened river work is done by the Seguin, a large and handsome boat, the Ariel, a T-wharf tug from Boston, and the Sarah J. Green, an ugly boat with a smokestack too tall for her.
The Government boat comes up in late April, while the river is still very rapid, brown and swirling after the spring freshet, and sets the channel buoys. We always thrill a little at her unwonted, sea-sounding whistle. She comes again in November, takes up the buoys, and carries them to some strange buoy paddock in one of the winter harbors, where hundreds and hundreds of them are stacked and repainted. The names of the revenue cutters in this service are prettily chosen, the Lilac, Geranium, etc.
Before the days of tugs, schooners and larger vessels sailed up and down the thirty-odd navigable miles of our river under their own canvas, and the traffic to and from Atlantic ports was carried on by packets: brigs, schooners, and topsail schooners. One of the captains has told me that, seventy-five years ago, on his first voyage, it took his brig seven days to beat to the mouth of the river, a passage now made in six hours. It must have been extremely difficult piloting. The channel is narrow in many places, though the river itself is so wide. There are sand-bars, mud-flats, and ledges.
In my Father’s childhood a curious, indeed a unique type of vessel, known as a Waterville Sloop, plied between what was then (before the building of the dams), the head of navigation, twenty-six miles above us, and Boston, taking lumber and hay. They carried one square-rigged mast, and sailed with lee-boards, like the Dutch galliots, and were in fact a survival of the square-rigged sloops of old time, immortal in the memories of the glorious Sloops of War, and in Turner’s pictures.
Once in a while you still see “pinkies,” which were once so common: small schooner-rigged vessels with a “pink” (probably originally a pinked) stern, i.e., a stern rising to a point, with a crotch to rest the boom in.
Scows are rarer than they used to be, but they still carry on their humble, casual lumber and hay business, sailing up with the flood-tide, and tying up for the ebb. They are sloop-rigged, quite smart-looking under sail, and sail with lee-boards, like the Waterville Sloops.
The Lobster Smack, a tiny two-masted schooner, not more than thirty feet long, comes once a week in the season, and we buy our lobsters on the wharf and carry them home all sprawling, and are delighted when we get a little sea-weed with them.
The laborers of the river are the dredges, pile-drivers, and their kind. They must see to the journeyman’s work that keeps the river’s traffic unhampered. They drive piers and jetties and dredge out sand-bars. They go and come, unnoticed by smarter vessels, laden heavily with broken stone, sand, or gravel. They are dingy powerful boats, fitted with a derrick and hoist or other machinery. They carry big rope buffers at bow and sides, and in spite of this their bulwarks are splintered and scarred where they have been jammed against wharves and knocked about. There is no fresh paint or bright brass about them, they are grimy citizens, but are all strong and seaworthy. Sometimes the Captain is also owner; sometimes one man owns a whole little fleet, of two dredges, say, and a small tug, named perhaps after wife and daughters, as in one case I know, the Nellie, Sophia, and Doris. This is the family venture, followed with as much anxious pride in “our Vessels” as if the fleet were Cunarders.
One day what should come up the river but a white schooner, tapering and tall, and glistening with new masts and cordage, bearing a fairy cargo of shells and corals. The rare shells, some of them costly museum pieces, were to be sold to collectors, if any were to be found along our northern harbors, while others, as beautiful as flowers or sunset clouds, the children might have for a few pennies.
The Captain was a young Spaniard, very dark, and as handsome, grave, and simple in bearing, as a Spanish Captain should be. His men seemed to adore him, and to obey the turn of his eyelashes. They all gave us a charming welcome, especially to the children. It was a leisurely and pleasant little venture. I do not know whether it brought in profit, but all the town flocked to the schooner, day after day, for the week that she stayed with us.
The rafts come down the river when they please. They look about as easy to manœuvre as an ice-house, but the flannel-shirted lumbermen who operate them, two to a raft, seem unconcerned, and scull away at their long “sweeps,” in the apparently hopeless task of keeping their clumsy craft off the shallows. With the breaking up of the ice, stray logs, escaped from the holding booms, come down stream. The moment the ice-cakes are out of the river, even before, you begin to notice shabby old row-boats tied up and waiting at the mouth of every stream and “guzzle”; and as soon as a log whirls down amongst the confusion of ice, you will see boats put out, perhaps with a couple of boys, or else some old humped-up fellow, in a coat green with age, rowing cross-handed, nosing out like an old pickerel watching for minnows. The logs that are missed drift about till they are water-logged, when they sink little by little, and at last become what are known as “tide-waiters,” or “tide-rollers,” i.e. snags drifting above, or resting partly on, the bottom, a menace to vessels.
There are holding booms at different turns of the river, with odd shabby little house-boats for the rafts-men moored beside them; and what are these called but gundalows, an old, old “Down-east” corruption of gondola; whether in derision, or in ignorance, is not now known. Sometimes they are fitted up with some coziness, perhaps with white curtains and a little fresh paint, and I have even seen geraniums at their windows.
Another brand-new schooner, the William D’Arcy, tied up at our lumber wharf this last spring, and lay there for nearly a week. We all went on board her. She lay at the sheltered side of the wharf, out of the cold wind, and the sun poured down on her. The smell of salt and cordage was so strong that you could almost feel the lift of her bows to the swell, but there she lay, as quiet as if she had never lifted to a wave at all. The men were at work at various jobs; no one was in a hurry; it plainly made no difference whether they were two days at the wharf or ten.
The bulwarks and outside fittings, anchors, hawsers, and hawse-holes, seemed wonderfully large to our landsman eyes, and the inside fittings, lockers, etc., as wonderfully small and compact. The enormous masts were of new yellow Oregon pine.
The Captain welcomed us hospitably, and took us down into his cabin, which was fitted with shelves, lockers, and cupboards, neat and compact, all brand-new and shining with varnish. There was a shelf of books, the table had a red cover and reading lamp, and the wife’s work-basket stood on it, with some mending. She had gone “upstreet” for her marketing.
“Oh,” said one of us, “it looks so homelike and cozy!”
The Captain looked round it complacently, but with remembering