TUDIES OF THRILLING LIVES THE PILOT

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 19, 12 May 1909, Page 47

TUDIES OF THRILLING LIVES THE PILOT

BY

WILLIAM “ALLEN JORNSTON.

Fashionable and Democratic. > AYE you ever seen him come over the. rail of an ocean liner—the I 1 pilot? / If you have, you were surprised. undoubtedly, at his appearance. ■You rather expected a uniform man, at least some self-evident type of a nautical man. You certainly did not expect this man in a smart Derby and fashionable overcoat, who smiles good naturedly as he hands out a roll of precious newspapers and laughingly settles a number of foolish bets made in the tedium of the smoking room—as to the make of his watch, the colour of his necktie, and whether he prefers a pipe or a cigar. - ■ He looks like a first cabin passenger; and wha t a democratic sort of a fellow he is! . None of the sailors touches a forelock to him, no official commotion is caused by his appearance: but, if you'll notice, the C aptain grasps his hand with a look of confidence and deep concern, as though he were handing him the keys of a high office. •• — - And instantly then the pilot's face settles into grim, grave lines. He walks to his post with quick, decisive steps, and from that moment on, if you'll look at IrinT. high up there in the air in his narrow, railed off walk, you’ll find him a graven image of exceeding carefulness and dire responsibility. In the power of Iris keen eye and cool head he holds the lives of a whole town full of people and property valued at several millions—holds this great charge with a delicate balance, for the channel that marks his path from Knoll’s point to the pier is so shallow that oftentimes less than the thickness of a man’s body intervenes between the sandy bottom and the keel of the great liner—with a most delicate balance, for all about the narrow pathway lies a field bristling with rocky reefs, sheer cliffs, sunken vessels, seething currents and sandbars. Appears to be Charming. Not knowing this and seeing only the Calm man up on the narrow walk, dignified by the importance of his post and earning considerably more than one hundred dollars for a few hours’ work, his vocation strikes one as quite charming. It strikes many boys that way; one of them happened into the Pilot Commission room as I waited there. He was a big, good natured lad-.-“Er—-I’d like to be a pilot,” he announced. - • . “ The secretary nodded, eved him keenly. _“All right,” he said' kindly; "I’ll tell you what to do. “First, you must take a sea voyage—pay, two years—learn how to pull ropes.” ; “But I want to be a pilot!” “Yes,” the secretary smiled, “I know. But we only take sailors.” . ‘•'bh!” said the boy. “.When you come back we’ll give you a place in the port <vt port wages; and if yon make yourseft the pick of your crowd we’ll, perhaps, make you an apprentice.” - - - What’s that?” 1

“An apprentice on a pilot boat, where you’ll serve for two years. If you’re •bright and the pilots like you, and you pass a creditable examination, you may become a boatman and have, charge of a pilot boat. “Then you are just starting in. Yau must serve three years more anyway, and after that wait for a vacancy. But I don’t want to encourage you too much. You must please the pilots and seafaring men, who, if you don’t know it, are the hardest to please in all this mortal kingdom. The. discipline is severe, but if you work hard you’ll win out—some time.” "Then" ‘’Then you become an ‘eighteen-foot* branch pilot, handling vessels drawing eighteen feet and less. Then you get a ‘twenty-two foot* license, ■ and, finally, you are made a ‘full branch’ pilot.” ‘"Like Captain—?” “All that—for that?” ‘‘Yes.” The boy put on his hat. “I guess I don’t want to be a pilot,” said he. “I thought as much.” said the secretary. as the door closed behind the disappointed applicant. “He didn’t have the stuff in him of which pilots are made. It is best, then, that he find it Out now.” “Sounds like a hard course of training,” he added, “doesn't it? But '.it should lie so. These bar pilots—there

are about one hundred and twenty in all —handle the passenger traffic and most of the tonnage of the greatest and most intricate port in the world. Every day they hold in their keeping millions of dollars in property worth and thousands of precious lives. That responsibility requires a certain kind of a man—not an ordinary kind —made so by the most rigorous training. And then, as you will learn later, there are exactions and danger in the life that a man must measure up to.” The secretary leaned. back in his chair. “Tin an old man*” said he, "grown old in this service, and a pilot’s life looks threadbare to me. Dord knows. I’m not one. to hold forjth any optimism or enthusiasm- on the subject. But I’ll say this of them, they're not college bred men nor trained business men, but I'll take- the first twelve of them that-enter this room to-day (he pointed to the waiting room of the Sandy Hook Pilot Association) and I’ll match them for intelligence, nerve and decision of character against the first twelve bankers you may meet in Wall street. How's that?” Interesting Map. Over our heads on the wall was hung a large blue-print map of the harbour, so thickly dotted with sounding points and measurements that it looked like a section of the blue sky in a blinding snowstorm. Dotted lines showed the old South Channel of Colonial days, Ged-

ney’s. of late use, and the new Ambrose Channel. It was a masterpiece of map work. “Pilot Beebe made that,” said the secretary, “and here’s his book, a complete guide that every pilot swears by. These accomplishments bespeak intelligence, don't they? Well, now for nerve. “Have you ever been seasick? Yes? Then you knows what it means. How would you like to go out to your day's' work to-day, to-morrow. next day. knowing assuredly that you would suffer that torture before you came home? Pilot Beebe does that!” “But why?” “Why it’s his vocation, that’s all. He can’t stop. He’s got to make his living, you know. But think of it! Nothing theatric about it—no sudden danger out of a sky that's generally clear: no risk with the glory of saving others' lives; no band playing for inspiration's sake. Nothing of that. Just a calm, patient, everyday grappling with a torturing ill ness that lies in the path of duty. 1 call that nerve!" The pilot's Club next door is a place worth visiting. It is unique in every way. Principally, it lacks tin* luxury of other New York Clubs, but what it lacks in this res|H‘ct it makes up for in reality and sharp tension of life. Here are men who really do things, and are quit * unconscious of it. I found a room redolent of brine and tobacco smoke ati.l ringing with rhe deep throated laughter that tells of tr:i>peratc habits and an open air, open-hearted life. The doors swing ceaselessly t > admit T ‘Wcomers, men carrying grips—well dressed men with keen business faces and prightly walk. Others are lounging in .hail's, telling stories or quizzing and bantering the new arrivals, letting their eyes wander occasionally towards a blackboard with double column* and the words “Outward" and “Reserve” over each. Here track is kept of outgoing and incoming pilots; hourly news is had of clearing vessels. And now a* a man chalks down a name a pilot gets up, swings into his coat, and. with hi* grip in hand and a cheery “So long!" dis appears through the door. “Are. all of them waiting their turn?” 1 asked. “Not all,” *aid a pilot “Some are just lounging.” \ twinkle came to his eye. "You see." said he, “we are seafaring men, and oftentimes the wives of seafaring men arc gifted with sharp tongues and handy brooms." The t winkle gave way to a reminiscent look, “generally the old lady says: ‘ Now, John, get out of here, you and your pipe. Just look at those lace curtains!’ So. you see, the boys come here -to play.” Ho crossed his legs with an expression of supreme content and hummed an old Yankee air: ‘•No sound, No ground, No bottom to be found With a long pine pitch pole, daddy.” There’s no shop talk in this pilot’* club, no sailors’ yarns and the like. AH

that sort of thing is tabooed by common Consent, and -there are only good natured rebuffs forthcoming for him who tries to lift the conversation reminiveenceward. "Romance?” snorted a pilot, an old sailor who has travelled the sea® in quest of the dangerous eachelot and chased away many a bow head whale up the Pacific side of the Arctie. “Romance—in a pilot's life? Romance, rot! It’s plain humdrum, I call it.” Then 1 heard a dry recital of the dull routine of cruise and docking, of weary days in the harbour station, of long, rainy days in the pilot boat, tossing on a choppy sea, or rolling about in a “white ash” breeze beneath a copper atm.

And unintentionally then the record ran on into wintry seas and vessels reached by a flimsy, twisting rope ladder in waves that stove in wooden hulls, of ice foundered boats and boats capsized on icy 100 shores, of waiting in a fog right in the path of the .sharp nosed ocean leviathans, "with a siren screeching at you, now in your ears, it seems, now this way and then a ntiie off, and then all of a sudden a big, black hull looms up and goes swashing by so near that yon can look in the port holes and see what they have for dinner, while a Ji.jHow voice on the deck ’way over your head, says suddenly: “‘D —— n! What’s that?” Dangerous Life. ‘ Then yonr life is dangerous.” 1 suggested, with conviction, for I had fore-

knowledge of a list of casualties that would fill several newspaper columns. "Yes” —doubtfully. "Not as it uised to be. Well, I dunno. either. Yes —no.” And then an argument was started, which was just the thing for a despairing interviewer. Over on the wall was a chart showing the high sea’s limit and the pilot’s domain within. New York lies at the inner point of a wide funnel: and in the old days, when pilots were autocrats and snubbed captains and broke heads ad libitum, they patrolled the outer rim of this funnel from Hatteras on the south as far north as the Georgian Banks. Thcv went out often five hundred miles,

were gone as long as two months—and sometimes never came back. "That was no fun.” growled an old pilot, “floundering off Sable Island in an eighty-footer, with a terrible norwester blowin’ snow, and zero cold. I saw a yawl leave the boats once in answer to a blue signal on a freighter—and it was two days before we found her.” “And the pilot ?” “Frozen, of course.” "In the famous blizzard of ’BB—aw, the wind was cold,” said the old pilot with a reminiscent shiver, “as eoid as a stepmother’s breath.” Two pilot boats were wrecked and two went down, with all hands lost. Vp to 1895, in fact, the death roll shows a boat and crew lost for almost every year. That was in the old days of competition, when every pilot was out for him-

self, and it was ‘‘steal a ship” if you could. Since 1895 the bar pilots have existed a profit sharing association under a Pilot Commission, which is State appointed. The old pilot fleet has all but disappeared, and the patrol lines have been drawn in almost to Sandy Hook. Three of the old time schooners, with the big numerals on their sails, are still used in the Southern Ground (for vessels from the West Indies and South America), but the bulk of the cruising is done by two fine steamers, the New York and New Jersey, owned by the Pilot’s Association, and built at a respective eost of 90.000 dollars and 73,000 dollars. "They’re all right inside, with their

steam heat and electric lights,” said a pilot, arguing for present day peril, “but the weather has not changed any that I notice. Plunged into Icy Sea. “Take the Cedric last winter, when she came in a floating iceberg in a terrible sea. When I caught her ladder she pitched over me till all I eould see above was a roof of ice, and I went down in the water up to my armpits. Then up she lifts —full feet in the air —and I swung In against the hull with a bump, I can tell you ” “That bumping is bad. It knocked the hearts out of John Canvin and Alf. Bandier.” “Hearts out?” “Well, yes, Canvin dropped dead as he shook the captain’s hand, and Bandier

fell back off the ladder and disappears* like a sack of shot.” "But how did you climb the Cedric?• “Skated,” said he. All in all, the present day peril side had the best of the argument. There are the same wintry blasts to-day that froze Pilot Bob “Mitchell to death as he stood at his post on the good ship Stingray: the same smother of sea and snow that engulfed the Columbia when the Alaska cut her in two, and then, backing with full speed astern, sucked the wreckage and four men down with her churning propeller. The pilot is the stormy petrel of the aea. Blow high or low. come sun or snow, blue sky or sleet, his post is there on the outer bar. ready to shake hands in all weather with a saucy windjammer or a big four-piper and then feel them in through the long, narrow ship lane, with its hundred danger spots, past rock and treacherous shoal, on and up to the pier of "All’s well? Av, av. sir!”