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“Where did I go to sea from? The First Ward.”

—TOM WILSON.

Before it was anything else New York was a seaport, and before anything else it still is. The immigrants who came here from Europe had a good idea of that, but most of their children have forgotten it; as for the immigrants from inland America, they apparently never knew it. New Yorkers read of London River and Liverpool. They think of Nantucket and Provincetown and Gloucester as towns with a nautical atmosphere, or of New Bedford as the home of a marine tradition. But they don’t realize that the fellow next to them in the subway is just as likely a second engineer off a freighter as a certified public accountant employed by Dunkelbinner & Follywinkle in the Jacob Ruppert Building. The Manhattan waterfront is not hard to find. You start in any direction and walk. But psychic barriers block it off from the rest of the city. The foot of Wall Street is as nautical as The Nigger of the Narcissus, but a block away nobody thinks of anything more seaworthy than Warner Brothers, Preferred. The great liners dock within a few blocks of the Casa Manana. Nobody gives a damn.

As good a place as any to get the feel of the port is the office of the Kennedy Towing Line at 32 South Street. It is the last old-fashioned tugboat office left. The bigger lines have gone down to buildings like 24 State and 17 Battery Place, where they employ female stenographers and rub elbows with transatlantic steamship companies. But a pot-bellied iron stove still overheats the Kennedy office from early fall until late spring, and a gay blue and white portrait of the tug “Idlewild,” with more paint than perspective, provides its chief adornment. Of the six Kennedy boats two were built before 1875. It is Tom Wilson’s favorite office for yarning.

Tom is the senior tugboat master of the harbor, with a voice on him like the Staten Island Ferry boat and a chest like an oil drum.

“I am 74 years old,” he roars, “and I can jump out of that window and jump right back again.” The office is on the second floor. “When they put me together they put me together right,” says Tom, heaving on a handful of snow white hair. “Every hair drove in with a nail. None of your shin plasters.

“I went tug-boatin’ when I was 18, aboard of the Leonard Richards, the twin of that Idlewild in the pitcher. Where did I go to sea from? The First Ward. Tugboat captains was the cream of society in them days. They wore high hats and gold watch chains and Prince Albert coats and striped trousers, and they never touched the wheel without kid gloves. They would steal the sight out of your eyes.

“The Leonard Richards was a Hooker. What was a Hooker? Why, a tug that cruised off Sandy Hook for schooners, of course. Just the same as a Gater was a tug that hanged off Hell Gate, and a lugger was a tug that lugged ships to their berths after the Hookers and the Gaters brought them in, whether the ships was pinewooders from the South, or brickers, or whatever they might be.

“Them days there was more ships than now, and plenty of sail. The most part of them had no regular agents ashore to hire tugs, and there was no radio, anway, so the agents wouldn’t a’ knowed when they was coming in. The first tug that seed a ship he made up to her and the two captains paced their deck awhile and called each other this and that and at last they struck a bargain, or they didn’t, and you sheered off and he run up the American flag for another tug.

“But the tug that got out first had the best chance. So sometimes at night the captain would shake you by the shoulder and say, ‘Get up and cast off with no noise,’ and you would try to give the other boats the shake and get out to sea before they was wise. You would go out without lights, by Rockaway or South Beach or Coney Island, where you knowed there was nothing you could hit only maybe an oyster boat, and you wouldn’t stop for that.

“Sometimes when you would get out in the stream you would hear the whistles tooting if they suspicioned you, and the whole gang would be after you.

“Then, if the old man was wise, he would switch his running lights. He would put his red and green lights astern and his white light on the bow, and it would look like he was coming in instead of going out. But if the other guy was wise he wouldn’t take none of that—just give her more medicine.

“We would cruise off the Hook two or three days. We would carry that much coal, but only water for twenty hours, steady steaming; but we could get water at the Hook, but not coal. How far did we go? Half way to Ireland, boy—half way to Ireland. Ten per cent of what he got was for the captain, besides what he could steal, and if he didn’t get no tow he didn’t get no wages.

“Thirty or forty hours at a stretch working was nothing. The first command I got, after I got my license in 1883, I asked my owner for some bedding so’s the men could lay down. ‘I didn’t hire them men to sleep,’ he says. I can work thirty hours right now without squealing, and on my hoofs, too.

“Then when you would get out there sometimes there would be a good wind and they would sail right past you, and maybe offer you a line.

“But when the wind died they had a different tune.

“Once I picked up a French bark off Fire Island, and I couldn’t make a price with him. I follied him and I follied him, and at Long Beach, sure enough he goes ashore. Now I had him, I figured, and he would pay me a damn good price to pull him off. Up comes a nor’west gale, and what does the sucker do but back her off under sail! Ah, well, heartaches in every trade.

“But one time they wouldn’t bargain was the war. That was the golden age. All I had to do was cruise down by the Highlands on a calm day and take my pick of the schooners and barks that was bringing supplies to New York. I would make up to the one that looked the best bet.

“ ‘Morning, captain,’ I would tell the old man. ‘Seed anything of a submarine around here?’

“ ‘My God!’ he would say. ‘So close to New York?’

“ ‘Shelled a ship up by Hoffman’s Island this morning,’ I would say.

“ ‘How much to take me in?’

“ ‘Fifteen hundred dollars.’

“ ‘You’re a pirate. I’ll not pay it.’

“ ‘Very good, captain. Sorry we can’t do business, captain. But I ain’t got no time to waste out here. I don’t want to lose this little craft or the few lives I got on board.’

“I’d start off, and five minutes later he’d be signaling for me to come back and tow him at my price.

“When I’d get him up to Quarantine I’d drop him. ‘If you want to go any further,’ I’d say, ‘get a local. This is an express.’ ”

It was during the war that Tom performed his greatest feat of pilotage.

The Swash Channel, between Homer Shoal and Flynn’s Knoll, two treacherous shallows, is charted good for twenty feet of water.

“I took a five-masted bark, the Orleans, up there, drawing twenty-four and a half,” Tom said pridefully. “When I got her through Morgan, the captain, nearly went crazy.

“ ‘Why the hell did you take her through there?’ he asks.

“ ‘I knowed the tide, and I knowed the spot. You didn’t bump, did you?’

“ ‘No, but if that hawser had parted, or if something had gone wrong with that little boat, she would have been left dry and broke her back sure.’

“The reason I done it, of course, was I saved three miles instead of going round by the Main Ship Channel, and I was running short of water.”

Tom says he never knew a harbor thief.

“I knew some that had the name of it,” he said, “but I could not give you their pedigree. There were stories of some fellows that would go out in a schooner and make a price to bring her in. Then they would wait until night, and any tug they found at the end of a pier they would just take it and do the job and get their cash, and then leave the tug at the nearest slip and think no more of it.

“But taking gear, now, that is something else again. Anything that was not nailed to the boat, in the old days, the owner was not considered entitled to it.”