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Kull ... I steered carefully along the Jersey flats as far as the buoys that mark the entrance channel to the ferry dock on the south side of the statue. There I could see by the action of the buoys' leaning and weaving in the current that we had used up all the benefits of the Back Channel route. I shaped a course across the main ship channel, stemming the current for the tip of Governors. I had gotten perhaps a quarter of the way across when the pilot- house door flew open and there was the captain, much annoyed. "'I said to go up to the statue before you cut across.'" "I felt very foolish. 'I was almost there.' "'I didn't say almost. You go to it. That's the way it's done. That's the way it's always done.'" We've reached only the fourth page of text in this rich 270-page volume (includ- ing index, five pages of bibliography, seven of chapter notes, and a three-page epilogue), and already we've ventured seamlessly from the formation of the planet and a part of it cut-out just for tug- boats, to the credentials of the guide who is conducting our tour. Were a hull to slide as cleanly through the water, a boatman would be proud. We've even come to understand just a little about tugboating and a stand-up, be ready to be stood- down, character of its world. What could the next four pages bring? Minding Business in New York Whatever the main theme of the book, the author departs its regional orientation at his pleasure, whenever no other way arises to tell the tale. If he goes back eleven hundred million years to the gene- sis of this place made for tugboats, he's earned the right to go back 268 years to the genesis of the self-propelled towing vessel, drawn-up on paper. It was appar- ently never built, and had its origin in London in 1737, not New York. Like the plate tectonics that constructed the region, the movement of ideas was inexorable but slow. The earliest commercial steamboats saw the prospects in towing, even if not as a primary occupation. The famous Nau- tilus, the Staten Island steam ferry that entered service 80 years after the steam towboat was first sketched-out, was an early adopter of the new tech. She was fit- ted with towing bitts, the author tells us, and from time to time went off on the impromptu tow with a complement of ferry passengers still aboard. Even by the time of purpose-built tow- boats, sidewheelers after the 1830s, the spontaneous demand for services — or competition to provide same — was pro- pelled by the technology of the day. There were no long-distance communications, and a lot of tows arrived on the winds. When? Why, there they are now. As the local fleet of tugboats developed ocean- going prowess, working the waters around Sandy Hook, they extended the practicality of doing business in the region. Not many merchantmen could make their way across the ocean, straight up to their docks under sail. If the port of New York made commerce viable and physically built the city, it had the tugboat, literally, as its motor. The clipper ships wouldn't have worked if it hadn't been for tugboats, which by the 1860s had developed the screw propeller and the particular profile by which they're recognized to this day. Transatlantic steamships bearing cargo by then were able to navigate closer to the piers of New York, and schedules grew somewhat more predictable. But it still took tugboats to dock them. The voracious appetite of the adoles- cent city required tugboat services for cargo coming the other way too, from the north down the Hudson for example. This included the barges and boats of the Erie Canal, among other canals built to the Hudson, and a great towing empire that developed midway between New York and Albany. The Cornell Steamboat Com- pany headquartered itself at Rondout, near the D&H Canal, like New York itself "as much a creature of its geographical situa- tion as it was of the management skills of its early proprietors." For the better part of a century, the Cornell company was the dominant force in towing things south to the old Manhattan Prong. Goods came from the canals, and from the towns along the rivers en route, with their gravel and cement and bluestone and brick, the base substances of cities before architects discovered steel and glass. They arrived in tows whose sheer sprawl is hard to imagine in a day when container barges take such little space. The canalers were not literally tugboats of New York, but they were so closely affiliated with New York that the story is incomplete without them. Their influences surface periodical- ly through the book. Almost from the time the canals began operation, railroads and eventually high- ways began competing with the river tows, successfully in response to the social requirements and economic bal- ances of the 19th and 20th centuries. That was okay, because downriver the railroads themselves needed tug services. Some- thing had to bring boxcars from the rail- heads on the Jersey shore to their final destinations around the boroughs and beyond. The author credits John H. Starin, who built a large nautical empire in New York (130 tugs, lighters, steamers and barges by the 1880s), for development of the carfloat system that might form the gene- sis of intermodal transport as we know it. In time the tugboats at this work were mostly railroad property in their own right, though they stimulated other busi- ness for the boats on the harbor begun for them so many millions of years before. A lot of tugs from elsewhere, as well as the proprietary tug operations of corpora- tions with other "core businesses," like the railroads and the petroleum companies, commingled in New York along with the assets of purely local operators large and small, mostly small. Only a few sourcess seem to have recorded tug business deal- ings in those days, beyond the iconic descriptions of dispatchers shouting orders to skippers through megaphones from Manhattan office towers. The tug- 22 • MarineNews • March, 2006 TUGBOATS The opening page of the book reproduces the tugboat shown here, and later on a towing receipt with an 1870s date -- in that case, to Tug Bluestone. Besides the "propeller" Meyers, other towing receipts for New York tugs from 1880 through 1898 have turned up, all with exactly the same illustration. Were all New York tugs identical? Or was clip art of generic tugs offered by printers on stock forms? The identical "cut" also appears on receipts from various Atlantic ports, including Norfolk, Philadelphia, Boston and others. Dates so far range from 1868 to 1907. So the icon of the representative screw tugboat was estab- lished from just past the Civil War to a decade past the Spanish-American, practically everywhere. (Don Sutherland scan.) Something about the K. Whittelsey's galley must be irresistable. The book gives us a picture of a rack from the galley taken in the 1940s, and here it is again in 2003. What gourmets these tugboaters be. (Photo: Don Sutherland) MARCH MN2006 3(17-24).qxd 3/3/2006 2:47 PM Page 22
