William H. Miller Jr. - Great Ships in New York Harbor: 175 Historic Photographs, 1935-2005

New York harbor is indeed a magical place. On a Saturday morning in early June 2004, the setting was superb. The citys weather was flawless. The skies overhead were ink blue, the light soft and clear, the visibility crystalline and seemingly limitless. You could almost see all the way to Portugal!

We were fortunate: a boat ride was in our schedule. On a chartered craft with several hundred fellow guests aboard, our journey had, in fact, a very specific purpose: the 100th anniversary of the tragic burning and near-sinking of the steamer General Slocum. Some 957 perished in the churning, Long Island Sound waters just north of Hell Gate. Once at the site, there were commemorative speeches, a narrative, and the tossing of wreaths and carnations. A clergyman added a blessing while several surrounding boats paused in momentary vigil as a city fireboat elegantly sprayed great hoops of colored water. Whistles then sounded in rightful homage, followed by a deep silence. Those lost souls were fittingly remembered.

We had undocked from Lower Manhattan, from the piers of South Street Seaport Museum and where, decades before, passenger ships, tramp steamers, and those ever-romantic banana boats had cast off for the likes of Havana, Vera Cruz, and Cartagena. An immortal ship, the liner Morro Castle, which hideously burned off the New Jersey shore in September 1934 with the loss of 122 passengers and crew, used nearby Pier 15, one dock to the north. Our boat swung out and then turned north, eventually moving along the mighty East River and under that trio of illustrious bridges: the Brooklyn, the Manhattan, and the Williamsburg.

While Manhattans cityscape is dominated by those great skyscrapers, the opposite Brooklyn shore is lower, gentler, perhaps less inhibiting and more individualistic. There, in melancholy splendor, also sat the great warehouses, factories, and piers that once pulsated, hummed and drummed, and churned with commerce and trade and, of course, shipping. I thought back to those busier times, to the 1950s and 60s, when those very docks were crammed with freighters, their matchstick-like booms swung in every direction, loading and off-loading freight of every kind and type, and from the far corners of the earth: Capetown, Hamburg, Yokohama, Valparaiso, and Trinidad. There was the Meyer Line, Farrell Lines, Moore-McCormack Lines, Grancolombiana, the Elder Dempster Lines, NYK Line, and the Barber Line. And they were the names belonging to just the upper-Brooklyn docks. Dozens and dozens were left to the lower Brooklyn waterfront, extending southward to the mammoth Army Terminal down at 58th Street.

I even loved the smells of those old Brooklyn docks. There were the smells of the hemp lines, the smells of the combinations of the oils and the greases, the smells of our cargoes, the smells of the wood pilings and, of course, the smells of the river itself, remembered Captain Dag Dvergastein, present-day master of an ultra-luxurious cruise ship, the Seven Seas Voyager. Then, however, the young Dag was a junior on Norwegian-flag, Barber Line freighters. Barber was actually the American agents name. The ships belonged to the Oslo-based Wilhelmsen Lines, and possibly best remembered for their impeccable freighters, which all had names that began with the letter T. Dag served aboard the likes of the Taronga, Tegola, Trianon, Tennessee, and Taiping . We would lay over in the Brooklyn docks for days at a time, usually a full week in fact, off-loading and then reloading for the next voyage. It all took much longer, even in the 1970s, as the changeover to full containers was not yet complete. I often did the night watch onboard, sometimes casting a glance backward at the great Manhattan skyline, those towers glowing and reaching for the sky. The combination of ship, pier, cargo, and the city was fascinating, intoxicating, absolute poetry.

The Barber Line freighters carried an enormous range of freight in their six, seven, even eight holds. We were like floating supermarkets, noted the Captain. We would have mail, shirts, California apples, steel, bourbon, bags of corn, and American-made cars encased in plywood. Wed also have toys from Taiwan, automobile parts from Japan, bed sheets from China, latex and tapioca from Bangkok, and yet other items such as canned sardines, fireworks, clocks, and construction equipment. We had a very organized routing in those days, from Brooklyn to the Panama Canal and the West Coast before heading for the Far East. Afterward, we would return from the East again through Panama and stopping in the Caribbean before calling at a succession of U.S. ports before returning to Brooklyn. The full voyage took as long as four or five months.