This exuberant piece is an account of a day Hoagland spends aboard the Teresa Moran, “a new, 4290-horsepower, round-the-clock boat which had just changed crews, as it does every other day.”
He introduces us to the crew: Captain Biagi (“Biagi’s back hurt because he’d been raking fertilizer into his lawn the day before; he’s peppy, talkative, competent, clever, and lives in East Brunswick, New Jersey”); co-captain Ray Carella (“Carella, who started on the Erie Canal at sixteen as a deckhand, now lives in East Meadow, Long Island, but is a gaunter, less assured, somber man”); Ture Eklund, deckhand (“a soft-spoken, civilized fellow who lives in Westchester County and builds model boats”); Walter Anglim, deckhand (“a raw-boned, rugged American sort”); Tom Rasmussen, engineer (“young, gangly, and energetic”); Joe Gallant, engineer (“a husky, hard-headed old customer”); and Candy Coelho, cook (“a Portuguese who is a veteran of forty-four years on the tugs, though his tightly smooth face doesn’t show it”).
Hoagland’s account begins at noon with the Teresa Moran helping the ocean liner United States get underway from its slip in the North River:
The United States, though the biggest of ships, is not a particularly memorable proposition among all the tasks that come to a tug. We were helped by the Esther Moran, which tied onto the stem: we were at the bow, with Carella in the wheelhouse. Captain Biagi, on the ship’s bridge, gave his directions by walkie-talkie, each tug answering with its peep whistle to conform that the order was understood. Two longshoremen cast the hawsers off, and the ship, its engines reversed, provided its own motive power, while the Teresa and Esther kept it clear of the pier. Especially at the Manhattan piers, which are finger wharfs, built at right angles to the river, undocking a ship is a great deal simpler than docking it. The ship has been moored bow-in, so the tug which is at the bow only acts as a rudder as the ship backs away. In a kind of a dance, the Teresa nudged first one side of the stem, then the other – the stem looming overhead as sharp as a blade. There were acres of black steel plating, rivets in twisting patterns, and the two anchors like a whale’s eyes. The ship blasted its whistle to warn any traffic on the river and in no time it had backed into the current whereupon the two tugs pushed it around ninety degrees to head towards the sea. Compared to the rigamarole of warping a big ship into its slip, this was as easy as kicking your shoes off.
The Teresa’s next job is to go around Lower Manhattan and up the East River to an oil depot at 138th Street in the East Bronx to pilot the Liberian tanker St. Grigorousa:
A silent back stretch, 138th Street is beyond Hellgate Bridge, off Sunken Meadows and by North Brothers Island, where the planes sweep low every thirty seconds to land at LaGuardia Airport. The St Grigorousa, scruffy, patch-painted, offered no problems, except that our tug in maneuvering got careless and snapped a few pilings on an adjoining dock. The Greeks on the ship watched this little miscalculation with the attention which seamen of different nationalities bestow on each other’s blunders. Anglim had had trouble throwing a line up on deck, and that interested them, too.
While accompanying the St. Grigorousa downstream, they see the Marie Moran, the Patricia Moran, and the Esther Moran pushing the broad side of a lumber boat, the Seamar from Coos Bay, Oregon, which had managed to draw parallel with its pier but was unable to approach closer. The dispatcher tells them to go to its assistance quickly. Hoagland writes,
Without waiting for Biagi to come off the ship, we swung away, and putting our bow amidships on the Seamar, shoved full ahead for what amounted to nearly an hour. Our extra horsepower did stop the drifting, but then no more progress was made, though the four tugs shifted position and pushed as hard as they could. First the outflowing tide had been the villain, but soon it was just a case of the ship being so heavily loaded that her keel was touching the bottom; we were trying to push her into a list sufficient to bring her deck close to the dock where the cranes would be able to unload her. It was tedious business; the tug captains talked back and forth on the radio and talked to the pilot, who was from the Patricia.
Eventually the Teresa leaves the other three tugs shouldering the Seamar and heads for Governor’s Island to pick up Biagi, who’s been deposited on a small barge boat called the Lester. On this mission, there’s nearly an accident:
A German freighter, the Hilde Mittman, was travelling beside us as we entered the curve that the East River makes near Delancey Street. At the same time, however, a tug called the Carol Moran was coming upriver, as well as a Penn Central Railroad tug which was roped between two unwieldly carfloats. The Hilde was outside of us and signaled them both to go outside her – or, in other words, closer to Brooklyn – but the Carol swerved inside instead, between the Hilde Mittman and us. The Hilde had to veer toward the railroad tug suddenly, and the railroad tug was almost forced into a pier on the Brooklyn side of the river – trying to avoid a collision, she reversed engines and swung dangerously sideways, and the bow lines on one of the carfloats broke. The Carol went on, the Hilde went on, but we lingered a moment or two to see whether she needed help.
The Teresa’s next job is to help a McAllister tug sail the freighter Fraternity from Pier 1 in the Erie Basin. Hoagland describes the trip:
We passed a good many ships in berths on the way: the Alamahdi, the Concordia Lago, the Lexa Maersk, the Lichtenfels. A paint-company launch puttered by, towing rafts and scaffolding; also a union launch collecting dues from the barge and lighter men whom it encountered. The sun had come out, the weather was warming up genially. Tugboats ride very low in the water, with the stubby bow pushing waves that are higher than the decks. It was a lovely, foamy, noisy trip. Standing on the fantail, I had the sense I was aquaplaning, a feeling of victory. “How are you doing – meditating?” asked Eklund.
They guide the Fraternity out of its slip and out of Erie Basin without difficulty. I love this passage:
It’s always a sharply focused instant when a ship separates from the tugs. Water slashed in as the gap opened; the wind seemed to blow harder, no longer blocked by the ship, and it was an ocean wind. For the first time, the ship’s screw kicked up a deep, worldly froth, a green wake, and the Fraternity pointed away, heaving us where we were.
The next job is across the Upper Bay at Pier F in Jersey City. Hoagland writes,
The Baltic Sea (Goteberg) was our new eight o’clock ship. Eklund heaved up the throwing line, which has a ball on the end so that it will hang over the ship’s rail until it’s retrieved. Since the ship was white, he put a white cloth over our bow, where we would rub paint. Up on deck the silent Swedes with their beards and curly blonde hair and muted manner looked down at us, though their captain was pacing restlessly. We waited three quarters of an hour while they finished swinging cargo aboard and setting the hatches to rights. Tugboatmen kill these odd bits of time with cards, and tying up all over the harbor, they know little waterfront stores everywhere which can be reached by froghopping over a series of pilings and climbing a fence or two. Then Carella, as pilot, performed a simple and classic soft-shoe undocking from Pier F “into the stream,” as they say, scrambling down to the Teresa again while the Swedes watched. The ship had its running lights on, green on the starboard and red on the port, and the uncountable lights of Manhattan were emerging in all their bravado as the dusk darkened. The water churned between ship and tug; the sea breeze struck us as we slid clear of the ship – the mystically warm-and-cold wind of May.
The last job Teresa performs before Hoagland debarks is to help the Joan Moran sail the Ixia, an English timber boat. Hoagland describes the trip to Greenpoint where the Ixia is docked:
The spray plumed like cream at our bow, and the water was like crinkled tinfoil. The lights of the city were like jubilant news. They were flung out so far that what can one say? They’re not man-made; they’re the work of some several million men. The lights in the office buildings are a blunt blind yellow, blaring into the muffling night, but the lights of Stuyvesant Town and the other big centers of home life are like stippled banks of amber, glowing. I sat on the capstan in the stern, and it was like a whole screwy radar screen. It’s so dazzling that one’s eyes go dead every minute or so, looking. You can’t take it in; you look until your eyes go blank, turn them away to the darker water, and then look again at the sweep of it and the shining water, until again your vision wilts and goes dead.
The Teresa and the Joan push the Ixia out into the stream, and she gets underway. Hoagland’s ride is over. The Teresa drops him off on South Street on her way to another job. He writes, “I stood on the bow fender and climbed over the rail at Pier 9, East River, waving good-by and shaking hands, worn out, exuberant, and caught a bus home.”
“Knights and Squires” exemplifies Hoagland’s tremendous descriptive power. It contains several inspired sentences. This one, for example:
Eklund, a relaxed man, worked with brief motions, snuggling the thick Dacron lines around the horns of the bitt as easily as if he were tightening his belt.
And this beauty:
In the spotlight a leaping reindeer on the smokestack came alive, and the smoke, bowel-gray, bulged out of the stack, vaulting and rolling.
In detail after splendid detail, “Knights and Squires” evokes the action of a working tug in one of the world’s busiest harbors. I first read it fifty years ago. I've never forgotten it.
Postscript: Two more excellent “tugboat” pieces by Hoagland: “The Tugman’s Passage,” in his 1982 collection of the same name; and “Tugboats on the Tanana,” chapter 13 of his Alaskan Travels (2013).
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