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Works are sometimes constructed to arrest beaches, either to protect land behind, or to prevent their passage round pier-heads into artificial harbours, and thus engineers are practically aware of their travelling power in direction of certain winds. Why are sandy-beaches formed more rapidly than shingle?
And I would remember a bewildered little shaver, no higher than the back of this chair, with a mother and perhaps a big sister on the quay, very quiet but too upset to wave their handkerchiefs at the ship that glides out gently between the pier-heads; or perhaps some decent middle-aged father who had come early with his boy to see him off, and stays all the morning, because he is interested in the windlass apparently, and stays too long, and has got to scramble ashore at last with no time at all to say good-bye.
One of our bergs also shifted its position by this pressure, so as to weaken our confidence in the pier-heads of our intended basin; and a long “tongue” of one of them forcing itself under the Hecla’s forefoot, while the drift-ice was also pressing her forcibly from astern, she once more sewed three or four feet forward at low water, and continued to do so, notwithstanding repeated endeavours to haul her off, for four successive tides the ice remaining so close and so much doubled under the ship, as to render it impossible to move her a single inch.
Though old seventy-fours and old frigates are converted into chapels, and launched into the docks; though the "Boatswain's Mate" and other clever religious tracts in the nautical dialect are distributed among them; though clergymen harangue them from the pier-heads: and chaplains in the navy read sermons to them on the gun-deck; though evangelical boarding-houses are provided for them; though the parsimony of ship-owners has seconded the really sincere and pious efforts of Temperance Societies, to take away from seamen their old rations of grog while at sea: notwithstanding all these things, and many more, the relative condition of the great bulk of sailors to the rest of mankind, seems to remain pretty much where it was, a century ago.
They seldom took the general cut through Maiden and Laurel Streets to Second, but kept down the river bank by Beach Street, to see the ship-yards and hear the pounding of rivets and the merry adzes ringing, and see youngsters and old women gathering chips, while the sails on the broad river came up on wind and tide as if to shatter the pier-heads ere they bounded off.
Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
His large boat heeled, shot up, just missed my cable; and then he let her go free, and she ran clear away. As she ran he looked over his shoulder and laughed most cheerily; he greeted me with his eyes, and he waved his hand to me in the morning light. He held her well. A clean wake ran behind her. He put her straight for the harbour-mouth and passed the pier-heads and took the sea outside.
Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
Thick, around the bows of the ferry-boat as she lay tied in her slip, they flew; and as we went out I watch'd beyond the pier-heads, and across the broad stream, their swift-winding loop-ribands of motion, down close to it, cutting and intersecting. Though I had seen swallows all my life, seem'd as though I never before realized their peculiar beauty and character in the landscape.
This basin forms a sort of ante-chamber to the dock itself, where vessels lie waiting their turn to enter. During a storm, the necessity of this basin is obvious; for it would be impossible to "dock" a ship under full headway from a voyage across the ocean. From the turbulent waves, she first glides into the ante-chamber between the pier-heads and from thence into the docks.
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