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Updated: June 27, 2025
We crossed the city at Fifty-ninth Street and went down the East Side. Wherever men were working, we applied. We went to the stevedores on the East Side, but they were all "full up." "For God's sake," I said to some of them, but I was brushed aside with a wave of the hand. I never felt so like a beggar in my life.
He uttered the last part of the sentence involuntarily; stopped. "I was bound out, was beaten. I fought, ran away. In lumber camps, the drunken riffraff cursed the new scrub boy; on the Mississippi, the sailors and stevedores kicked him because the mate kicked them. Everywhere it was the same; the boy learned only one thing, to fight. Fight, or be beaten!
>From the noise I inferred that there must be four or five men, and from the ease with which they shifted the cases about some of them must have been pretty husky stevedores. "I don't know," a more polished but unfamiliar voice answered. The door to our hiding-place was opened roughly and then banged shut before we realised it.
Between the two long walls of brick appeared in the background the wharf with its mountains of merchandise, its squadrons of black stevedores, wagons and carts. On beyond were the hulls of the ships sustaining their grove of masts and smokestacks and, at the extreme end, the yellow breakwater and the sky recently washed by the rain, with flocks of little clouds as white and placid as silky sheep.
It was dusk when the 'Jackson' pushed her nose into the levee, and the song of the negro stevedores rose from below as they pulled the gang-plank on to the landing-stage. Stephen stood apart on the hurricane deck, gazing at the dark line of sooty warehouses. How many young men with their way to make have felt the same as he did after some pleasant excursion.
I slowed up at a convenient horse-trough, splashed my hands and face in the cooling water and adjusted my clothing as best I could, then I strolled into the shipping shed, where stevedores and dock labourers were busy, by electric light, completing the loading of a smart-looking little cargo boat. A notion seized me. It was a coaster, so I knew I could not be going very far away.
A snuff-taker is rarely to be met with, and few, if any, chew the weed, if we except the stevedores and foreign sailors to be seen about the shore and shipping. Havana has no wharves, properly speaking; vessels are loaded and discharged by means of lighters or scows.
Gay as Naples with colour, piercing the blue sky with a thousand spars, fluttering the flags of all nations to the wind, shot through with the sharp rattle of winch-chains, and perfumed with garlic, vanilla, fumes of coal tar, and the tang of the sea, the wharves of Marseilles lay before the travellers, a great counter eternally vibrating to the thunder of trade; bales of carpets from the Levant, tons of cheeses from Holland, wood from Norway, copra, rice, tobacco, corn, silks from China and Japan, cotton from Lancashire; all pouring in to the tune of the winch-pauls, the cry of the stevedores, and the bugles of Port Saint Jean, shrill beneath the blue sky and triumphant as the crowing of the Gallic cock.
The ammunition which was issued to the troops at this time was drawn at the same place. When wagons arrived to receive issues, stevedores were directed to count out the different articles under the direction of an overseer, and these piles of articles were verified by the officer in charge of the issues. The stevedores then loaded them on the wagons which were to haul them to the different camps.
Their farewells to the men Good-by, John, etc., with wavings of handkerchiefs as long as they were in sight. A pert, petulant young clerk, continually fooling with the mate, swearing at the stevedores and laboring men, who regard him not. Somewhat dissipated, probably. The mate of a coal-vessel a leathern belt round his waist, sustaining a knife in a leathern sheath.
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