W

HEN the Olympic arrived in New York on her maiden voyage she was three mortal hours in covering the nine miles from Quarantine to a point on the Hudson opposite her dock at Twenty-first street; and yet the Olympic has proved herself capable of twenty-one and a half knots, or twenty-four and three-quarter miles, as a landlubber would put it, an hour. There was nothing the matter with the Olympic, but there was so much the matter with New York harbor that the big ship could only be docked on the slack of tide. If the captain had been a railroad man he might have explained that he was "killing time" on the way up from Quarantine; but being merely a British mariner he could only marvel in his unimaginative way at the people who are so busy admiring their own progressiveness that they never have time to catch up with the procession.

Most of the difficulties arise from the lack of intelligence displayed in arranging the docks of New York harbor, every one of which is placed at right angles to the current. In Liver

pool the steamer floats

gracefully and easily up to a

landing stage parallel with the stream. At Hamburg, Rotterdam, and in fact every up-to-date port, the docks are parallel with the flow of the tide, or nearly so. It took the vaunted ingenuity of the Yankee to figure out a scheme of docks athwart the current.

There are two other wholly unnecessary drawbacks which make the docking of a liner in New York the work of an expert. The first of these drawbacks is that the slips are only two hundred and fifty feet wide. At best this affords but scanty room for maneuvering a vessel seven hundred feet or more long and eighty or ninety feet wide; but they rarely have even that much space. Nearly always there is another vessel at one side of the slip which with a flotilla of lighters and barges receiving or discharging cargo take up more than half the space. Added to all this the Hudson is so shallow that the big Hamburg-American liners, which dock in Hoboken, actually drag in the mud occasionally.

In Hamburg and other European ports dredges are always at work to maintain an ample depth in the harbor. Neither the National Government, which has lavished millions upon the construction of an entrance to the harbor, nor the city of New York spends a cent in clearing away

the annual deposits in the Hudson. Finally, the docks are built with vertical walls with only a narrow runway at the side. Some of the big liners have so much flare at the bow that the overhang arrives some time in advance of the rest of the hull. Watchful eyes and skillful hands are required to prevent this overhanging bow from gouging several thousand dollars worth of damage out of the dock structure. Should the vessel happen to have a list the superstructure may come in contact with the dock with disastrous results.

To maneuver masses of steel seven or eight hundred feet long and weighing from thirty thousand to sixty thousand tons into position in such exceedingly narrow quarters, with a swift tide always ready to take instant advantage of a false move, is the task of the marine superintendent.

While the liner is feeling her way cau

tiously up the crowded river the marine superintendent's navy of tugs clears for action. Sometimes when conditions of wind and tide are favorable a liner can be docked with the aid of one or two tugs; at other times as many as fourteen find their work cut out for them in assisting a vessel of twenty-five thousand tons net register into her berth. As each one gets ten dollars for the job the docking process is likely to be expensive.

When the ship is within two hundred feet of the dock three men put out in a row boat to bring the first line ashore. The instant that line reaches the pier the responsibility of the marine superintendent begins, while that of the captain ceases. Not legally, mind you, but practically. In the eyes of the law the captain is always responsible, though as a matter of fact the captain only has a free hand while he is on the high seas when no one else wants to run the ship. As

trans-Atlantic liner always lands with her bow to the current; though in tidal waters the current reverses its direction twice daily. Fifty men divided into squads of ten, each under the command of a foreman, are waiting on the dock. Each squad has its part assigned. One squad takes the line from the row boat and hauls in on it until the hawser, an overgrown rope nine inches in diameter is made fast. Others are ready with fenders consisting of large bundles of cordage to protect the vessel's side as she cautiously edges up to the dock. Others are ready to take care of the next lines. Altogether there are five lines to be attended to before the ship is finally moored in her berth, and it takes ten men to handle each one.

All hands, the men on the dock, the tugs, and the officers on the bridge, work together on signal from the marine superintendent. From his position on the open end of the dock he keeps a wary eye on everything-the men, the tugs, the vessel, the wind, and the tide. As all hands know their business the marine superintendent talks in the sign language to his men and to the officers on the bridge. The tugs, being farther away, sometimes have to be signalled with a flag. On rare occasions the marine superintendent may have to use the megaphone; but he does it reluctantly, for he hates noise, or anything suggestive of a play to the galleries.

READY TO GIVE ORDERS FROM THE WHARF. The task of docking arriving liners is entrusted to a highsalaried expert, the "Marine Superintendent."

soon as he gets within the three-mile limit a pilot climbs up to the bridge and gives him advice until he gets to the dock when the marine superintendent takes charge.

Like a Mississippi river steamboat a

GETTING THE FENDERS BETWEEN BOAT AND PIER INTO ACTION.

After considerable trouble the liner is laid up against the end of the dock, bow to the tide, with spring line in position and tugs ready for business. At the psychological moment the marine superintendent gives a signal. The word is passed to the bridge where the man at the marine telegraph signals the engine room. to come ahead on one screw and to back on the other. The tugs lined up side by side with their noses against the liner's flank now ring for full speed ahead to push her around. Using the corner of the pier as a fulcrum the ship is swung slowly around like a big

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So far as can be ascertained from the records no trans-Atlantic liner has ever sailed from New York with all the passengers who intended to go on her. Just as the vessel backs into the stream a taxicab dashes up to the pier entrance, one or more intending passengers prance up stairs then down the whole length of the pier where they lean out of the end windows and beckon to the captain to come back for them. He, the brute, pretends not to see them.

The star performance was given in July, 1911, by a lady passenger who had engaged passage on the Majestic. She went on

gate, the men on the lines holding every inch gained. The squads must mind their p's and q's, for if they allow too great a strain to come upon one of the big ropes it is likely to snap;

and when a nine inch hawser snaps any one in the neighborhood is liable to get hurt. More than one man has had a leg broken on the docks of New York when a hawser snapped. Some have been killed. In the course of time the liner is swung around until she lies parallel to the dock, and is coaxed into her berth.

board an hour before sailing, left her hat and pocketbook in her stateroom, then went, bareheaded and without a cent, out on the dock to watch the preparations for sailing. Not until the vessel was in midstream did it occur to her that while her luggage and money were sailing for Europe according to schedule she was not. Her hysterics availed her nothing, for the marine superintendent refused to become an accessory to her suicide by sending her out on a tug.

ALIFORNIA suggests gold mines and placers, but the traveler over its mountains and valleys will observe some strange contradictions: rivers running under ground and completely out of sight, and rats living in trees. He may see oil pumped out of the ocean seemingly, and springs of oil at sea. I have seen men standing in a bed of clams on a mountain slope shoveling them out and they may have been a million years old. I saw a railroad laid through the grave of a giant elephant that had been caught in a quicksand half a million years ago. In any event the old stream bed was on the face of a cliff, high above the old stream where the elephant tried to drink.

But the most remarkable sight in California today is a mine where tigers are taken out with a pick, or it may be a

giant sloth, or a lion or a mastodon or a dozen or more strange animals.

Probably animals can be mined in various places, but I fancy this mine on La Brea ranch six miles west of Los Angeles is unique from the fact that it is an asphaltum trap which entangled animals of all sizes and kinds perhaps a million or more years ago and is doing exactly the same thing today.

In a word a bit of the old Tertiary time has been passed down to us almost as it stood ages ago and is today trapping animals as it did then. Away back in 1885, the cattle ranch was owned by a Mr. Hancock and was supposed to be injured by the curious asphaltum or tar springs which appeared at various places. They were little tar volcanoes, generally small, some several feet across and one of pure tar the size of an ordinary well. Finally some demand was occasioned