Traffic on the river shrank immensely with the forming of the Ice Trust, which holds our ice-fields now only as a reserve. We see three or four tall schooners at a time now, where we used to count the riding lights of a dozen at anchor in the channel.
The greater part of our fleet of tugs is scattered. The _Resolute_ and _Adelia_,—dear me, even their names are like old friends—the _Clara Clarita_, the _City of Lynn_, the _Knickerbocker_, and the trim smart twin tugs, _Charlie Lawrence_ and _Stella_, have gone to other waters. The _Ice-King_ plies now in the coast-wise trade. Our lessened river work is done by the _Seguin_, a large and handsome boat, the _Ariel_, a T-wharf tug from Boston, and the _Sarah J. Green_, an ugly boat with a smokestack too tall for her.
The Government boat comes up in late April, while the river is still very rapid, brown and swirling after the spring freshet, and sets the channel buoys. We always thrill a little at her unwonted, sea-sounding whistle. She comes again in November, takes up the buoys, and carries them to some strange buoy paddock in one of the winter harbors, where hundreds and hundreds of them are stacked and repainted. The names of the revenue cutters in this service are prettily chosen, the _Lilac_, _Geranium_, etc.
Before the days of tugs, schooners and larger vessels sailed up and down the thirty-odd navigable miles of our river under their own canvas, and the traffic to and from Atlantic ports was carried on by packets: brigs, schooners, and topsail schooners. One of the captains has told me that, seventy-five years ago, on his first voyage, it took his brig seven days to beat to the mouth of the river, a passage now made in six hours. It must have been extremely difficult piloting. The channel is narrow in many places, though the river itself is so wide. There are sand-bars, mud-flats, and ledges.
In my Father’s childhood a curious, indeed a unique type of vessel, known as a Waterville Sloop, plied between what was then (before the building of the dams), the head of navigation, twenty-six miles above us, and Boston, taking lumber and hay. They carried one square-rigged mast, and sailed with lee-boards, like the Dutch galliots, and were in fact a survival of the square-rigged sloops of old time, immortal in the memories of the glorious Sloops of War, and in Turner’s pictures.