# Travels in Philadelphia/To League Island and Back

World War I: and America has joined the fray. Battleships, and sometimes submarines, are becoming increasingly visible on the shores of Philadelphia.
| “ | The word submarine has become a commonplace of our daily life, but there is always a tingle of excitement on seeing these strange human fishes. The O-16, one of the American undersea craft that operated from the Azores base during the war, was lying awash at her pier. I would have given much to go aboard, but as the officer guiding us said, "It pretty nearly takes an act of Congress to get a civilian aboard a submarine." | ” |
TO LEAGUE ISLAND AND BACK
Yesterday afternoon the American Press Humorists visited League Island. When the party boarded a Fifteenth street car I was greatly excited to see a lady sitting with a large market basket in her lap and placidly reading The Amazing Marriage. "You see," I said to Ted Robinson, the delightful poet from Cleveland, "we have a genuine culture in Philadelphia. Our citizens read Meredith on the trolleys as they return from shopping." "That's nothing," said Ted, "I always read Meredith on the cars at home. I've ​often read the greater part of a Meredith novel on my way to the office in the morning." So perhaps the Cleveland transits aren't any more rapid than our own.
The rain came down in whirling silver sheets as we crossed the flats toward League Island, but after a short wait at the end of the car line the downfall slackened. Under the guidance of three courteous warrant officers we were piloted about the navy yard.
Nothing is ever so thrilling as a place where ships are gathered, and the adventurousness of a trip to the navy yard begins as soon as one steps off the car and finds great gray hulls almost at one's side. It seems odd to see them there, apparently so far inland, their tall stacks rising up among the trees. The Massachusetts and the Iowa were the first we passed, and we were all prepared to admire them heartily until told by our naval convoy that they are "obsolete." Passing by a pack of lean destroyers, leashed up like a kennel of hounds, we gazed at the gray profile of the Nevada. The steep chains perpending from her undercut prow we were told were for the use of the paravanes, and I think the ladies of the party were pleased not to be paravanes. The older destroyers—such as the Wainwright—are very small compared with the newer models; but it is curious that the outmoded types of battleship appear to the civilian eye more massive and towering than the latest superdreadnoughts. The Ohio, ​the Connecticut, the New Hampshire, all older vessels, loomed out of the water like cliffs of stone; their two and three high funnels out-topping the squat single stack of the new oil-burners.
The word submarine has become a commonplace of our daily life, but there is always a tingle of excitement on seeing these strange human fishes. The O-16, one of the American undersea craft that operated from the Azores base during the war, was lying awash at her pier. I would have given much to go aboard, but as the officer guiding us said, "It pretty nearly takes an act of Congress to get a civilian aboard a submarine."
In a vast dry-dock, like small minnows gasping for breath in a waterless hollow, lay four diminutive submarines of the K type. Men were hosing them with water, as though to revive them. Their red plates made them look absurdly like goldfish; the diving rudders, like a fish's tail, and the little fins folded pathetically upon their sides toward the bow, increased the likeness. Their periscopes were stripped off, and through openings in the hull workmen were clambering inside. One tried to imagine what the interior of these queer craft might be like. Of all the engines of man they are the most mysterious to the layman. Their little brass propellers seemed incongruously small to drive them through the water. At their noses we could see the revolving tubes to hold the four torpedoes.
We passed, alas too fast, the great air-craft ​factory, with its delicious glimpses of clean and delicate carpentry, the steamboxes for bending the narrow strips of wood, the sweet smell of banana oil which I suppose is used in some varnishing process. A little engine came trundling out of a shed, pulling a shining gray fuselage on a flat-car. Its graceful lines, its sensitive and shining metal work, its sleek, clean body, all were as beautiful and tender as the works of a watch. Overhead roared an older brother, a flying hydroplane with tremendous sweep of wing, singing that deep hum of unbelievable motor power.
In the recreation hall we stopped for orange soda and salted peanuts. Sailors in white ducks were playing pool. The sailor soda-tender passed out his iced bottles from a huge chest under the counter. In the old days of naval tradition one doubts whether a sailors' bar would have been a place where a party, including ladies and children, could have tarried with such satisfaction. In the Y. M. C. A. building next door marines in their coffee-and-milk uniforms were writing letters; a band was tuning up some jazz in preparation for a theatrical show; a copy of Soldiers Three lay on a table. Oilskins lying along the benches gave a nautical touch. There was something characteristically American about the sharp, humorous, nonchalant features of the men. Everywhere one saw sturdy, swing-strided marines whose shoulders would have thrilled a football coach.
At one of the wharves along the Delaware side ​was the new destroyer Tattnall, just taking on her equipment—coils of yellow, creaky rope; fenders, cases of electric bulbs, galvanized buckets, cases of heavy sea boots. It was a tale of adventure just to study her lean, crisp, flaring bow with its concave curves, her four slender funnels, her tall glass-screened bridge, the sternward slant of her hull. Even in the mild swell and swing of Delaware water she rode daintily as a yacht, lifted and caressed by the flow and wash of the water. How she must leap and sway in the full tumble of open seas. She seemed an adorable toy. Who would not go to war, with such delicious playthings to covet and care for! And beside her on the pier, lay a clumsier and grimmer-seeming engine. Three great gun-mounts for Admiral Plunkett's naval railroad battery, that carried the fourteen-inch guns that dropped shells into Metz from twenty-eight miles away. On one of these huge steel caissons I saw that some member of the A. E. F. had scratched his doleful message: George W. Moller, a soldier of St. Nazaire, France, who wishes to go home toot sweet.
The lively little tug Betty curtsied up to the pier and took us on board. Harry Jones, her friendly skipper, steamed us down past the green mounds of old Fort Mifflin, past the long tangle of Hog Island's shipways and the wet-basins where the Scantic, the Pipestone County and other of Hog Island's prides were lying, one of them kicking up a white smother with her propeller in some engine ​test. Then we turned upstream. It had been raining on and off all afternoon. From the Jersey shore came the delicious haunting smell of warm, wet pinewoods, of moist tree-trunks and the clean whiff of sandy soil and drenched clover fields.
Our Humorist visitors admitted that they had never realized that Philadelphia is a seaport. The brave array of shipping as we came up the river was an interesting sight. Among several large Dutch steamers lying in the stream below Kaighn's Point I noticed the Remscheid, which bore on her side in large white letters the inscription:
WAFFENSTILLSTAND ARMISTICE
Waffenstillstand is the German for armistice. This struck me as particularly significant. Probably the cautious Dutch owner of the Remscheid, sending his ship to sea soon after November 11, feared there might still be U-boats at large that had not learned of the truce and would not respect a neutral flag.
Among other ships we noticed the Edgemoor and Westfield of Seattle, the four-masted schooner Charles S. Stanford of Bangor, the Naimes of London, the Meiningen of Brest, the Perseveranza of Trieste, and Iskra of Dubrovnik (which W. M. explains to me is the Slavic name for Ragusa). Thus, in the names on the sterns along Philadelphia piers one reads echoes of the war. And most appealing of all the ships we passed was the little white Danish bark Valdivia, just such a craft as ​used to be commanded by the best-known sea captain of modern years, Joseph Conrad.
It must be a brave life to be a tugboat skipper. To con the Betty up the shining reaches of the Delaware in a summer dusk, the soft flow of air keeping one's pipe in a glow, that good musk of the Jersey pines tingling in the nostril. Then to turn over the wheel to the mate while one goes below to tackle a tugboat supper, with plenty of dripping steak and fried murphies and coffee with condensed milk. And a tugboat crew sleep at home o' nights, too. Think of it—a sailor all day long, and yet sleep in your own bed at home!