Porpoises and Escallops 
The Log of a Motor Boat Cruise on the Hudson 
River and Long Island Sound 
By JULIAN BURROUGHS 
C AN you see the red buoys shouldering 
their way through the tide, the wheeling 
gulls, the white sails of the oyster flee , 
green water turning in a smooth, foam-edged 
furrow under your bows, or feel the sand under¬ 
foot and smell the wind from off the sea, or 
taste the escallops and snappers fresh from the 
clear, salt water? We could. Impatience did 
more than stand on tiptoe; it danced on the 
cylinder heads. 
Yes, everything was aboard at last; it must 
have been, because in any case there was room 
for nothing more. Just a mad jumble of 
blankets, clothing, baskets of food, pails of fruit 
and vegetables, butter, milk, suit cases, lanterns, 
fishing tackle, charts, rope, anchors, tools, um¬ 
brellas, and on top of all my bicycle. There 
was no room to turn around or pass one an¬ 
other. Still the rain held off; the ebb, oily and 
streaked with floating soot, began to flow. I 
threw off the lines, jumped aboard, and stepping 
over the dunnage, found the engine. It had not 
been turned over for more than a year, but re¬ 
sponded instantly, after the manner of kerosene 
engines, to a touch of the fly-wheel. 
All our friends had said rain, a big rain, a 
storm, a real equinoctial for our starting day. 
It had looked like it. Now the heavy, lowering 
sky took on a more yellow color, with a hint 
of clearing. As we pulled away down the Hud¬ 
son, slipping along with the ebb, we all fell to 
clearing up. In a couple of hours everything 
was quite ship-shape and livable; the two anchors 
in place on the bow, the bicycle taken apart and 
strapped to the engine room wall, the food, 
clothing and blankets all in the lockers and 
hunks. I filled the bow tank with fresh water 
and went over all the gear. The women swept 
up and prepared to be comfortable. Sometimes 
a fine rain would come slanting across the decks, 
at others the sun would, almost peep through. 
There were four of us, Mrs. G. and her 
daughter—whom I just had to call Jean, because 
she was in many ways so unlike the Jean Mac- 
Neil that Harry Lauder sings about, and Jean 
is a nice, vibrant name that fits the tongue nicely 
_Mr. D. the scholar, and myself just filled the 
30 by 8 cabin cruiser. We were off for the sea 
and adventure; we had cleared for strange ports 
and others not so strange. The anchor flukes 
were anxious to bite some salt mud and sand, 
and the motor eager wnce again to feel the salt 
water in its veins. 
The Hudson is a nice place to cruise when 
you have a fast boat and want to get some¬ 
where. A sail is all right, too, when it is hang¬ 
ing over an engine. We only had a little seven 
horsepower pressure motor and a loaded boat 
and a sixteen-foot tender, yet in just eleven 
hours and ten minutes we had passed under the 
Poughkeepsie bridge, sailed through the High¬ 
lands, past West Point, turned into the wide, 
hill-encircled Haverstraw Bay, Tappan Zee and 
left Yonkers behind and dropped the mud hook 
in the little creek behind the island at Spuyten 
Duyvil. The wooded hills were over us on one 
side, and on the other were sights and sounds 
that made us aware that we were in Greater New 
York. With a sailboat we would have been 
drifting with the tide fifty or more miles up 
the river at the mercy of every passing steamer. 
That night as I lay in my bunk I could hear 
the rustle of the tide about the boat and the 
far-off roar of the electrics. How strange it ail 
seemed! I felt responsible for the three people 
in my care, and wondered what they thought of 
it all. I had an anchor light burning brightly, 
and knew the big kedge would hold us, unless 
it should slide out into deeper water, or-the rope 
should chafe off on some sharp object on the 
bottom, or a big floating timber or piece of 
wreckage drift into us. I hings could happen, 
and what would become of us sleepers adrift 
on that swift tide? 
Never can I forget one night at Spuyten 
Duyvil. I was s’eeping soundly in the cabin 
with my wife and two little girls when bang! 
bar-g! thump! bang! something came against the 
Wance, making her quiver in every timber. I 
ran out on the dewy deck to find that a big 
catboat had drifted into us. I passed her on 
down stream and went hack to my berth. For 
an hour I was startled and sleepless, and when 
at last I got into a sound sleep I was rudely 
awakened by someone yelling in the cabin door: 
“Hey! hey!” the voice shouted, “do you know 
where you are?” 
Utterly bewildered and half asleep I tumbled 
out of bed, “No,” I managed to answer. 
“Well, you’re adrift, and ’ll wake up with mud 
in your eye!” 
Having satisfied myself that the man was in¬ 
toxicated, and that we were not adrift, I went 
back to bed, though it was a long while before 
I could compose myself to sleep. 
What a waste of energy this tide business does 
seem! Percival Lowell tells us that in time the 
friction of the tides will stop the earth s rota¬ 
tion on its axis. It is a wonder to me that it 
does not do so very soon. 
Sunday was a beautiful sunshiny day with a 
fresh breeze from the south that sent the white- 
caps chasing over the sound, and filled all sails 
with a good measure of wind. Once clear of 
the terribly “gummed-up” Harlem and East 
River, and the free, clear sound under our keel, 
we settled down to a day of enjoyment—all but 
poor Jean, who ate too much fudge just before 
we began to roll, and who disappeared for the 
day. 
Because of the onshore wind I kept well off, 
and at 5:15 p. m. we pulled into Bridgeport, 
Conn. There were several hundred people fish¬ 
ing about the breakwater for snappers, and how 
they did stare at us as we ran past them. We 
found a perfect anchorage and spent a long, 
quiet night of unbroken sleep. There were 
oyster sloops about us, with the owners of which 
I scraped acquaintance. One of them offered to 
give us all the oysters we wanted, “but don’t 
eat them,” he cautioned. He opened two to 
show us that they were all green from sewage. 
“From the Norwalk Islands to the Thimbles it 
is the same,” he added. What an unfit people 
to live are we Americans! We destroy our 
forests, rob our soil, dump our sewage into the 
nearest water, and then buy fertilizers from 
Germany and South America and spend hundreds 
of millions in trying to get pure water! It will 
be a real blessing when the mines of nitrates, 
potash and phosphoric acids are exhausted. 
Monday was a September day at its very best, 
a day limpid with soft haze and sunshine, a day 
of glorious colors, a day free from doubts as to 
the weather, a day to cruise on and on. 
Once a water pipe clogged up and flooded the 
engine with water, and it was twenty minutes 
before we could go again. Also from 10 until 
4 o’clock we had an unfavorable tide. Aside 
from that, it was a day of unalloyed pleasure. 
At 4 o’clock we were passing a school of por¬ 
poises playing on the glassy water just outside 
of Plum Gut, and a few minutes later we were 
in Gardiner’s Bay, where the low wooded shores 
reached out to greet us. Gulls wheeled, bunker 
steamers were going home, oyster stakes seemed 
to dip in welcome, the sun went down in smoky 
glory. We ran straight across Gardiner's Bay, 
slowly leaving Orient Point behind and raising 
the wooded shores of Long Island with Shelter 
Island off to starboard and Gardiner’s Island to 
port. How wild and peaceful it was—mirroring 
water, shores and hills of unbroken woods, long 
stretches of inviting, lonely sand beaches. Just 
