Harpers's Weekly, September 1877
Taken at a bird's-eye glance, the harbor of New York is a magnificent picture, each detail of which is
of the greatest interest. Here are crafts of all possible sorts, except, perhaps, Chinese junks and birch-bark
canoes, and the flags of every maritime nation are unfurled to the breeze. You may find little clam boats
from Connecticut, and fishing smacks from the Banks; shapeless canal-boats from Buffalo, and grimy
steam barges fro the Delaware and Raritan; coquettish pilot-boats tripping seaward, and trim schooners
with potatoes from Nova Scotia or tobacco from Norfolk; brigs from Boston and Bombay, barks from the
Mediterranean and South American ports; full rigged ships and swifts clippers resting from voyages round
the Horn or the Cape of Good Hope; thick-skinned whalers from Arctic seas, and battered merchantmen
from the Indian Ocean; Liverpool and Glasgow and Hamburg and Havre steamers, whose crews speak
of the Eastern hemisphere simply as "the other side," and go over and back in three weeks; iron-clad frigates
representing the navies of the world; natty corvettes escorting imperial visitors to Uncle Sam; and weaving all together, saucy tugs sputtering here and there, ferry-boats like turtles, gaudy pleasure boats, steamboats, and revenue cutters with gilt-edged officers in the wheelhouse.
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