The Hudson
The Rivers of America Series
by: Carl Carmer   Illustrated by: Stow Wengenroth

CHAPTER 29

They Loved the Mary Powell

Absalom Anderson planned her in 1861 and she was built by Michael Allison in Jersey City. From the hour she came off the ways she was the river queen. Not even the Alida, the Chauncey Vibbard, the Jenny Lind, the Onteora could be compared with her. She was the fastest on the river--and the smoothest.

In vain the captains tried to take her trade away. The Armenia tootled proudly on her new 34-whistle calliope, arousing strange echoes among the jealous Highlands with "The Belle of the Mohawk Vale," "Way Down Upon the Swanee River," and "Jordan’s a Hard Road to Travel." Wheezing apoplectically, the Glen Cove and the General Sedgwick raised their voices in song, slowing down as the steam that was meant for pressure released itself into staccato melodies blown on the whistle organs.

Commodore Hancox, the James B. Schuyler’s skipper, who had been known to try to keep a boat from passing by taking pot shots with his rifle at her pilothouse, thought up a new scheme to enhance his boat’s reputation for speed. He had a good band aboard and whenever a rival drew alongside he marched them to the deck nearest her and ordered them to play fortissimo. As the passengers on the other steamer heard the entrancing music they rushed toward it, weighing down one side of their vessel so greatly that the paddle wheel on the other side was lifted completely out of water and spun aimlessly. With her band playing a triumphant paean, the James B. Schuyler would forge into the lead and stay there until her opponent’s passengers had redistributed themselves. (The commodore caught a Tartar once, though, for hardly had his trombones begun to woo the Dean Richmond to lopsided helplessness than her skipper ordered all safety valves lifted. Then calmly he went his noisy way, knowing his patrons could not hear the James B. Schuyler’s band.)

But not all the tricks the shrewd captains played, not all the speed the fast boats mustered, could ever make a difference to the Mary Powell. Serenely she skimmed past the swiftest, not stirring a ripple on a cup of coffee in her dining room. She had clean lines--three hundred feet of them in one long symmetry. The rococo dreams of the poets of the jigsaw were not for her. The other boats with their drippings of cheap ornament were fancy girls beside the river queen. Absalom Anderson sold her once, and her new masters decked her out in lavish wooden laces. His proud heart broke until he got her back and stripped her clean again for speed. He knew that the less a steamboat carried the better she looked, the faster she went. Some say he hired a black boy just to keep the flies from lighting on her rail and slowing her with their weight. They claim he mixed whale’s grease into her paint to give her easy sliding through the water. And once in a river barroom I heard some poet say, "He hitched her to a porpoise four-in-hand."

She steamed away from Kingston in the morning. By noon she moored below New York’s high towers. At three she took the tide again. At nine her silver bell was sounding over the dark waters of Rondout Creek and the sweet Negro voice of deckhand Seymour Darling was calling, as it called for thirty-four years, "Last Stop, Home Port, Kingston Landing!" Absalom Anderson kept the Mary Powell so clean that the Dutch housewives of Hurley could find no speck on her--and he kept her respectable too. He never ran her on Sunday and he never sold liquor aboard her. Like the captain whom Fanny Kemble commended in 1832 for personally escorting a drunken passenger to a raft of logs "floating along shore about twenty miles below West Point where he was bound," Absalom Anderson had scant patience with the intoxicated. He always sifted such sinners from his embarking patrons and returned them to the dock. He ran a family boat and everyone could feel safe on her, even the young, unchaperoned females often entrusted to his strict charge.

The Mary Powell never had a major accident. She never lost a passenger. She carried fathers from hot labor in the city to cool riverside homes where their families waited. She was a honeymoon boat, she was a children’s boat. She carried young boys to West Point and she returned them officers in the United States Army. Once, in a coffin wrapped with a flag, she brought the long body of George Custer to West Point. The Indians of the western plains at last had won his yellow hair.

"You could depend upon the Mary Powell," the river families say. "She was always on time.” They laugh and say the Military Academy used to time its formations by the sound of her bell because it was always nearer right than the West Point clocks. Even on the day the cyclone hit her, twisting her broadside against the rushing wind and tumbling her stacks overboard, pilot Guernsey Betts brought her into Rondout on schedule. On ordinary days she had minutes to spare. She never wasted effort at a landing. Sometimes Guernsey Betts did not bother to make fast her landing lines--just held her up against the dock while the gangway was run ashore and the passengers came aboard. He knew how to take advantage of every tide, every whorl and eddy on her course. Once he had given the boys in the engine room the jingle she would be off like a race horse. She could slip into top speed while other boats were casting off. The only time she ever gave him trouble, he used to say, was when he would try to pass the mouth of Rondout Creek on one of his few trips to Albany. She was so accustomed to turn in there that she would bear to the left no matter how firm he held the wheel--as if she had some sort of curvature.

Only once in all her years of service was the Mary Powell beaten on the river. That was in the June of 1885 when the Herreshoffs brought their new ninety-foot yacht Stiletto down from Bristol, Rhode Island, to race with the queen of the Hudson. Although the Mary Powell was almost twenty-five years old and carried passengers and all regular equipment, she was only five minutes behind at Sing Sing where the Stiletto stopped racing.

When Absalom Anderson died, his son, Captain A. E. Anderson, carried on the tradition. Gracefully the Mary Powell grew old and he aged with her. Before her nearly sixty years were over she was known and loved not only in America, but in all countries of the world whose citizens had visited the banks of the Hudson. The skipper of a Nile steamboat once recognized Captain Anderson on a vacation tour and insisted that he accept the honors and privileges of his rank while on the Egyptian craft. Captain Anderson the second died before she made her last journey. She ended her career peacefully, faithfully, on the Day Line run.

At Sunflower Dock on the Rondout, just out of sight of Hudson water, in the days of the Great War, junk dealer John Fisher dismantled the Mary Powell. Down came her tall stacks of Day Line brown--always black when Absalom Anderson owned her. From above the wheelhouse came the silver bell to adorn the Day Line Park at Indian Point. The Robert Fulton now speaks with the deep voice of her whistle. And in the Senate House Museum at Kingston stands the pilot wheel that Guernsey Betts’s hands knew so well. But the Mary Powell lives in more than these relics of her past. "She is a complete and lovely image in thousands of memories. "She had a silver tongue," they say. "She had a golden throat."