Two miles north of the Salt-Pan Lock, hidden inside an overgrown, reed-choked upkeep creek, lay The Iron Cormorant.
She was a royal town steam-dredge barge, built thirty-five years ago by the naval foundries of Bellwether. A huge, flat-bottomed scow of six-inch heart-oak, seventy feet long and twenty-four feet wide. Her hull was heavy from stem to stern with heavy rolled-iron load-bearing angle-irons. Mounted upon her central deck was a twenty-horsepower Cornish steam boiler of riveted charcoal-iron, geared to a massive endless-bucket dredge ladder that projected thirty feet out over her blunt bow.
For fourteen years, since the trade ring had seized the delta tolls, The Iron Cormorant had sat abandoned in the mud berths.
The high-water floods had filled her lower cargo hold with three feet of stale delta silt. Marsh willows had taken root in the coal bunkers. Her copper boiler tubes were green with thick green rust. And her sixty-foot iron bucket chain lay buried in the black mud like a huge, sleeping dragon.
Tomas Reed, Captain Barnaby Miller, and forty members of the Lower Delta Association arrived at the creek at the fourth bell of the morning.
They didn’t bring fine words or grand speeches. They brought four two-man timber bilge pumps, six iron-banded hand scoops, twelve heavy ash-wood shovels, three barrels of coal-tar, and two teams of heavy brown heavy cart oxen from Vance’s caravan.
“Look at her bottom planking, Miller,” Tomas said. He stood knee-deep in the cold creek water. He ran his hands over the massive oak strakes of the barge’s bilge.
The oak was seasoned, black as iron, soaked in thirty years of coal-tar resin. Because the barge had sat sunk in anaerobic delta silt, the timber had not rotted. It was as sound, dense, and hard as the day the shipwrights drove the copper spikes into the bottom spine-beam.
“She will float, Tomas,” Captain Miller said, his eyes shining with skilled pride as he struck the oak strake with his caulking mallet. The wood rang with a deep, solid, musical THUNK. “The hull is tight as a beer cask! The seams are packed with horsehair and pitch. Clear the mud out of her bilge. She will carry fifty tons of gear without drawing three feet of water!”
“Then we pump,” Tomas said.
The forty wagon drivers and bargees went to work with the disciplined, furious smooth speed of working men who knew their lives depended on timber.
Two teams of four men manned the double-handled bilge pumps. Their wooden pump-rods rose and falling with a steady, rhythmic clack-slosh-clack-slosh. It sent twin four-inch streams of foul, black bilge water gushing over the boat sides into the creek. Inside the cargo hold, twenty men stripped to their waists, their shovels biting into the three feet of packed river mud. They passed heavy wicker hampers of wet silt up to the deck in an unbroken, human chain of cart hauling.
Tomas worked in the boiler room, his linen shirt soaked in sweat and coal dust, his buckled wrist brace white with dried lime.
The clockwork design of The Iron Cormorant was an example of working-class building at its most durable.
The Cornish boiler was not a fancy toy. It was a single tube-shaped chimney pipe of nine-sixteenths charcoal iron, seven feet in width and twenty feet long, designed to burn anything from low-grade peat to hard coal. Its twin steam cylinders, mounted horizontally above the coal bunkers, were twelve inches in bore with an eighteen-inch stroke, their piston rods forged from solid Swedish hard steel.
Tomas worked with an iron scraper along the metal tube cross-heads, removing fourteen years of dried river grease and dead mud-crab shells. He inspected the brass gibs and cotters that lined up the connecting rods.
“The bronze is clean, Brant,” Tomas said, wiping the metal with an oily rag. “No scoring on the guide bars. When the town crew laid her up fourteen years ago, they packed the cylinders with sheep fat and drove oak plugs into the steam ports. The mechanics who worked this boat cared about their iron.”
“They were Low Ward men, Tomas,” Brant grunted. He tightened a packing gland with an eighteen-inch wrench. “Men who lived on Tanner Street and ate dried herrings. When a working man gets custody of a twenty-horsepower steam engine, he treats the bronze like his mother’s silver teapot.”
Beside him, diver Brant and an old foundry blacksmith named Kael were inspecting the iron boiler. They had opened the fire-box door. They cleared out the old bird nests and dried mud with iron scrapers, checking the riveted seams with small ball-peen hammers.
“The iron is three-eighths thick, Tomas,” Blacksmith Kael reported, tapping the crown sheet. The boiler rang with a clear, sharp, bell-like tone. “No blistering. No scale pitting. The royal foundry used cold-blast charcoal iron for these plates. It doesn’t rot like cheap merchant pig-iron. Pack the water gauge with fresh leather washers, blow the mud out of the blow-down cock with a hand pump. She will hold forty pounds of steam pressure without leaking a feather of vapor.”
On the forward deck, Nessa Vale was supervising the hoisting of the massive bucket chain.
She had rigged an ash-wood sheer-legs over the bow. She used a three-fold purchase of heavy manila hemp rope connected to the two teams of oxen on the bank.
“Heave, oxen!” Nessa called out, her voice crisp and clear across the marsh.
The four brown beasts leaned into their leather yokes, their hooves churning the gray clay. The heavy hemp tackle groaned, fibers creaking under huge tension, as the twenty-ton iron bucket ladder rose slowly out of the sucking mud with a huge, echoing SCHLUCK.
Thirty iron buckets, each large enough to hold five bushels of silt, emerged from the black water, dripping with green slime and water-rot, their hard dark metal steel cutting lips gleaming in the morning sun.
By noon, the miracle had been accomplished.
The bilge water was cleared. The mud was shoveled out. The boiler was filled with clean spring water hauled down from the bluff in Vance’s barrels. And three cords of dry birch and alder cordwood were stacked high in the coal bunkers.
On the mud bank beside the creek, Apprentice Olla was recording the mobilization inventory in her ledger.
“Supplies on board The Iron Cormorant,” Olla read aloud to Captain Miller. “Forty cords of dry split birch. Twenty bushels Welsh hard coal. Six barrels fresh drinking water from the Bluff-End spring. Eighty deep-water lengths four-inch manila hemp thick ship rope. Two five-hundred-pound forged iron kedge anchors. Twelve cold chisels, six twelve-pound steel sledges, and four iron crowbars.”
Miller nodded, his weather-beaten face set in fierce satisfaction. “We have enough iron and coal to dig a channel to the moon, little clerk. Now let’s see if the old girl still remembers how to float.”
Tomas checked the steam pressure gauge on the side of the boiler casing.
The gauge was an antique Bourdon tube instrument of spun brass, its curved glass face clouded with salt dust. He took a corner of his linen shirt, polishing the glass until the black fine-tuning marks were sharp: zero to sixty pounds of pressure. Inside the casing, the curved brass tube was clean, its internal bronze link connected to a small toothed side that turned the steel pointer.
“The spring has kept its temper, Brant,” Tomas noted, tapping the brass bezel. “The pointer returns cleanly to zero when the blow-down valve is open. In modern foundries, they use cheap copper spirals that lose their spring after three heatings. This is naval glowing-bronze. It will tell us the true pressure down to the half-pound.”
“That’s why she didn’t blow her top forty years ago, Tomas,” Brant replied, tossing an armload of dry birch wood into the open fire-box. “The naval yard didn’t pinch silver coins on safety valves. When this boiler says forty pounds, you have forty pounds of steam ready to move fifty tons of river.”
With a gentle, groaning shudder of her oak timbers, The Iron Cormorant broke the suction of the mud berth.
The flat-bottomed scow rose six inches in the creek water, floating level, floating, and proud upon her own lines, her tall black iron smokestack pointing toward the sky like an iron lance.
Captain Miller climbed to the small wheelhouse on the upper deck. His rough hands locked around the spokes of the six-foot spoked steering wheel. He threw his head back, letting out a wild, roaring sea-laugh that echoed across the marshes.
“She floats!” Miller roared, wiping grease from his beard with his sleeve. “The Cormorant floats! God above, she’s ready to eat the river!”
Tomas walked the length of the cargo deck, checking the tension of the heavy iron tie-rods that cross-braced the hull frames.
The tie-rods were one-and-a-half-inch forged iron, fitted with heavy central turnbuckles that allowed the shipwrights to adjust the hog and sag of the barge’s keel. He took an eighteen-inch iron wrench from his belt, testing each turnbuckle. The rods rang with a tight, high-pitched ping. The sign that the hull was rigid, properly cambered, and ready to withstand the violent lateral surges of an eighteen-knot high-pressure scour wave.
“The frames are locked, Miller,” Tomas said, setting the wrench back into his tool loop. “She will take forty tons of water on the foredeck without popping an oak trenail.”
Tomas stood on the foredeck, wiping his blackened hands on a piece of waste hemp. He looked south toward the open fairway. There, the silt bar blocked the sea.
“Splice the ten-fathom towing hawsers,” Tomas commanded, his voice steady as rock. “We’re towing her to the Black Shingle on the evening tide.”