The Life and Times of a Wanderer

The Esso tanker of yesteryear, the George G. Henry, will always have a special place in my recollections. It was November 1931 that with my bride of one month I boarded the grand old tanker in the harbor of Savannah and set sail for Aruba. But these observations are just an incidental flashback and a way of leading into the tale, which I am about to tell. The things, which follow, are much less well documented but they are not fiction.

I think the month may have been May, and the year just could have been about 1940; anyway we’ll say it was. The General Office Building in Aruba stand beside the Big Lagoon and from my office I had a clear view across the mile of peaceful water to the great reef and on out into the always troubled waters of the open Caribbean. It was a spot which then was much used by ships of the Esso fleet, and other tankers, while waiting for berths in the busy harbor. So when I arrived at my office on the morning the tale begins the vista, which greeted me held nothing of particular interest, at first glance, that is. Two empty tankers riding high on the rolling waves and swinging on their anchor lines were not an unusual sight, that a third tanker, much closer in, begged for a closer look, and the closer look told me all was not right with that ship. She was not rising and falling with the waves, like her sister vessels, in fact she wasn’t moving at all. I reached for my binoculars and they immediately confirmed that sad fact that the ship was hard aground, and to add to my sorrow she was my old friend the George G. Henry.

With snorkel and goggles, while spear fishing and shell hunting, I had floated over the area where the tanker was mired. It was a great field of huge boulders, and coral shoals in a morass of tree size spires of coral, like an underwater forest of oak trees shorn of their limbs and foliage. Obviously the ship had drifted in on a high tide and had then been pushed farther and farther in by a never-ending succession of great waves. It was a potential graveyard for unfortunate ships and I had seen there the skeleton remains of some smaller vessels. Even as I sized up the situation, I observed our harbor tug, the Captain Rodger beating her way out of the harbor entrance over a mile up the coast from the General Office Building. Two harbor launches followed in her wake as she made her way to a point as near the Henry as she dared to go. One of the launches proceeded on out to the stricken vessel, carefully, where members of our Marine Department clamering from the launch to the deck of the tanker. Launch Number 2 meanwhile had taker a heavy towing line from the Captain Rodger and was proceeding to the grounded vessel.

The drama now unfolding was not without an audience. Over the years in Aruba the tanker fleet had been and still was our life line. They kept us supplied with the necessities of life and come vacation time it was the good ships of the Esso fleet that transported us to the States and back to Aruba. All of us had traveled on them and many watching had traveled on the good ship now fighting for her life. So it was that a goodly portion of the workers in the G.O.B. (General Office Building) were now watching from the windows looking across the lagoon, and more than a few were out on the shoreline seeking a better view. We had “seats on the fifty-yard line.”

I still recall some of the random remarks from the gallery. “Soon as the tug takes the slack out of that line she’ll come off all right.”

“Hope she comes off without too much damage,” another worried.

I was not so optimistic. I had seen what was out there in that hostile water.

By now the tug was ready to pull. We saw the heavy tow line come taut. Black smoke poured from the funnel of the Captain Rodger, her stern seemed to squat in the water and two flumes of white water poured back from her racing propellers. The little tug was giving it her best shot, but the George G. Henry moved not an inch. The tentacles of the reef were wrapped around the 17,000 tons of steel and machinery and were more than a match for the tug.

“Better get a man to do a man’s job, that dinky little tug ain’t got the horses,” came from the gallery. In the cubicle next to me someone was whistling “An Ant Can’t Move a Rubber tree Plant.”

Apparently the wise and experienced heads of the Marine Office had reached the same conclusion. One of the gallery who had liaison with the Marine people came to announce that the big new tanker William Green was about to come out and take over the “man’s” job. “Should be easy for her”, the informant added.

He was partly right. The William Green did indeed appear on the scene but not until after lunch and it was immediately apparent that the magnitude of the job had been reassessed. The big tanker did take the tow line but moved forward just enough to keep it taut. She was not pulling yet.

“Henry’s pumping out ballast,” said the knowing one. “They want her to float as high in the water as she can, the the Green can pull her over those rocks with very little trouble”. I still was not optimistic.

But the stranded vessel really was pumping ballast. After a time---maybe an hour, we could see that her Plimsoll marks were higher above the water’s surface and in perhaps another hour we could see her rising and falling as the waves rolled in from the open sea. She was almost floating free. Throughout this entire operation the William Green kept a strain on the tow line just to insure that now the lighter tanker didn’t drift even further back into the morass of the reef.

The tide was now full, and the Green made her move. With her big twin turbines revving up to a roar we could hear all the way across the lagoon, and with a solid cylinder of black rising skyward from her funnel the great tanker moved out. As the line came fiddle-string taut the Henry did move forward, slowly and tortuously, but moving. A cheer was just beginning from the eager audience; then disaster struck! With a thump and a crunch that even we could hear, Henry’s bow struck an immovable underwater obstruction. The force of the collision was such that we could see the poor ship heel to port and her forward deck rise in the water. For a moment we thought she might rise and slide over the great boulder that barred her escape. But it was not to be. The power being exerted by the pulling ship and the sudden shock of the collision were too much for the big towing hawser. With a deep throated crack like the firing of a cannon the rope parted and now the lightened Henry was picked up like a balloon by an incoming wave and carried a good hundred feet farther back into the doom that was the reef. I feared the fate of the gallant George G. Henry was sealed. Was she destined to sit there on an awful reef until rust and corrosion melted her down, to be ingested by the hungry ocean?

The audience voiced my fears. “Nothing can move her out of there now”.

“How many millions will the write-off be?” one of the accountants asked. “Guess our year-end special thrift contributions won’t be quite so big this year” said another cynic. “They ought to take the Esso name plate off her, not the kind of billboard our marketing people will approve”. And the doomsday rhetoric accelerated.

But the Marine people were not yet ready to acknowledge defeat. That was a multi-million dollar investment sitting out there in that underwater jungle and they had one more card to play. Call in the experts. Esso’s Marine Organization took a back seat to no one when it came to operating ships and moving oil; but salvaging severely stranded vessels was not their bag. So, a call had gone out to the Standard Salvage Company---or so our marine connection soon informed us. And the content of an incoming cable was soon common knowledge among us. “Salvage Vessel Pigeon Point enroute from Jamaica E.T.A. 800 hours Monday.” It was Friday and the curtain would ring down on the first set of the drama. It would rise again Monday with little change in the existing stage setting, but the new characters coming on the scene.

Monday morning and the audience was back in its seats, so to speak, with all eyes glued to the extension of land we called “Colorado Point”. Around that spit of land the Pigeon Point would come together with whatever attending craft the job required. Surely, to do the job at hand she had to be a veritable leviathian with pulling power to move Gibraltar. One thing did not disappoint us. She arrived with the promptness of the rising sun, at exactly 8:00 A.M., and stood out on the horizon in vivid silhouette for all to see. The groan which arose from the crowd was half anguish and have derision. The dumpy little boat rounding the land was scarcely bigger that our Captain Rodger and she was completely alone.

A moment of stunned silence, then the chatter began. “Has to be some kind of a joke,” said one voice, “Maybe she’s just an advance scout." "The salvage ship’ll follow shortly.” “That silly little stinkpot couldn’t pull the captain’s hat off.”

Pigeon Point wasn’t listening. In a matter of minutes it was obvious she “came to play” and she wasn’t wasting time. Taking up a position as close to the Henry as appeared prudent she proceeded to put over the side two small outboard-powered work boats, and from some source there appeared a small self-propelled work barge. Whether it came from Pigeon Point or from the harbor I still do not know. Loaded with workmen the first small boat set out for the grounded tanker and placed three men aboard. Small boat number 2 followed with three men in diving gear. Two divers went over the side of the tanker hull, a third one was taken some hundred feet away where he, too submerged.

I had to guess the first two divers were examining the hull and her immediate surroundings, to determine just what kind of mess she was really in. The other diver must be exploring the reef to get a complete picture of just what obstacles must be dealt with.

At this point the whistler was in the wings giving with his line about the ant and the rubber tree plant, “Five’ll give you ten they don’t even pull when they see what they’re up against, but Esso New York’ll have their bill before that water pygmy gets back to Jamaica.

Again Pigeon Point wasn’t listening. Going about her business as though she had rescued ships from that reef all her life, she reminded me of a line my father used to use on me a growing boy. “Say nuthin’ and saw wood” was the way he put it. I hadn’t forgotten that line, and right now it seemed to me Pigeon Point was say’n nuthin’ and sawing wood. The work boats were keeping up a steady beat moving men to and from Henry and divers to various points out in the battlefield that was the reel. The barge was transporting equipment, including several large coils of steel cable from tug to tanker and loading it on Henry’s deck.

Monday passed and I remember thinking, if you’re a brain surgeon or a salvage tug you “make haste slowly.” There was no visible evidence that anything was getting done. Then it was Tuesday and we say one of the strands of steel cable gleaming in the morning sun, stretching from the port side of Henry’s bows out some 200 feet where it apparently had been made fast to the sea bottom.

As that day and the succeeding days passed more cables appeared, radiating from all quarters of the ship outward to various locations on the reef. By Friday I remember thinking the network of cables, gleaming in the bright sun, looked for all the world like an enormous spider web with George G. Henry playing the role of the spider. Sitting there hunkered down, the vision stuck my imagination so vividly that I half expected to see her rise on eight great hairy legs and glide over the web out to the deep water.

“They’re getting her well tied down just to make sure she doesn’t slip away during the night,” offered one would-be funny man.

“Got to do something during the week they’re going to charge us for,” came from the cost-conscious cynic in the gallery. And, again from a nearby cubicle came the refrain of the Ant and the Rubber Tree Plant.

Pigeon Point just said nuthin’ and sawed wood, and Friday morning we noticed a change in the routine. Both work boats now were ferrying men to the Henry and we could see them boarding and taking up positions around the deck. At the same time the barge was coming away from the tanker’s bow and we could see she was bringing an enormous tow line out to the little tug which was now positioned out in deep water almost directly in front of Henry’s bow---a quarter mile away. At this point our marine connection informed us that Pigeon Point was about to pull.

Now the gallery was becoming vociferous. Nobody believed that tiny tug could begin to exert the force that big William Green had tried, and besides, Henry was now tied down with a network of steel cables. Just what Pigeon Point was about was a complete mystery to me.

Then, with a blast from her whistle Pigeon Point moved forward. The line came taut, her stern settled well down in the water. A black column issued from her stack and two foaming streams of white water flowed back from her propellers; the George G. Henry moved! The big ship staggered forward and we waited to see her come up against that underwater obstruction which had stopped her so decisively before. Then, and I couldn’t believe my eyes, she suddenly swung hard aport. The cable leading from her port bow obviously had stopped straight-forward progress and pulled her bow sharply to the left. Then I saw that cable go slack and the opposite number on the starboard side came up taut, while another cable somewhere towards the stern suddenly became rigid and hauled the stern to the left, and George G. Henry moved forward on a modified course which took her past the big boulder.

As we stared in amazement, steel cables on the ship alternately tightened and slackened. With the trained crew working like a symphony orchestra they moved Henry’s stern and bow this way and that and as the tug continued to muscle her forward I got the distinct impression that she was literally walking, picking her way past shoals and boulders and seeking out passages through the great underwater rock forest. Before we quite realized it, there sat George G. Henry putting down her anchor in 15 fathoms of clean blue water. The grand tanker was back from the dead, rising and falling with the waves, and turning on her anchor line just like the tankers around her. It seemed to me she was breathing for the first time in 10 days. Blasts of congratulation came from anchored ships and ships at dock in the harbor. And the cheer that went up from the gallery almost drowned a baritone voice intoning the bottom line of the song---“Whoops, there goes another rubber tree plant.”

As I looked at Pigeon Point now, somehow she didn’t look so small. Puffing with pride like a pouter pigeon, I thought, and as she let go the tow line the two short blasts from her whistle seemed to say: “There you doubting Thomases, what do think of that!”

Looking back on the episode I think I learned two lessons I won’t forget. First, when you have a really hard job to do and it’s outside your expertise, give it to an expert. Second, there is no substitute for thorough preparation. Pigeon Point proved that: Five days to get ready, FIVE MINUTES TO PULL!