Henry or John Reed, in a boyscoutish style (trying not to get ahead of his character's naivete) that has aged badly. Still, I find intriguing its onetrackmind fascination with the New York harbor as an indomitable juggernaut that can never be stilled-especially since it has been stilled. In I9>0 the U.S. Treasury Department, for purposes of customs law, established its demarcations as including all the territory lying within the corporate Umits of the cities of Greater New York and onkcrs, N.Y., and of Jersey City, N.J., and in addition thereto all the waters and shores of the Hudson River and Kill von Kill in the State of New Jersey from a point opposite Fort Washington to CIS«i Pomt Light and all the waters and shores of Newark Bay and the Hackensack River lying Hudson County, N.J., from Bergen Point Light to the Umits of Jersey City." This area had a •front of 771 miles, of which 362 mUes were developed with 852 piers. Manhattan alone had a Pe waterfront (measuring the area around the piers) of about 76 miles. IN 1915, THE SAME YEAR The Harbor appeared, the Russell Sas Foundation published Charles B. Barnes's The Longshoremen, probably the first indepth study ever done of American dockworkers. The author's sympathy for the men he studied was apparent. Conveying with statistics and sober prose the dangerous, unremitting working conditions these men endured, Barnes reported that a longshoreman handled about three thousand pounds per hour, that the heavy lifting led frequently to hernias and muscular exhaustion, that the pressure to load or unload ships as rapidly as possible resulted in crews working thirty to forty hours straight, and that the ensuing fatigue increased the chances of accident. Cargoes would swing through the air, barely missing men's heads, steel cables swayed precariously in the wind, a hundred competing noises distracted the focus, buckets of coal were dumped with a roar, releasing clouds of dust. At night the dangers increased, because of lowered visibility and the buildup of fatigue, and along with them came a curious indifference to personal safety, the men having successfully dodged so many close scrapes already. But however invulnerable a longshoreman might come to feel, virtually none were spared some incapacitating injury in the course of their careers. "One man who said he had never been hurt, was reminded by his daughter that his toe had been cut off while he was at work," wrote Barnes. And so on: these dockworkers seem to have been blessed with a mixture of stoicism and amnesia. Still, there was no way to put a good face on fatal accidents. Here, Barnes rose to grisly enumeration: The ways in which a man may meet death at longshore work are many and varied. ... In four cases a heavy log or case rolled over and caught the men. Two men were overcome by the heat. Four were caught in the cog wheel of a winch or pulled around the drum end by the rope fall. Four were killed by the breaking of a boom or block.