Now employing 185 people, Vane Brothers is as much a maritime presence in Philadelphia and Norfolk as it is in Baltimore. Its headquarters, nevertheless, remain at Pier 11 in Canton. In 1941 Captain D'arcy Grant described Charley and Claude Hughes's Pratt Street chandlery as the center of the schoonerman's world. Today, a visit to Pier 11 gives one both a sense of what life on Pratt Street at the turn of the century might have been, as well as a notion of why the maritime trades—even in an age of superlight diesel fuel, superheavy container transports, and a shipping industry conducted almost entirely out of sight of the average citizen—can still hold such powerful allure.

The Vane Brothers complex has grown to include Pier 12, which is being rebuilt with oyster shell fill and will be entirely refurbished. Next to Pier 12, on what is called Pier 3, sits the former Pennsylvania Central Railroad grain elevator. Today, its ground floors have been converted to a marine repair shop, where topside maintenance work is done on the Vane fleet.

At the head of Pier 3, grain silos have been demolished, giving a stunning view of the nearby Seagirt Marine Terminal. Its huge blue container-cranes are poised like giant insects on the quay, awaiting the next ship that docks below. On this day the Seagirt Marine Terminal is unloading blue metal boxes from two majestic container ships. Along Pier 3, a cargo ship unloads bulk aggregate; another vessel loads 25-ton blocks of granite bound for Italy. Cranes dump the aggregate into a barge that awaits beside. At the cargoship's stern, the Vane Brothers water barge VB-1 maneuvers to supply fresh water.

While much traffic runs among all three piers, Pier 11 remains ascendant. On the dock, a forklift loads totes filled with lubricating oil onto the launch Willkate. The motor tanker Duff awaits nearby. Farther down the pier, the USNS Comfort sits at berth, unmistakably huge. At five o’clock, her port gangway will fill with the local civilian employees who work on her each day.

Inside the terminal, on the second deck, are the Vane Brothers central operations, an intimate, seemingly continuous network of offices and meeting spaces. Around the conference table in the Operations Room sit Thomas G. Gaither, general manager; Donald E. Glenn, marketing manager; and H. Donald Browning, operations manager. The telephone rings endlessly as they schedule upcoming barge runs. From a window, a huge magnetic crane on the dock below can be seen loading miscellaneous scrap iron into a barge headed that evening for New Jersey. The pace, if not exactly frantic, is non-stop, everywhere.

In the midst of the bustle, the boardroom has a reflective calm. There are models and photographs: the John R. P. Moore, the first schooner Charles Hughes Sr. invested in; and the R. E. Powell, Charles Sr.’s father’s boat, and later his brother Claude’s. There is a deadeye made of lignum vitae, by tradition off the Doris Hamlin, and more likely than not the work of the Maryland Block and Pump Company at Redman-Vane shipyard. In a corner sits the rich mahogany desk that once belonged to J. Carroll Redman. On the walls there are aerial photographs of the harbor, and maritime charts. It is a museum, really.

Through a door, the offices give way to the warehouse space of the second deck. Once it was crowded with immigrations officers and customs offices. Today it warehouses chemicals, supplies, and the fiberglass containers that hold the life rafts serviced by Vane Brothers Marine Safety & Services Division.

Vane's Marine Safety service has its repair shop there. The shop is within a large shed separated from the rest of the warehouse. The shop's garage door is open, and sitting upon the tidy cement floor three fully-inflated life rafts can be seen. With black waists and peaked bright orange canopies, the rafts look almost festive. The air of the shop is heavy, and smells faintly of fruity polymers. When maintaining and repairing life rafts, the doors are dropped and the room's atmospheric pressure, humidity, and temperature are closely guarded. The work is serious, and neatly-framed licenses and manufacturers' warrants display the shop's credentials—credentials acquired following rigorous training programs in the United States, Japan, Spain, Germany, Ireland, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

Below, visible from the deck that runs like a balcony the length of the pier, the tug Thomas Gaither can be seen docking. The tug's captain and two of his crew come ashore. They are all Tangiermen who speak with the exotic, nearly-Elizabethan inflections for which Tangier Island in the lower Chesapeake is famous. It is staggeringly different from any English accent one is likely to have heard. Tangiermen remind us that, while cargo today may travel in containers rather than in nets, and be snatched from superfreighters’ decks by exotic-looking Japanese-built superstructures, the world remains a large and heterogeneous place.

The Thomas Gaither is loading water and picking up provisions. Rather than order from the Vane Brothers chandlery of yesteryear, her captain hitches a ride to a supermarket, nearby in Canton. Later that evening, the Gaither will pick up a barge for a tow to Philadelphia. The Vane Brothers’ other nine tugs are all at sea, as are the company’s twenty-nine barges. "It's a good day when I can’t see any of our vessels," Charles Hughes Jr. says. "That means they're all working."

A better way to serve sailors

More work is on the way. Vane has commissioned two double-skinned barges, each of which carries a price tag of $3 million, with an option for an additional two. Each will have a 30,000-barrel capacity, and be completed early in 1999. The delivery of the two new barges, built with an eye toward the climate of the next century, will serve as a fitting capstone to the company's first one hundred years of service.

When Captain William Burke Vane first came ashore in 1898, he had in mind a better way to serve sailors. By continuously reinventing itself, his company has survived and prospered, all the while remaining very much a family concern. The legacy of the Vanes and Hugheses lives on today as Vane tugs ply the waters of the Eastern Shore’s Wicomico River and the Chesapeake Bay D0 waters that once knew the billowing sails of the schooners R. E. Powell and the John R. P. Moore. As the competitive environment and the technology of the maritime industry has changed dramatically, Vane has prospered by remaining true to the values of hard work, innovation, and camaraderie. D'arcy Grant captured its spirit around the stove at Pratt Street in 1940. That spirit flourished for thirty years in Fell’s Point. It still burns today on the piers in Canton.


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