This week, a picture by Charles Wheeler Locke showing a typical ‘tramp steamer’ at the Brooklyn dockside, New York City, in 1925. It has the distinctive clusters of cargo cranes, which appear to be typical of its class.

Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”, written in high summer 1925, features the Brooklyn dockside at Red Hook and just such a freight-carrying steamer…

[New York police detective Malone had discovered] “They had come in steamships, apparently tramp freighters, and had been unloaded by stealth on moonless nights in rowboats which stole under a certain wharf and followed a hidden canal to a secret subterranean pool beneath a house.”

“Then the tramp steamer claimed all attention. A boat put off, and a horde of swart, insolent ruffians in officers’ dress swarmed aboard the temporarily halted Cunarder. They wanted Suydam or his body — they had known of his trip, and for certain reasons were sure he would die.”