American Merchant Ships and Sailors by Willis J. Abbot

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But the boatmen themselves had dangers to meet, and robbers to evade or to
outwit. At any time the lurking Indian on the banks might send a
death-dealing arrow or bullet from some thicket, for pure love of
slaughter. For a time it was a favorite ruse of hostiles, who had secured
a white captive, to send him alone to the river's edge, under threat of
torture, there to plead with outstretched hands for aid from the passing
raft. But woe to the mariner who was moved by the appeal, for back of the
unfortunate, hidden in the bushes, lay ambushed savages, ready to leap
upon any who came ashore on the errand of mercy, and in the end neither
victim nor decoy escaped the fullest infliction of redskin barbarity.
There were white outlaws along the rivers, too; land pirates ready to rob
and murder when opportunity offered, and as the Spanish territory about
New Orleans was entered, the dangers multiplied. The advertisement of a
line of packets sets forth:

"No danger need be apprehended from the enemy, as every person whatever
will be under cover, made proof against rifle or musket balls, and
convenient portholes for firing out of. Each of the boats are armed with
six pieces, carrying a pound ball, also a number of muskets, and amply
supplied with ammunition, strongly manned with choice hands, and masters
of approved knowledge."

The English of the advertisement is not of the most luminous character,
yet it suffices to tell clearly enough to any one of imagination, the
story of some of the dangers that beset those who drifted from Ohio to New
Orleans.

The lower reaches of the Mississippi River bore among rivermen, during the
early days of the century, very much such a reputation as the Spanish Main
bore among the peaceful mariners of the Atlantic trade. They were the
haunts of pirates and buccaneers, mostly ordinary cheap freebooters,
operating from the shore with a few skiffs, or a lugger, perhaps, who
would dash out upon a passing vessel, loot it, and turn it adrift. But one
gang of these river pirates so grew in power and audacity, and its leaders
so ramified their associations and their business relations, as for a time
to become a really influential factor in the government of New Orleans,
while for a term of years they even put the authority of the United States
at nought. The story of the brothers Lafitte and their nest of criminals
at Barataria, is one of the most picturesque in American annals. On a
group of those small islands crowned with live-oaks and with fronded
palms, in that strange waterlogged country to the southwest of the
Crescent City, where the sea, the bayou, and the marsh fade one into the
other until the line of demarkation can scarcely be traced, the Lafittes
established their colony. There they built cabins and storehouses, threw
up-earthworks, and armed them with stolen cannon. In time the plunder of
scores of vessels filled the warehouses with the goods of all nations, and
as the wealth of the colony grew its numbers increased. To it were
attracted the adventurous spirits of the creole city. Men of Spanish and
of French descent, negroes, and quadroons, West Indians from all the
islands scattered between North and South America, birds of prey, and
fugitives from justice of all sorts and kinds, made that a place of
refuge. They brought their women and children, and their slaves, and the
place became a small principality, knowing no law save Lafitte's will.
With a fleet of small schooners the pirates would sally out into the Gulf
and plunder vessels of whatever sort they might encounter. The road to
their hiding-place was difficult to follow, either in boats or afoot, for
the tortuous bayous that led to it were intertwined in an almost
inextricable maze, through which, indeed, the trained pilots of the colony
picked their way with ease, but along which no untrained helmsman could
follow them. If attack were made by land, the marching force was
confronted by impassable rivers and swamps; if by boats, the invaders
pressing up a channel which seemed to promise success, would find
themselves suddenly in a blind alley, with nothing to do save to retrace
their course. Meanwhile, for the greater convenience of the pirates, a
system of lagoons, well known to them, and easily navigated in luggers,
led to the very back door of New Orleans, the market for their plunder. Of
the brothers Lafitte, one held state in the city as a successful merchant,
a man not without influence with the city government, of high standing in
the business community, and in thoroughly good repute. Yet he was, in
fact, the agent for the pirate colony, and the goods he dealt in were
those which the picturesque ruffians of Barataria had stolen from the
vessels about the mouth of the Mississippi River. The situation persisted
for nearly half a score of years. If there were merchants, importers and
shipowners in New Orleans who suffered by it, there were others who
profited by it, and it has usually been the case that a crime or an
injustice by which any considerable number of people profit, becomes a
sort of vested right, hard to disturb. And, indeed, the Baratarians were
not without a certain rude sense of patriotism and loyalty to the United
States, whose laws they persistently violated. For when the second war
with Great Britain was declared and Packenham was dispatched to take New
Orleans, the commander of the British fleet made overtures to Lafitte and
his men, promising them a liberal subsidy and full pardon for all past
offenses, if they would but act as his allies and guide the British
invaders to the most vulnerable point in the defenses of the Crescent
City. The offer was refused, and instead, the chief men of the pirate
colony went straightway to New Orleans to put Jackson on his guard, and
when the opposing forces met on the plains of Chalmette, the very center
of the American line was held by Dominique Yon, with a band of his swarthy
Baratarians, with howitzers which they themselves had dragged from their
pirate stronghold to train upon the British. Many of us, however
law-abiding, will feel a certain sense that the romance of history would
have been better served, if after this act of patriotism, the pirates had
been at least peacefully dispersed. But they were wedded to their
predatory life, returned with renewed zeal to their piracies, and were
finally destroyed by the State forces and a United States naval
expedition, which burned their settlement, freed their slaves, razed their
fortifications, confiscated their cannon, killed many of their people,
and dispersed the rest among the swamps and forests of southern Louisiana.

In 1809 a New York man, by name Nicholas J. Roosevelt, set out from
Pittsburg in a flatboat of the usual type, to make the voyage to New
Orleans. He carried no cargo of goods for sale, nor did he convey any band
of intended settlers, yet his journey was only second in importance to the
ill-fated one, in which the luckless Amis proved that New Orleans must be
United States territory, or the wealth of the great interior plateau would
be effectively bottled up. For Roosevelt was the partner of Fulton and
Livingston in their new steamboat enterprise, having himself suggested the
vertical paddle-wheel, which for more than a half a century was the
favorite means of utilizing steam power for the propulsion of boats. He
was firm in the belief that the greatest future for the steamboat was on
the great rivers that tied together the rapidly growing commonwealths of
the middle west, and he undertook this voyage for the purpose of studying
the channel and the current of the rivers, with the view to putting a
steamer on them. Wise men assured him that on the upper river his scheme
was destined to failure. Could a boat laden with a heavy engine be made of
so light a draught as to pass over the shallows of the Ohio? Could it run
the falls at Louisville, or be dragged around them as the flatboats often
were? Clearly not. The only really serviceable type of river craft was the
flatboat, for it would go where there was water enough for a muskrat to
swim in, would glide unscathed over the concealed snag or, thrusting its
corner into the soft mud of some protruding bank, swing around and go on
as well stern first as before. The flatboat was the sum of human ingenuity
applied to river navigation. Even barges were proving failures and
passing into disuse, as the cost of poling them upstream was greater than
any profit to be reaped from the voyage. Could a boat laden with thousands
of pounds of machinery make her way northward against that swift current?
And if not, could steamboat men be continually taking expensive engines
down to New Orleans and abandoning them there, as the old-time river men
did their rafts and scows? Clearly not. So Roosevelt's appearance on the
river did not in any way disquiet the flatboatmen, though it portended
their disappearance as a class. Roosevelt, however, was in no wise
discouraged. Week after week he drifted along the Ohio and Mississippi,
taking detailed soundings, studying the course of the current, noting the
supply of fuel along the banks, observing the course of the rafts and
flatboats as they drifted along at the mercy of the tide. Nothing escaped
his attention, and yet it may well be doubted whether the mass of data he
collected was in fact of any practical value, for the great river is the
least understandable of streams. Its channel is as shifting as the mists
above Niagara. Where yesterday the biggest boat on the river, deep laden
with cotton, might pass with safety, there may be to-day a sand-bar
scarcely hidden beneath the tide. Its banks change over night in form and
in appearance. In time of flood it cuts new channels for itself, leaving
in a few days river towns far in the interior, and suddenly giving a water
frontage to some plantation whose owner had for years mourned over his
distance from the river bank. Capricious and irresistible, working
insidiously night and day, seldom showing the progress of its endeavors
until some huge slice of land, acres in extent, crumbles into the flood,
or some gully or cut-off all at once appears as the main channel, the
Mississippi, even now when the Government is at all times on the alert to
hold it in bounds, is not to be lightly learned nor long trusted. In
Roosevelt's time, before the days of the river commission, it must have
been still more difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless, the information he
collected, satisfied him that the stream was navigable for steamers, and
his report determined his partners to build the pioneer craft at
Pittsburg. She was completed, "built after the fashion of a ship with
portholes in her side," says a writer of the time, dubbed the "Orleans,"
and in 1812 reached the city on the sodden prairies near the mouth of the
Mississippi, whose name we now take as a synonym for quaintness, but which
at that time had seemingly the best chance to become a rival of London and
Liverpool, of any American town. For just then the great possibilities of
the river highway were becoming apparent. The valley was filling up with
farmers, and their produce sought the shortest way to tide-water. The
streets of the city were crowded with flatboatmen, from Indiana, Ohio, and
Kentucky, and with sailors speaking strange tongues, and gathered from all
the ports of the world. At the broad levee floated the ships of all
nations. All manual work was done by the negro slaves, and already the
planters were beginning to show signs of that prodigal prosperity, which,
in the flush times, made New Orleans the gayest city in the United States.
In 1813 Jackson put the final seal on the title-deeds to New Orleans, and
made the Mississippi forever an American river by defeating the British
just outside the city's walls, and then river commerce grew apace. In 1817
fifteen hundred flatboats and five hundred barges tied up to the levee. By
that time the steamboat had proved her case, for the "New Orleans" had run
for years between Natchez and the Louisiana city, charging a fare of
eighteen dollars for the down, and twenty-five dollars for the up trip,
and earning for her owners twenty thousand dollars profits in one year.
She was snagged and lost in 1814, but by that time others were in the
field, first of all the "Comet," a stern-wheeler of twenty-five tons,
built at Pittsburg, and entering the New Orleans-Natchez trade in 1814.
The "Vesuvius," and the "AEtna."--volcanic names which suggested the
explosive end of too many of the early boats--were next in the field, and
the latter won fame by being the first boat to make the up trip from New
Orleans to Louisville. Another steamboat, the "Enterprise," carried a
cargo of, powder and ball from Pittsburg to General Jackson at New
Orleans, and after some service on southern waters, made the return trip
to Louisville in twenty-five days. This was a great achievement, and
hailed by the people of the Kentucky town as the certain forerunner of
commercial greatness, for at one time there were tied to the bank the
"Enterprise" from New Orleans, the "Despatch" from Pittsburg, and the
"Kentucky Elizabeth" from the upper Kentucky River. Never had the
settlement seemed to be so thoroughly in the heart of the continent.
Thereafter river steamboating grew so fast that by 1819 sixty-three
steamers, of varying tonnage from twenty to three hundred tons, were
plying on the western rivers. Four had been built at New Orleans, one each
at Philadelphia, New York, and Providence, and fifty-six on the Ohio. The
upper reaches of the Mississippi still lagged in the race, for most of the
boats turned off up the Ohio River, into the more populous territory
toward the east. It was not until August, 1817, that the "General Pike,"
the first steamer ever to ascend the Mississippi River above the mouth of
the Ohio, reached St. Louis. No pictures, and but scant descriptions of
this pioneer craft, are obtainable at the present time. From old letters
it is learned that she was built on the model of a barge, with her cabin
situated on the lower deck, so that its top scarcely showed above the
bulwarks. She had a low-pressure engine, which at times proved inadequate
to stem the current, and in such a crisis the crew got out their shoulder
poles and pushed her painfully up stream, as had been the practice so many
years with the barges. At night she tied up to the bank. Only one other
steamer reached St. Louis in the same twelve months. By way of contrast to
this picture of the early beginnings of river navigation on the upper
Mississippi, we may set over some facts drawn from recent official
publications concerning the volume of river traffic, of which St. Louis is
now the admitted center. In 1890 11,000,000 passengers were carried in
steamboats on rivers of the Mississippi system. The Ohio and its
tributaries, according to the census of that year, carried over 15,000,000
tons of freight annually, mainly coal, grain, lumber, iron, and steel. The
Mississippi carries about the same amount of freight, though on its turbid
tide, cotton and sugar, in no small degree, take the place of grain and
the products of the furnaces and mills.

But it was a long time before steam navigation approached anything like
these figures, and indeed, many years passed before the flatboat and the
barge saw their doom, and disappeared. In 1821, ten years after the first
steamboat arrived at New Orleans, there was still recorded in the annals
of the town, the arrival of four hundred and forty-one flatboats, and one
hundred and seventy-four barges. But two hundred and eighty-seven
steamboats also tied up to the levee that year, and the end of the
flatboat days was in sight. Ninety-five of the new type of vessels were in
service on the Mississippi and its tributaries, and five were at Mobile
making short voyages on the Mississippi Sound and out into the Gulf. They
were but poor types of vessels at best. At first the shortest voyage up
the river from New Orleans to Shippingport--then a famous landing, now
vanished from the map--was twenty-two days, and it took ten days to come
down. Within six years the models of the boats and the power of the
engines had been so greatly improved that the up trip was made in twelve
days, and the down in six. Even the towns on the smaller streams tributary
to the great river, had their own fleets. Sixteen vessels plied between
Nashville and New Orleans. The Red River, and even the Missouri, began to
echo to the puffing of the exhaust and the shriek of the steam-whistle.
Indeed, it was not very long before the Missouri River became as important
a pathway for the troops of emigrants making for the great western plains
and in time for the gold fields of California, as the Ohio had been in the
opening days of the century for the pioneers bent upon opening up the
Mississippi Valley. The story of the Missouri River voyage, the landing
place at Westport, now transformed into the great bustling city of Kansas
City, and all the attendant incidents which led up to the contest in
Kansas and Nebraska, forms one of the most interesting, and not the least
important chapters in the history of our national development.

The decade during which the steamboats and the flatboats still struggled
for the mastery, was the most picturesque period of Mississippi River
life. Then the river towns throve most, and waxed turbulent, noisy, and
big, according to the standards of the times. Places which now are mere
names on the map, or have even disappeared from the map altogether, were
great trans-shipping points for goods on the way to the sea. New Madrid,
for example, which nowadays we remember chiefly as being one of the
stubborn obstacles in the way of the Union opening of the river in the
dark days of the Civil War, was in 1826 like a seaport. Flatboats in
groups and fleets came drifting to its levees heavy laden with the
products of the west and south, the output of the northern farms and
mills, and the southern plantations. On the crowded river bank would be
disembarked goods drawn from far-off New England, which had been dragged
over the mountains and sent down the Ohio to the Mississippi; furs from
northern Minnesota or Wisconsin; lumber in the rough, or shaped into
planks, from the mills along the Ohio; whisky from Kentucky, pork and
flour from Illinois, cattle, horses, hemp, fabrics, tobacco, everything
that men at home or abroad, could need or crave, was gathered up by
enterprising traders along three thousand miles of waterway, and brought
hither by clumsy rafts and flatboats, and scarcely less clumsy steamboats,
for distribution up and down other rivers, and shipment to foreign lands.

At New Orleans there was a like deposit of all the products of that rich
valley, an empire in itself. There grain, cotton, lumber, live stock,
furs, the output of the farms and the spoils of the chase, were
transferred to ocean-going ships and sent to foreign markets. Speculative
spirits planned for the day, when this rehandling of cargoes at the
Crescent City would be no longer necessary, but ships would clear from
Louisville or St. Louis to Liverpool or Hamburg direct. A fine type of the
American sailor, Commodore Whipple, who had won his title by good
sea-fighting in the Revolutionary War, gave great encouragement to this
hope, in 1800, by taking the full-rigged ship "St. Clair," with a cargo of
pork and flour, from Marietta, Ohio, down the Ohio, over the falls at
Louisville, thence down the Mississippi, and round by sea to Havana, and
so on to Philadelphia. This really notable exploit--to the success of
which good luck contributed almost as much as good seamanship--aroused
the greatest enthusiasm. The Commodore returned home overland, from
Philadelphia. His progress, slow enough, at best, was checked by ovations,
complimentary addresses, and extemporized banquets. He was _the_ man of
the moment. The poetasters, who were quite as numerous in the early days
of the republic, as the true poets were scarce, signalized his exploit in
verse.

"The Triton crieth,
'Who cometh now from shore?'
Neptune replieth,
''Tis the old Commodore.
Long has it been since I saw him before.
In the year '75 from Columbia he came,
The pride of the Briton, on ocean to tame.

* * * * *

"'But now he comes from western woods,
Descending slow, with gentle floods,
The pioneer of a mighty train,
Which commerce brings to my domain.'"

But Neptune and the Triton had no further occasion to exchange notes of
astonishment upon the appearance of river-built ships on the ocean. The
"St. Clair" was the first and last experiment of the sort. Late in the
nineties, the United States Government tried building a torpedo-boat at
Dubuque for ocean service, but the result was not encouraging.

Year after year the steamboats multiplied, not only on the rivers of the
West, but on those leading from the Atlantic seaboard into the interior.
It may be said justly that the application of steam to purposes of
navigation made the American people face fairly about. Long they had
stood, looking outward, gazing across the sea to Europe, their sole
market, both for buying and for selling. But now the rich lands beyond
the mountains, inviting settlers, and cut up by streams which offered
paths for the most rapid and comfortable method of transportation then
known, commanded their attention. Immigrants no longer stopped in stony
New England, or in Virginia, already dominated by an aristocratic
land-owning class, but pressed on to Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and
Illinois. As the lands filled up, the little steamers pushed their noses
up new streams, seeking new markets. The Cumberland, and the Tennessee,
the Missouri, the Arkansas, the Red, the Tombigbee, and the Chattahoochee
were stirred by the churning wheels, and over-their forests floated the
mournful sough of the high-pressure exhaust.

In 1840, a count kept at Cairo, showed 4566 vessels had passed that point
during the year. By 1848, a "banner" year, in the history of navigation on
the Mississippi, traffic was recorded thus:

25 vessels plying between Louisville, New Orleans and
Cincinnati 8,484 tons
7 between Nashville and New Orleans 2,585 tons
4 between Florence and New Orleans 1,617 tons
4 in St. Louis local trade 1,001 tons
7 in local cotton trade 2,016 tons
River "tramps" and unclassified 23,206 tons

It may be noted that in all the years of the development of the
Mississippi shipping, there was comparatively little increase in the size
of the individual boats. The "Vesuvius," built in 1814, was 480 tons
burthen, 160 feet long, 28.6 feet beam, and drew from five to six feet.
The biggest boats of later years were but little larger.

[Illustration: THE MISSISSIPPI PILOT]

The aristocrat of the Mississippi River steamboat was the pilot. To him
all men deferred. So far as the river service furnished a parallel to the
autocratic authority of the sea-going captain or master, he was it. All
matters pertaining to the navigation of the boat were in his domain, and
right zealously he guarded his authority and his dignity. The captain
might determine such trivial matters as hiring or discharging men, buying
fuel, or contracting for freight; the clerk might lord it over the
passengers, and the mate domineer over the black roustabouts; but the
pilot moved along in a sort of isolated grandeur, the true monarch of all
he surveyed. If, in his judgment the course of wisdom was to tie up to an
old sycamore tree on the bank and remain motionless all night, the boat
tied up. The grumblings of passengers and the disapproval of the captain
availed naught, nor did the captain often venture upon either criticism or
suggestion to the lordly pilot, who was prone to resent such invasion of
his dignity in ways that made trouble. Indeed, during the flush times on
the Mississippi, the pilots were a body of men possessing painfully
acquired knowledge and skill, and so organized as to protect all the
privileges which their attainments should win for them. The ability to
"run" the great river from St. Louis to New Orleans was not lightly won,
nor, for that matter, easily retained, for the Mississippi is ever a
fickle flood, with changing landmarks and shifting channel. In all the
great volume of literature bearing on the story of the river, the
difficulties of its conquest are nowhere so truly recounted as in Mark
Twain's _Life on the Mississippi_, the humorous quality of which does not
obscure, but rather enhances its value as a picturesque and truthful story
of the old-time pilot's life. The pilot began his work in boyhood as a
"cub" to a licensed pilot. His duties ranged from bringing refreshments up
to the pilot-house, to holding the wheel when some straight stretch or
clear, deep channel offered his master a chance to leave his post for a
few minutes. For strain on the memory, his education is comparable only to
the Chinese system of liberal culture, which comprehends learning by rote
some tens of thousands of verses from the works of Confucius and other
philosophers of the far East. Beginning at New Orleans, he had to commit
to memory the name and appearance of every point of land, inlet, river or
bayou mouth, "cut-off," light, plantation and hamlet on either bank of the
river all the way to St. Louis. Then, he had to learn them all in their
opposite order, quite an independent task, as all of us who learned the
multiplication table backward in the days of our youth, will readily
understand. These landmarks it was needful for him to recognize by day and
by night, through fog or driving rain, when the river was swollen by
spring floods, or shrunk in summer to a yellow ribbon meandering through a
Sahara of sand. He had need to recognize at a glance the ripple on the
water that told of a lurking sand-bar and distinguish it from the almost
identical ripple that a brisk breeze would raise. Most perplexing of the
perils that beset river navigation are the "snags," or sunken logs that
often obstruct the channel. Some towering oak or pine, growing in lusty
strength for its half-century or more by the brink of the upper reaches of
one of the Mississippi system would, in time, be undermined by the flood
and fall into the rushing tide. For weeks it would be rolled along the
shallows; its leaves and twigs rotting off, its smaller branches breaking
short, until at last, hundreds of miles, perhaps, below the scene of its
fall, it would lodge fair in the channel. The gnarled and matted mass of
boughs would ordinarily cling like an anchor to the sandy bottom, while
the buoyant trunk, as though struggling to break away, would strain upward
obliquely to within a few inches of the surface of the muddy water,
which--too thick to drink and too thin to plough, as the old saying
went--gave no hint of this concealed peril; but the boat running fairly
upon it, would have her bows stove in and go quickly to the bottom. After
the United States took control of the river and began spending its
millions annually in improving it for navigation and protecting the
surrounding country against its overflows, "snag-boats" were put on the
river, equipped with special machinery for dragging these fallen forest
giants from the channel, so that of late years accidents from this cause
have been rare. But for many years the riverman's chief reliance was that
curious instinct or second sight which enabled the trained pilot to pick
his way along the most tortuous channel in the densest fog, or to find the
landing of some obscure plantation on a night blacker than the blackest of
the roustabouts, who moved lively to the incessant cursing of the mate.

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