Life on the Mississippi
venture the rest, for we would have plainer sailing and better water.
But it would be insanity to attempt Hat Island at night. So there was
a deal of looking at watches all the rest of the day, and a constant
ciphering upon the speed we were making; Hat Island was the eternal
subject; sometimes hope was high and sometimes we were delayed in a
bad crossing, and down it went again. For hours all hands lay under the
burden of this suppressed excitement; it was even communicated to me,
and I got to feeling so solicitous about Hat Island, and under such
an awful pressure of responsibility, that I wished I might have five
minutes on shore to draw a good, full, relieving breath, and start over
again. We were standing no regular watches. Each of our pilots ran such
portions of the river as he had run when coming up-stream, because of
his greater familiarity with it; but both remained in the pilot house
constantly.
An hour before sunset, Mr. Bixby took the wheel and Mr. W----stepped
aside. For the next thirty minutes every man held his watch in his hand
and was restless, silent, and uneasy. At last somebody said, with a
doomful sigh--
'Well, yonder's Hat Island--and we can't make it.' All the watches
closed with a snap, everybody sighed and muttered something about its
being 'too bad, too bad--ah, if we could only have got here half an hour
sooner!' and the place was thick with the atmosphere of disappointment.
Some started to go out, but loitered, hearing no bell-tap to land. The
sun dipped behind the horizon, the boat went on. Inquiring looks passed
from one guest to another; and one who had his hand on the door-knob
and had turned it, waited, then presently took away his hand and let the
knob turn back again. We bore steadily down the bend. More looks were
exchanged, and nods of surprised admiration--but no words. Insensibly
the men drew together behind Mr. Bixby, as the sky darkened and one or
two dim stars came out. The dead silence and sense of waiting became
oppressive. Mr. Bixby pulled the cord, and two deep, mellow notes from
the big bell floated off on the night. Then a pause, and one more note
was struck. The watchman's voice followed, from the hurricane deck--
'Labboard lead, there! Stabboard lead!'
The cries of the leadsmen began to rise out of the distance, and were
gruffly repeated by the word-passers on the hurricane deck.
'M-a-r-k three!... M-a-r-k three!... Quarter-less three!... Half
twain!... Quarter twain!... M-a-r-k twain!... Quarter-less--'
Mr. Bixby pulled two bell-ropes, and was answered by faint jinglings far
below in the engine room, and our speed slackened. The steam began to
whistle through the gauge-cocks. The cries of the leadsmen went on--and
it is a weird sound, always, in the night. Every pilot in the lot was
watching now, with fixed eyes, and talking under his breath. Nobody was
calm and easy but Mr. Bixby. He would put his wheel down and stand on
a spoke, and as the steamer swung into her (to me) utterly invisible
marks--for we seemed to be in the midst of a wide and gloomy sea--he
would meet and fasten her there. Out of the murmur of half-audible talk,
one caught a coherent sentence now and then--such as--
'There; she's over the first reef all right!'
After a pause, another subdued voice--
'Her stern's coming down just exactly right, by George!'
'Now she's in the marks; over she goes!'
Somebody else muttered--
'Oh, it was done beautiful--_beautiful_!'
Now the engines were stopped altogether, and we drifted with the
current. Not that I could see the boat drift, for I could not, the stars
being all gone by this time. This drifting was the dismalest work; it
held one's heart still. Presently I discovered a blacker gloom than
that which surrounded us. It was the head of the island. We were closing
right down upon it. We entered its deeper shadow, and so imminent
seemed the peril that I was likely to suffocate; and I had the strongest
impulse to do _something_, anything, to save the vessel. But still Mr.
Bixby stood by his wheel, silent, intent as a cat, and all the pilots
stood shoulder to shoulder at his back.
'She'll not make it!' somebody whispered.
The water grew shoaler and shoaler, by the leadsman's cries, till it was
down to--
'Eight-and-a-half!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!....
Seven-and--'
Mr. Bixby said warningly through his speaking tube to the engineer--
'Stand by, now!'
'Aye-aye, sir!'
'Seven-and-a-half! Seven feet! Six-and--'
We touched bottom! Instantly Mr. Bixby set a lot of bells ringing,
shouted through the tube, 'NOW, let her have it--every ounce you've
got!' then to his partner, 'Put her hard down! snatch her! snatch her!'
The boat rasped and ground her way through the sand, hung upon the apex
of disaster a single tremendous instant, and then over she went! And
such a shout as went up at Mr. Bixby's back never loosened the roof of a
pilot-house before!
There was no more trouble after that. Mr. Bixby was a hero that night;
and it was some little time, too, before his exploit ceased to be talked
about by river men.
Fully to realize the marvelous precision required in laying the great
steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should know that
not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and blind
reefs, and then shave the head of the island so closely as to brush
the overhanging foliage with her stern, but at one place she must pass
almost within arm's reach of a sunken and invisible wreck that would
snatch the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it, and
destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of steam-boat and cargo
in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human lives into the
bargain.
The last remark I heard that night was a compliment to Mr. Bixby,
uttered in soliloquy and with unction by one of our guests. He said--
'By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!'
CHAPTER 8
Perplexing Lessons
At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my
head full of islands, towns, bars, 'points,' and bends; and a curiously
inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as I could shut
my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names without leaving
out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I began to feel that
I could take a boat down to New Orleans if I could make her skip those
little gaps. But of course my complacency could hardly get start enough
to lift my nose a trifle into the air, before Mr. Bixby would think of
something to fetch it down again. One day he turned on me suddenly with
this settler--
'What is the shape of Walnut Bend?'
He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm.
I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any
particular shape. My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course,
and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives.
I had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds of
ammunition, and was sure to subside into a very placable and even
remorseful old smooth-bore as soon as they were all gone. That word
'old' is merely affectionate; he was not more than thirty-four. I
waited. By and by he said--
'My boy, you've got to know the _shape _of the river perfectly. It is
all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else
is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the
night that it has in the day-time.'
'How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?'
'How do you follow a hall at home in the dark. Because you know the
shape of it. You can't see it.'
'Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling
variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I
know the shape of the front hall at home?'
'On my honor, you've got to know them _better _than any man ever did
know the shapes of the halls in his own house.'
'I wish I was dead!'
'Now I don't want to discourage you, but--'
'Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time.'
'You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around
it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't
know the shape of a shore perfectly you would claw away from every bunch
of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid
cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen
minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time
when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in
one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape
of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your
pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark
night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem to be
straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd _run _them for
straight lines only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right
into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well that
in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes
way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's
one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any
particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the
oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of _moonlight
_change the shape of the river in different ways. You see--'
'Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the
river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If
I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me
stoop-shouldered.'
'_No_! you only learn _the _shape of the river, and you learn it with
such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's
_in your head_, and never mind the one that's before your eyes.'
'Very well, I'll try it; but after I have learned it can I depend on it.
Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?'
Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W---- came in to take the watch, and
he said--
'Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's Island and all that
country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are
caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why,
you wouldn't know the point above 40. You can go up inside the old
sycamore-snag, now.{footnote [1. It may not be necessary, but still it
can do no harm to explain that 'inside' means between the snag and the
shore.--M.T.]}
So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing
shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty
apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got to
learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other
was, that he must learn it all over again in a different way every
twenty-four hours.
That night we had the watch until twelve. Now it was an ancient river
custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch changed. While
the relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his cigar, his partner,
the retiring pilot, would say something like this--
'I judge the upper bar is making down a little at Hale's Point; had
quarter twain with the lower lead and mark twain {footnote [Two fathoms.
'Quarter twain' is two-and-a-quarter fathoms, thirteen-and-a-half feet.
'Mark three' is three fathoms.]} with the other.'
'Yes, I thought it was making down a little, last trip. Meet any boats?'
'Met one abreast the head of 21, but she was away over hugging the
bar, and I couldn't make her out entirely. I took her for the “Sunny
South”--hadn't any skylights forward of the chimneys.'
And so on. And as the relieving pilot took the wheel his partner