Old Times on the Upper Mississippi
look alike to me", might under such circumstances be set to music
and sung with feeling and expression by the learner.
What the pilot must know to enable him to run the river at night, is
strikingly suggested in the conversation between young "Mark Twain"
and his chief, Mr. Bixby. When the boy had begun to take on airs as a
pilot, his chief suddenly fired the question:
"What is the shape of Walnut Bend?"
Of course he did not know, and did not know that he must know.
Mr. Bixby: "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
daytime."
"How on earth am I 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 I've got to know all the million trifling
variations of the shape of 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... You see,
this has got to be learned; there is no getting around it. A
clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you
didn't know the shape of the 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 straight lines then, and mighty dim ones, too;
you'd run them for straight lines, only you know better. You
boldly drive your boat into what seems to be a solid straight
wall (you knowing very well that 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 those grizzly
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--"
But the cub had wilted. When he came to his chief reassured him
somewhat by replying to his objections:
"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."
And that was approximately the case. The details of the river, once
learned, were so indellibly printed on the mind of the pilot that
it seemed as though eyes were almost superfluous. Of course Mr.
Bixby stated the extreme case. While the pilot was running a bend
"out of his head" in darkness that might be felt, there were always
well-known landmarks to be seen--shapes of bluffs so indistinct as
to seem but parts of the universal blackness. But these indistinct
outlines were enough to confirm the judgment of the man at the wheel
in the course he was steering. The man in the hall, in Mr. Bixby's
illustration, could not see anything, and didn't know what hall he
was in. He might just as well have been blind; and I never heard of a
blind man running a steamboat, day or night. In the short experience
that I had in the pilot house, I did not reach this perfection;
but I have stood on one side of the wheel, mechanically following
the orders of my chief, and listening to the churning of the wheel
reëchoed from the banks not fifty feet away, when I could scarcely
see the jack staff, and could not distinguish between the black of
the woods and the all-pervading black of the night.
Mr. Burns or Mr. Cushing would translate the situation, as the
boat plowed along under a full head of steam, somewhat like this:
"Now we're going down into the bend. Now we're opposite the big
cottonwood. Now we must pull out a little, to avoid that nest of
snags. Now we will let her begin to come out; the water begins to
shoal here; we'll keep away from the point a little, and cross over
into the west bend, and follow that down in the opposite direction."
This in the way of instruction; and so far as my observation went
he was drawing on his imagination for his facts, as I saw no big
cottonwood, nor nest of snags, nor any point. The only thing that
I could share with him in common was the fact that we were nearing
the point and getting into shoaler water--the boat told me that. The
floor under my feet seemed to hang back and drag; the motion of the
paddle wheel was perceptibly retarded; the escape was hoarser from
the pipes. I knew that there was shoal water on the point at the foot
of the bend, and the boat herself told me when we had reached the
point; but I had not seen it, either with my eyes, or in my head.
Mr. Burns had it all in his head, and did not require to see it with
his eyes. He simply ran the bend as he knew it to be; and he ran a
hundred others in the same way.
What might happen to any one who ran by sight, and not by faith, was
illustrated in the case of a young pilot on the "Key City", of our
line. He had his papers, and was standing watch alone in the pilot
house. He was going downstream. In going into Lansing, Iowa, one
runs a long bend on the left-hand shore. At Lansing the river turns
sharply to the south, from a nearly westerly course. Just at the
turn, and fronting the river toward the east, is a solid limestone
bluff four hundred feet high. On a starlit night the shadow of this
bluff is thrown out upon the river so far as totally to obliterate
the water, and for several minutes one must point his boat straight
into an apparently solid bluff before he "opens out" the turn to the
left. On the night in question the young man forgot to run by what
he knew to be the shape of the river, and trusted to what his eyes
showed him. He lost his head completely, and instead of stopping both
wheels and backing away from the impending doom, he put his wheel
hard over and plumped the "Key City" into the alluvial bank of the
island opposite, with such force as to snatch both chimneys out of
her, and very nearly to make a wreck of the steamer.
I have myself been tempted to run away from the same bluff; and but
for confidence inspired by the presence of one of the pilots, might
have done so. Mr. Burns drilled his "cubs" upon one point, however,
which made for the safety of the boat: "When in doubt, ring the
stopping bell and set her back." There was no place of safety to run
to in a panic on the Mississippi, and a boat standing still was less
likely to hurt herself or any one else than one in motion.
In no other particular, perhaps, has the art of piloting been so
revolutionized as in the adoption of the electric search-light for
night running. Time and again have I heard the question asked by
people new to the river: "Why don't you hang up two or three lanterns
at the front end of the boat, so that you can see to steer?"
It is easy to answer such a question convincingly. Go out into the
woods on a very dark night with an ordinary lantern. How far can you
see by such a light? Perhaps thirty feet; twenty feet would probably
be nearer the mark. Until a light was discovered that could project
its rays a half mile or more, and so concentrated as clearly to
reveal landmarks at that distance, the other extreme, no light at
all, was not only desirable, but positively necessary if the boat was
to be kept going.
After long usage, a pilot's eyes came to possess powers common to
the cat family and other night prowlers. He could literally "see
in the dark"; but he could not see in any half light, or any light
artificial and close at hand. For this reason it was necessary to
cover every light on the boat while running on a very dark night,
save the red and green sidelights at the chimney-tops. To accomplish
this, heavy canvas "shrouds" or "mufflers" were provided, which
fitted snugly around the forward part of the boat, in front of the
furnaces on the main deck; another set were placed around the boiler
deck, in front of the cabin; and still another set to muffle the
transom sky-lights on the hurricane deck. When these were properly
fitted and triced up, there was not a ray of light projected forward,
to break the dead blackness ahead. So delicate was this sense of
night sight, that no one was permitted to smoke a pipe or cigar in
the pilot house at such times, and even the mate, sitting by the bell
down on the roof below, had to forego his midnight pipe. As for the
pilot himself, a cigar in front of his nose would have shut off his
sight as effectively as though he were blindfolded.
Of course, were the pilot looking only ten feet, or even forty feet,
ahead of his boat, the lights on board might not have interfered
greatly, although they would not have assisted him in the slightest.
You can not steer a boat by landmarks ten feet ahead of her. The
pilot searches for landmarks a mile away, and must be able to
distinguish between two kinds of blackness--the blackness of the
night below, and the blackness of the sky above, and from the
dividing line between the two must read his marks and determine his
course. He does not see the woods on either side of him, and often
close at hand. The least ray of artificial light would blind the
pilot to the things which he must see under such conditions, hence
the shrouding of the boat was a necessity, were she to be run at all
on such a night. The coming of the electric search-light, and the
transfer of the marks from distant bluffs to big white diamond boards
planted low down on the banks where the light can be flashed upon
them from a distance of half a mile or more, has greatly simplified
the work of the pilot, and rendered obsolete the curtains which once
so completely darkened the Mississippi steamboat on the blackest of
nights.
Chapter XI
_Knowing the River_
To "know the river" fully, the pilot must not only know everything
which may be seen by the eye, but he must also feel for a great
deal of information of the first importance which is not revealed
to the eye alone. Where the water warrants it, he reaches for this
information with a lead line; as on the lower river, where the water
is deeper, and the draft of boats correspondingly great. On the
upper river, a twelve-foot pole answers instead. The performance
is always one of great interest to the passengers; the results are
often of greater interest to the man at the wheel. The manner in
which the reports of the leadsman are received and digested by the
pilot, is not usually known to or comprehended by the uninitiated.
The proceeding is picturesque, and adds one more "feature" to the
novelties of the trip. It is always watched with the greatest
interest by the tourist, and is apparently always enjoyed by them,