Now what COULD these banished creatures find to do to keep from dying
of the blues during the low-water season!
Once, in one of these lovely island chutes, we found
our course completely bridged by a great fallen tree.
This will serve to show how narrow some of the chutes were.
The passengers had an hour’s recreation in a virgin wilderness,
while the boat-hands chopped the bridge away; for there was no such
thing as turning back, you comprehend.
From Cairo to Baton Rouge, when the river is over its banks, you have
no particular trouble in the night, for the thousand-mile wall of dense
forest that guards the two banks all the way is only gapped with a farm
or wood-yard opening at intervals, and so you can’t ‘get out of the river’
much easier than you could get out of a fenced lane; but from Baton
Rouge to New Orleans it is a different matter. The river is more than
a mile wide, and very deep–as much as two hundred feet, in places.
Both banks, for a good deal over a hundred miles, are shorn of their timber
and bordered by continuous sugar plantations, with only here and there
a scattering sapling or row of ornamental China-trees. The timber is
shorn off clear to the rear of the plantations, from two to four miles.
When the first frost threatens to come, the planters snatch off
their crops in a hurry. When they have finished grinding the cane,
they form the refuse of the stalks (which they call BAGASSE)
into great piles and set fire to them, though in other sugar countries
the bagasse is used for fuel in the furnaces of the sugar mills.
Now the piles of damp bagasse burn slowly, and smoke like Satan’s own kitchen.
An embankment ten or fifteen feet high guards both banks of the Mississippi
all the way down that lower end of the river, and this embankment is set
back from the edge of the shore from ten to perhaps a hundred feet,
according to circumstances; say thirty or forty feet, as a general thing.
Fill that whole region with an impenetrable gloom of smoke from a hundred
miles of burning bagasse piles, when the river is over the banks, and turn
a steamboat loose along there at midnight and see how she will feel.
And see how you will feel, too! You find yourself away out in the midst
of a vague dim sea that is shoreless, that fades out and loses itself
in the murky distances; for you cannot discern the thin rib of embankment,
and you are always imagining you see a straggling tree when you don’t. The
plantations themselves are transformed by the smoke, and look like a part
of the sea. All through your watch you are tortured with the exquisite misery
of uncertainty. You hope you are keeping in the river, but you do not know.
All that you are sure about is that you are likely to be within six feet of
the bank and destruction, when you think you are a good half-mile from shore.
And you are sure, also, that if you chance suddenly to fetch up against
the embankment and topple your chimneys overboard, you will have the small
comfort of knowing that it is about what you were expecting to do.
One of the great Vicksburg packets darted out into a sugar plantation
one night, at such a time, and had to stay there a week. But there was no
novelty about it; it had often been done before.
I thought I had finished this chapter, but I wish
to add a curious thing, while it is in my mind.
It is only relevant in that it is connected with piloting.
There used to be an excellent pilot on the river, a Mr. X.,
who was a somnambulist. It was said that if his mind was
troubled about a bad piece of river, he was pretty sure
to get up and walk in his sleep and do strange things.
He was once fellow-pilot for a trip or two with George Ealer,
on a great New Orleans passenger packet. During a considerable