which he must also have. He must have good and quick judgment
and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake.
Give a man the merest trifle of pluck to start with, and by the time
he has become a pilot he cannot be unmanned by any danger a steamboat
can get into; but one cannot quite say the same for judgment.
Judgment is a matter of brains, and a man must START with a good
stock of that article or he will never succeed as a pilot.
The growth of courage in the pilot-house is steady all the time,
but it does not reach a high and satisfactory condition until
some time after the young pilot has been ‘standing his own watch,’
alone and under the staggering weight of all the responsibilities
connected with the position. When an apprentice has become pretty
thoroughly acquainted with the river, he goes clattering along
so fearlessly with his steamboat, night or day, that he presently
begins to imagine that it is HIS courage that animates him;
but the first time the pilot steps out and leaves him to his
own devices he finds out it was the other man’s. He discovers
that the article has been left out of his own cargo altogether.
The whole river is bristling with exigencies in a moment;
he is not prepared for them; he does not know how to meet them;
all his knowledge forsakes him; and within fifteen minutes
he is as white as a sheet and scared almost to death.
Therefore pilots wisely train these cubs by various strategic
tricks to look danger in the face a little more calmly.
A favorite way of theirs is to play a friendly swindle upon
the candidate.
Mr. Bixby served me in this fashion once, and for years afterward
I used to blush even in my sleep when I thought of it.
I had become a good steersman; so good, indeed, that I had all
the work to do on our watch, night and day; Mr. Bixby seldom
made a suggestion to me; all he ever did was to take the wheel
on particularly bad nights or in particularly bad crossings,
land the boat when she needed to be landed, play gentleman
of leisure nine-tenths of the watch, and collect the wages.
The lower river was about bank-full, and if anybody had questioned
my ability to run any crossing between Cairo and New Orleans
without help or instruction, I should have felt irreparably hurt.
The idea of being afraid of any crossing in the lot,
in the DAY-TIME, was a thing too preposterous for contemplation.
Well, one matchless summer’s day I was bowling down the bend
above island 66, brimful of self-conceit and carrying my nose
as high as a giraffe’s, when Mr. Bixby said–
‘I am going below a while. I suppose you know the next crossing?’
This was almost an affront. It was about the plainest and simplest crossing
in the whole river. One couldn’t come to any harm, whether he ran it
right or not; and as for depth, there never had been any bottom there.
I knew all this, perfectly well.
‘Know how to RUN it? Why, I can run it with my eyes shut.’
‘How much water is there in it?’
‘Well, that is an odd question. I couldn’t get bottom there
with a church steeple.’
‘You think so, do you?’
The very tone of the question shook my confidence.
That was what Mr. Bixby was expecting. He left, without saying
anything more. I began to imagine all sorts of things.
Mr. Bixby, unknown to me, of course, sent somebody down to
the forecastle with some mysterious instructions to the leadsmen,
another messenger was sent to whisper among the officers,
and then Mr. Bixby went into hiding behind a smoke-stack where
he could observe results. Presently the captain stepped out on
the hurricane deck; next the chief mate appeared; then a clerk.
Every moment or two a straggler was added to my audience;
and before I got to the head of the island I had fifteen
or twenty people assembled down there under my nose.
I began to wonder what the trouble was. As I started across,