work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons,
and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind;
no clergyman is a free man and may speak the whole truth,
regardless of his parish’s opinions; writers of all kinds are
manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly,
but then we ‘modify’ before we print. In truth, every man and
woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude;
but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none.
The captain could stand upon the hurricane deck, in the pomp
of a very brief authority, and give him five or six orders while
the vessel backed into the stream, and then that skipper’s reign
was over. The moment that the boat was under way in the river,
she was under the sole and unquestioned control of the pilot.
He could do with her exactly as he pleased, run her when and whither
he chose, and tie her up to the bank whenever his judgment said
that that course was best. His movements were entirely free;
he consulted no one, he received commands from nobody,
he promptly resented even the merest suggestions. Indeed, the law
of the United States forbade him to listen to commands
or suggestions, rightly considering that the pilot necessarily
knew better how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him.
So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch
who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words.
I have seen a boy of eighteen taking a great steamer serenely
into what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain
standing mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless
to interfere. His interference, in that particular instance,
might have been an excellent thing, but to permit it would
have been to establish a most pernicious precedent. It will
easily be guessed, considering the pilot’s boundless authority,
that he was a great personage in the old steamboating days.
He was treated with marked courtesy by the captain and with marked
deference by all the officers and servants; and this deferential
spirit was quickly communicated to the passengers, too. I think
pilots were about the only people I ever knew who failed to show,
in some degree, embarrassment in the presence of traveling
foreign princes. But then, people in one’s own grade of life
are not usually embarrassing objects.
By long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of commands.
It ‘gravels’ me, to this day, to put my will in the weak shape of
a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order.
In those old days, to load a steamboat at St. Louis, take her to New
Orleans and back, and discharge cargo, consumed about twenty-five days,
on an average. Seven or eight of these days the boat spent at the wharves
of St. Louis and New Orleans, and every soul on board was hard at work,
except the two pilots; they did nothing but play gentleman up town,
and receive the same wages for it as if they had been on duty.
The moment the boat touched the wharf at either city, they were ashore;
and they were not likely to be seen again till the last bell was ringing and
everything in readiness for another voyage.
When a captain got hold of a pilot of particularly high reputation,
he took pains to keep him. When wages were four hundred dollars
a month on the Upper Mississippi, I have known a captain
to keep such a pilot in idleness, under full pay, three months
at a time, while the river was frozen up. And one must remember
that in those cheap times four hundred dollars was a salary
of almost inconceivable splendor. Few men on shore got such pay
as that, and when they did they were mightily looked up to.
When pilots from either end of the river wandered into our small
Missouri village, they were sought by the best and the fairest,
and treated with exalted respect. Lying in port under wages
was a thing which many pilots greatly enjoyed and appreciated;