The owners and captains were the only obstruction that lay between
the association and absolute power; and at last this one was removed.
Incredible as it may seem, the owners and captains deliberately
did it themselves. When the pilots’ association announced,
months beforehand, that on the first day of September, 1861,
wages would be advanced to five hundred dollars per month, the owners
and captains instantly put freights up a few cents, and explained
to the farmers along the river the necessity of it, by calling their
attention to the burdensome rate of wages about to be established.
It was a rather slender argument, but the farmers did not seem to detect it.
It looked reasonable to them that to add five cents freight on a bushel
of corn was justifiable under the circumstances, overlooking the fact
that this advance on a cargo of forty thousand sacks was a good deal
more than necessary to cover the new wages.
So, straightway the captains and owners got up an association
of their own, and proposed to put captains’ wages up to five
hundred dollars, too, and move for another advance in freights.
It was a novel idea, but of course an effect which had been
produced once could be produced again. The new association decreed
(for this was before all the outsiders had been taken
into the pilots’ association) that if any captain employed
a non-association pilot, he should be forced to discharge him,
and also pay a fine of five hundred dollars. Several of these
heavy fines were paid before the captains’ organization grew
strong enough to exercise full authority over its membership;
but that all ceased, presently. The captains tried to get the pilots
to decree that no member of their corporation should serve under
a non-association captain; but this proposition was declined.
The pilots saw that they would be backed up by the captains and
the underwriters anyhow, and so they wisely refrained from entering
into entangling alliances.
As I have remarked, the pilots’ association was now the compactest
monopoly in the world, perhaps, and seemed simply indestructible.
And yet the days of its glory were numbered. First, the new
railroad stretching up through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky,
to Northern railway centers, began to divert the passenger travel
from the steamers; next the war came and almost entirely annihilated
the steamboating industry during several years, leaving most of
the pilots idle, and the cost of living advancing all the time;
then the treasurer of the St. Louis association put his hand
into the till and walked off with every dollar of the ample fund;
and finally, the railroads intruding everywhere, there was little
for steamers to do, when the war was over, but carry freights;
so straightway some genius from the Atlantic coast introduced the plan
of towing a dozen steamer cargoes down to New Orleans at the tail
of a vulgar little tug-boat; and behold, in the twinkling of an eye,
as it were, the association and the noble science of piloting were
things of the dead and pathetic past!
Chapter 16
Racing Days
IT was always the custom for the boats to leave New
Orleans between four and five o’clock in the afternoon.
From three o’clock onward they would be burning rosin and pitch pine
(the sign of preparation), and so one had the picturesque spectacle
of a rank, some two or three miles long, of tall, ascending columns
of coal-black smoke; a colonnade which supported a sable roof of
the same smoke blended together and spreading abroad over the city.
Every outward-bound boat had its flag flying at the jack-staff,
and sometimes a duplicate on the verge staff astern.
Two or three miles of mates were commanding and swearing with more
than usual emphasis; countless processions of freight barrels
and boxes were spinning athwart the levee and flying aboard
the stage-planks, belated passengers were dodging and skipping
among these frantic things, hoping to reach the forecastle
companion way alive, but having their doubts about it;
women with reticules and bandboxes were trying to keep up
with husbands freighted with carpet-sacks and crying babies,
and making a failure of it by losing their heads in the whirl