Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0141/01410.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 10KB | 195 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01410}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life On The Mississippi
Chapter L}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{new
orleans
captain
river
time
first
how
pilots
sellers
always}
$Date{1917}
$Log{}
Title:       Life On The Mississippi
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1917

Chapter L

The "Original Jacobs"

     We had some talk about Captain Isaiah Sellers, now many years dead. He
was a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and on
the river.  He was very tall, well built, and handsome; and in his old age -
as I remember him - his hair was as black as an Indian's, and his eye and hand
were as strong and steady and his nerve and judgment as firm and clear as
anybody's, young or old, among the fraternity of pilots.  He was the patriarch
of the craft; he had been a keelboat pilot before the day of steamboats; and a
steamboat pilot before any other steamboat pilot, still surviving at the time
I speak of, had ever turned a wheel.  Consequently, his brethren held him in
the sort of awe in which illustrious survivors of a bygone age are always held
by their associates.  He knew how he was regarded, and perhaps this fact added
some trifle of stiffening to his natural dignity, which had been sufficiently
stiff in its original state.

     He left a diary behind him; but apparently it did not date back to his
first steamboat trip, which was said to be 1811, the year the first steamboat
disturbed the waters of the Mississippi.  At the time of his death a
correspondent of the St. Louis Republican culled the following items from the
diary:

     In February, 1825, he shipped on board the steamer Rambler, at Florence,
Ala., and made during that year three trips to New Orleans and back - this on
the General Carrol, between Nashville and New Orleans.  It was during his stay
on this boat that Captain Sellers introduced the tap of the bell as a signal
to heave the lead; previous to which time it was the custom for the pilot to
speak to the men below when soundings were wanted.  The proximity of the
forecastle to the pilot-house, no doubt, rendered this an easy matter; but how
different on one of our palaces of the present day!

     In 1827 we find him on board the President, a boat of two hundred and
eighty-five tons burden, and plying between Smithland and New Orleans.  Thence
he joined the Jubilee in 1828, and on this boat he did his first piloting in
the St. Louis trade; his first watch extending from Herculaneum to St.
Genevieve.  On May 26, 1836, he completed and left Pittsburg in charge of the
steamer Prairie, a boat of four hundred tons, and the first steamer with a
stateroom cabin ever seen at St. Louis.  In 1857 he introduced the signal for
meeting boats, and which has, with some slight change, been the universal
custom of this day; in fact, is rendered obligatory by act of Congress.

     As general items of river history, we quote the following marginal notes
from his general log:

     In March, 1825, General Lafayette left New Orleans for St. Louis on the
low-pressure steamer Natchez.

     In January, 1828, twenty-one steamers left the New Orleans wharf to
celebrate the occasion of General Jackson's visit to that city.

     In 1830 the North American made the run from New Orleans to Memphis in
six days - best time on record to that date.  It has since been made in two
days and ten hours.

     In 1831 the Red River cut-off formed.

     In 1832 steamer Hudson made the run from White River to Helena, a
distance of seventy-five miles, in twelve hours.  This was the source of much
talk and speculation among parties directly interested.

     In 1839 Great Horseshoe cut-off formed.

     Up to the present time, a term of thirty-five years, we ascertain, by
reference to the diary, he has made four hundred and sixty round trips to New
Orleans, which gives a distance of one million one hundred and four thousand
miles, or an average of eighty-six miles a day.

     Whenever Captain Sellers approached a body of gossiping pilots, a chill
fell there, and talking ceased.  For this reason: whenever six pilots were
gathered together, there would always be one or two newly fledged ones in the
lot, and the elder ones would be always "showing off" before these poor
fellows; making them sorrowfully feel how callow they were, how recent their
nobility, and how humble their degree, by talking largely and vaporously of
old-time experiences on the river; always making it a point to date everything
back as far as they could, so as to make the new men feel their newness to the
sharpest degree possible, and envy the old stagers in the like degree.  And
how these complacent bald- heads would swell, and brag, and lie, and date back
- ten, fifteen, twenty years, and how they did enjoy the effect produced upon
the marveling and envying youngsters!

     And perhaps just at this happy stage of the proceedings, the stately
figure of Captain Isaiah Sellers, that real and only genuine Son of Antiquity,
would drift solemnly into the midst.  Imagine the size of the silence that
would result on the instant!  And imagine the feelings of those baldheads, and
the exultation of their recent audience, when the ancient captain would begin
to drop casual and indifferent remarks of a reminiscent nature - about islands
that had disappeared, and cut-offs that had been made, a generation before the
oldest baldhead in the company had ever set his foot in a pilot-house!

     Many and many a time did this ancient mariner appear on the scene in the
above fashion, and spread disaster and humiliation around him.  If one might
believe the pilots, he always dated his islands back to the misty dawn of
river history; and he never used the same island twice; and never did he
employ an island that still existed, or give one a name which anybody present
was old enough to have heard of before.  If you might believe the pilots, he
was always conscientiously particular about little details; never spoke of
"the state of Mississippi," for instance - no, he would say, "When the state
of Mississippi was where Arkansas now is"; and would never speak of Louisiana
or Missouri in a general way, and leave an incorrect impression on your mind -
no, he would say, "When Louisiana was up the river farther," or "When Missouri
was on the Illinois side."

     The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to
jot down brief paragraphs of plain, practical information about the river, and
sign them "Mark Twain," and give them to the New Orleans Picayune.  They
related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and
valuable; and thus far they contained no poison.  But in speaking of the stage
of the river to-day at a given point, the captain was pretty apt to drop in a
little remark about this being the first time he had seen the water so high or
so low at that particular point in forty-nine years; and now and then he would
mention Island so-and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some such
observation as "disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly." In these antique
interjections lay poison and bitterness for the other old pilots, and they
used to chaff the "Mark Twain" paragraphs with unsparing mockery.

     It so chanced that one of these paragraphs ^1 became the text for my
first newspaper article.  I burlesqued it broadly, very broadly, stringing my
fantastics out to the extent of eight hundred or a thousand words.  I was a
"cub" at the time.  I showed my performance to some pilots, and they eagerly
rushed it into print in the New Orleans True Delta.  It was a great pity; for
it did nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man's
heart.  There was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain.  It
laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful.  I did
not know then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable with
that which a private person feels when he is for the first time pilloried in
print.

[Footnote 1: The original Ms. of it, in the captain's own hand, has been sent
to me from New Orleans.  It reads as follows:

     "Vicksburg, May 4, 1859.

     "My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans: The water is
higher this far up than it has been since 1815.  My opinion is that the water
will be 4 feet deep in Canal Street before the first of next June.  Mrs.
Turner's plantation at the head of Big Black Island is all under water, and it
has not been since 1815."

     "I.  Sellers."]

     Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day
forth.  When I say he did me the honor, I am not using empty words. It was a
very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as Captain Sellers,
and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of it.  It was distinction
to be loved by such a man; but it was a much greater distinction to be hated
by him, because he loved scores of people; but he didn't sit up nights to hate
anybody but me.

     He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again
signed "Mark Twain" to anything.  At the time that the telegraph brought the
news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast.  I was a fresh, new journalist,
and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded
one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands - a sign
and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on
as being the petrified truth.  How I've succeeded, it would not be modest in
me to say.

     The captain had an honorable pride in his profession and an abiding love
for it.  He ordered his monument before he died, and kept it near him until he
did die.  It stands over his grave now, in Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis.
It is his image, in marble, standing on duty at the pilot-wheel; and worthy to
stand and confront criticism, for it represents a man who in life would have
stayed there till he burned to a cinder, if duty required it.

     The finest thing we saw on our whole Mississippi trip, we saw as we
approached New Orleans in the steam-tug.  This was the curving frontage of the
Crescent City lit up with the white glare of five miles of electric lights.
It was a wonderful sight, and very beautiful.