 | CHAPTER I. Peter Pilgrim, or, A rambler's recollections |  |
1. CHAPTER I.
Every body remembers the complimentary
admission of the Englishman in relation to
the Mississippi—that it was a very fine river
for a new country; a declaration which is,
however, only remembered to be laughed at
as an excellent joke, illustrative of the illiberal,
all-decrying spirit of so many British
travellers in America. The jest would not
have been so obvious, had the traveller added
that “the Mississippi would have been a much
finer river if in an old country;” for he would
have then spoken a truth not to be denied by
any informed and reflecting mind. It is only
in a mountainous country—the only old portion
of a continent, as every one with the
least tincture of geological science knows—
that rivers appear in their true grandeur and
leagues of length, are as nothing, without the
accompaniments of noble scenery along the
banks. The Amazon and the Nile, ploughing
their way through flat deserts of mud and sand,
are but overgrown, unromantic ditches, from
which the traveller longs to escape, to exchange
their gigantic tameness for the smallest
brooks chattering among cliffs and foaming
over precipices. It is more to his magnificent
banks than to the historic associations
connected with them, that father Rhine
owes his supremacy over all the rivers of
Europe; and the same cause—the glorious
assemblage of hills that follow him almost to
the ocean—has elevated the Hudson into a
similar pre-eminence among the navigable
rivers of the United States, nearly all of
which flow, for two-thirds of their length,
through a level alluvion of their own forming.
Of such a character is the Mississippi, a dull
monster, winding his sluggish way through
a wilderness of bog and forest, and often
swelling above it. When Nature, in some
new act of creation, has heaved up the reeking
valley a few thousand feet higher, and
studded it with peaks and promontories, with
chains of Alps and Andes, the Father Water
claim only as being the finest canal for commercial
purposes in the whole world.
But, destitute of beauty, of every element
of the romantic and picturesque, as the Mississippi
really is, it must be confessed that it
possesses many remarkable features of interest,
and that the impression it leaves on
the traveller's mind is deep, strong, and abiding.
Its very deformity becomes, after a
time, impressive; and the imagination is stirred
by the desolation that haunts its borders
—those banks of mouldering clay, bristling
with dead trees, or tumbling under the weight
of the green forests they bear with them pell-mell
into the flood—those never-ending
groves of cottonwoods springing from the
flats—those walls of willows sagging to and
fro in the current, in imitation of the more
formidable snags and sawyers that vibrate in
deeper water, hard by—those verdant pillars,
the ruins of branchless trees matted over
with ivies and peavines, jutting from protruding
banks—those long festoons of Spanish
moss swinging from the boughs, like cobwebs
spun by Brodignagian spiders—those rafts of
drift-timber lodged upon the low islands; in
short, the thousand other features that mingle
river from the Ohio to the sea.
The first effect of the Mississippi on the
mind of the traveller ascending it—the Coast,
or region of plantations, once left behind—
is undoubtedly weariness, if not even disgust.
Its scenery, varied only by alternations of
river and chute—the one wide, proud, majestic,
the other narrow, with a fierce and turbulent
flood—by windings and contortions that
exclude all distant prospects, and make one
feel as if in a kind of moving prison—oppresses
and almost stupifies the spirit. A
feeling of exile, of exclusion from the world,
preys upon it; and melancholy creeps over
every thought. The solitudes become more
solitary; the cottonwoods rise in double
gloom; the boughs and the tree-tops, as you
brush by them round some projecting point,
rustle in sadness; and the gush of the river
has in it something sullen and sorrowful.
It is then, amid these solitudes, that the
voyager begins to feel an interest in the river.
A species of superstition steals into his mind,
and gradually endows the flood with vitality.
He is no longer floating along a mere watercourse;
he feels as if resting on the bosom
of some sublime monster, which heaves under
human yearnings. In all common rivers,
a little poetic feeling enables one to find something
like sentience and congeniality in their
waters. One can fancy that a bubbling brook
rejoices with him; that a river, dashing gaily
along over bright pebbles and sands, ripples
up to his feet as if with the sportful inclinations
of a living creature; or, if his mood be
darker, he can discover in the sounds the
echoes of his own plaintive murmurs. At
least, if we do not not think so, we act as if
we felt it, and rejoice or murmur with ordinary
waters as with a friend. But there is no
feeling of companionship in the Mississippi.
A few days upon his bosom, and we feel ourselves
unworthy his regards; we laugh or
mourn, and the monarch of rivers passes on
with majestic unconcern. He is too great
for friendship; he was made for reverence, for
fear, for awe; feelings which creep, one after
the other, into the mind, and subdue it.
And then comes the thought of his prodigious
length, of the vast volumes of element
collected from the four quarters of the wind,
and borne, with the wreck and ruins of
mountain, prairie, and forest, and of all living
things that peopled them, to the Mexican sea,
destined, sooner or later, to convert into dry
land. That withered branch floating by may
have been torn from a fir on the ridge of the
Chippewyan; that quivering log flourished
once, perhaps, a noble pine, on the top of the
Pennsylvania Alleghanies or the Unikas of
North Carolina; that bundle of grassy weeds
was a sheaf of wild rice from the neighbourhood
of the Lake of the Woods; and that
stalk of prickly pear has wounded the foot
of the hunter on the plains of Mexico.
One thinks of his boundless extent, and
looks upon his surface for the evidences of
his boundless power. There is a treacherous
calmness over it all; the noisy billows, the
merry ripples, that animate common rivers,
are here seldom seen. The Mississippi flows
along like a river of oil or lava, `still-vexed,'
not agitated, a succession of secret whirlpools,
of sucks and eddies that boil below,
with scarce a mark of their fury visible on the
surface. It is a flood that seems to be constantly
convulsed—but convulsed like a
strong-hearted sufferer, who conceals his
throes in his own bosom, bearing a placid
countenance even when the turmoil within is
greatest. One cannot look long at the Mississippi,
swimmers who have fallen into it, have sunk,
never again to rise.
In a word, the Mississippi is the most august
of rivers, and few men can ascend it
without paying, in some mode and at some
time or other, the homage of awe. I have
often, in the gloom of evening—for at that
hour a double solemnity rests upon the scene
—watched its effects on the minds of my fellow-voyagers—men
of all characters, grave
and gay, the boisterous and the thoughtful—
thronging the boiler-deck of our goodly
steamer, all engaged in their several amusements.
The cards (wo's the word!) rattle
on the table, (if a table be there,) the jest
goes round, prankish tricks are played, songs
sung, and merry stories told; all is jollity and
laughter. But by and by, as the evening
darkens on, some one more contemplative
than the rest casts his eyes upon the tide,
forgets the mirth around him, and is subdued
to reverential awe. He calls the attention
of those near him to some customary object
—a great tree gliding along, a sawyer rising
to the surface, a raft collected at the head of
an island, a bank falling in, a torrent whirling
from a chute, a distant steamboat flashing
below, or a whirlpool sucking down a floating
bough—all common-place and every-day
objects, but all equally significant of the
power of the great river: they look on, and
also forget the song and jolly story. Others
imitate them, one by one; and presently all
eyes are fixed upon the river, all lips are for
awhile silent, all breasts filled with vague
reverence. Such is the tribute that human
nature—often unconsciously—pays to the
Mississippi.
It is in those serious evening moments that
men, who have voyaged often and long on the
Mississippi, and stored their memories with
the thousand dismal legends of disaster with
which its history is fraught, feel most inclined
to unlock their stores for the benefit of their
neighbours. They are then sure of listeners,
and of listeners in the right frame of mind.
The solemn feeling awakened by the river itself,
is doubly increased when we listen to
the tales of tragedy, now associated with
almost every point of its navigation.
Of these stories I have heard, and could
record enough to fill a volume; and, indeed,
I once had some thoughts of venturing before
the world with such a publication, not doubting
name—“Steamboat Chronicle, or a History of
Disasters by Steam on the Mississippi,”—
would ensure great success to the undertaking;
but upon informing a bookseller of my
design, he assured me the work would not
do. “There is no occasion for it,” said he;
“men that are curious about steamboat accidents
on the Mississippi, have but to refer to
the daily papers, each of which is a history
—or each of which, at least, contains a history,
a never-ending history, of steamboat
disasters, published one chapter a-day!” My
bookseller was right, and I was convinced.
I leave the subject to be handled, as usual, by
its daily historians.
It was my fate, however, to hear, on one
of the occasions spoken of, a story of a remarkable
catastrophe, a tale of a Snag,
which, I believe, has never made its way into
any newspaper; for which reason, and because
it is in some respects very different
from the common run of “Deplorable Accidents,”
I think it worthy of being laid before
the reader.
| CHAPTER I. Peter Pilgrim, or, A rambler's recollections | |