This boyish pedestrian trip
occupied about twenty-one days, and covered some
three hundred miles of hard tramping. New
England gives honest measure on the
finger-posts along her highways. The traveller learns
by well-earned experience the length of her
miles; but in the wilderness of the south there
is no standard of five thousand two hundred and
eighty feet to a statute mile, and the watermen
along the sea-coast are ignorant of the fact that
one-sixtieth of a degree of latitude (about six
thousand and eighty feet) is the geographical
and nautical mile of the cartographer, as well
as the "knot" of the sailor.
At Piraway Ferry no two of the raftsmen and
lumbermen, ignorant or educated, would give the
same distance, either upon the lengths of surveyed
roads or unmeasured rivers. "It is one hundred
and sixty-five miles by river from Piraway Ferry
to Conwayborough," said one who had travelled
the route for years. The most moderate estimate
made was that of ninety miles by river. The
reader, therefore, must not accuse me of
overstating distances while absent from the seaboard,
as my friends of the Coast Survey Bureau have
not yet penetrated into these interior regions with
their theodolites, plane-tables, and
telametrerods. To the canoeist, who is ambitious to score
up miles instead of collecting geographical notes,
these wild rivers afford an excellent opportunity
to satisfy his aims.
From sixty to eighty miles can be rowed in
ten hours as easily as forty miles can be gone
over upon a river of slow current in the
northern states. There is, I am sorry to say,
a class of American travellers who "do" all the
capitals of Europe in the same business-like way,
and if they have anything to say in regard to
every-day life in the countries through which
they pass, they forget to thank the compiler of
the guide-book for the information they possess.
There was but one room in the cabin of my
new acquaintance, who represented that class of
piny-woods people called in the south - because
they subsist largely upon corn, - Corn Crackers,
or Crackers. These Crackers are the "poor white
folks" of the planter, and "de white trash" of
the old slave, who now as a freedman is
beginning to feel the responsibility of his position.
These Crackers are a very kind-hearted people,
but few of them can read or write. The children
of the negro, filled with curiosity and a
newborn pride, whenever opportunity permits,
attend the schools in large numbers; but the very
indolent white man seems to be destitute of all
ambition, and his children, in many places in the
south, following close in the father's footsteps,
grow up in an almost unimaginable ignorance.
