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.
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