We were DRAWING nine! My hands were in a nerveless flutter. I could not
ring a bell intelligibly with them. I flew to the speaking-tube and
shouted to the engineer -
'Oh, Ben, if you love me, BACK her! Quick, Ben! Oh, back the immortal
SOUL out of her!'
I heard the door close gently. I looked around, and there stood Mr.
Bixby, smiling a bland, sweet smile. Then the audience on the hurricane
deck sent up a thundergust of humiliating laughter. I saw it all, now,
and I felt meaner than the meanest man in human history. I laid in the
lead, set the boat in her marks, came ahead on the engines, and said -
'It was a fine trick to play on an orphan, WASN'T it? I suppose I'll
never hear the last of how I was ass enough to heave the lead at the
head of 66.'
'Well, no, you won't, maybe. In fact I hope you won't; for I want you
to learn something by that experience. Didn't you KNOW there was no
bottom in that crossing?'
'Yes, sir, I did.'
'Very well, then. You shouldn't have allowed me or anybody else to
shake your confidence in that knowledge. Try to remember that. And
another thing: when you get into a dangerous place, don't turn coward.
That isn't going to help matters any.'
It was a good enough lesson, but pretty hardly learned. Yet about the
hardest part of it was that for months I so often had to hear a phrase
which I had conceived a particular distaste for. It was, 'Oh, Ben, if
you love me, back her!'
Chapter 14 Rank and Dignity of Piloting
IN my preceding chapters I have tried, by going into the minutiae of the
science of piloting, to carry the reader step by step to a comprehension
of what the science consists of; and at the same time I have tried to
show him that it is a very curious and wonderful science, too, and very
worthy of his attention. If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no
surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have
followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it. The reason is
plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely
independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the
hampered servants of parliament and people; parliaments sit in chains
forged by their constituency; the editor of a newspaper cannot be
independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and
patrons, and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind; no
clergyman is a free man and may speak the whole truth, regardless of his
parish's opinions; writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the
public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we
print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and
worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the
Mississippi pilot had none. The captain could stand upon the hurricane
deck, in the pomp of a very brief authority, and give him five or six
orders while the vessel backed into the stream, and then that skipper's
reign was over. The moment that the boat was under way in the river,
she was under the sole and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could
do with her exactly as he pleased, run her when and whither he chose,
and tie her up to the bank whenever his judgment said that that course
was best. 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. Seven or eight of these days the boat spent at the
wharves of St. Louis and New Orleans, and every soul on board was hard
at work, except the two pilots; they did nothing but play gentleman up
town, and receive the same wages for it as if they had been on duty. The
moment the boat touched the wharf at either city, they were ashore; and
they were not likely to be seen again till the last bell was ringing and
everything in readiness for another voyage.
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