There Is Something Fascinating About Science.
One Gets Such Wholesale Returns Of Conjecture Out Of Such A Trifling
Investment Of Fact.
When the water begins to flow through one of those ditches I have been
speaking of, it is time for the people thereabouts to move.
The water
cleaves the banks away like a knife. By the time the ditch has become
twelve or fifteen feet wide, the calamity is as good as accomplished,
for no power on earth can stop it now. When the width has reached a
hundred yards, the banks begin to peel off in slices half an acre wide.
The current flowing around the bend traveled formerly only five miles an
hour; now it is tremendously increased by the shortening of the
distance. I was on board the first boat that tried to go through the
cut-off at American Bend, but we did not get through. It was toward
midnight, and a wild night it was - thunder, lightning, and torrents of
rain. It was estimated that the current in the cut-off was making about
fifteen or twenty miles an hour; twelve or thirteen was the best our
boat could do, even in tolerably slack water, therefore perhaps we were
foolish to try the cut-off. However, Mr. Brown was ambitious, and he
kept on trying. The eddy running up the bank, under the 'point,' was
about as swift as the current out in the middle; so we would go flying
up the shore like a lightning express train, get on a big head of steam,
and 'stand by for a surge' when we struck the current that was whirling
by the point. But all our preparations were useless. The instant the
current hit us it spun us around like a top, the water deluged the
forecastle, and the boat careened so far over that one could hardly keep
his feet. The next instant we were away down the river, clawing with
might and main to keep out of the woods. We tried the experiment four
times. I stood on the forecastle companion way to see. It was
astonishing to observe how suddenly the boat would spin around and turn
tail the moment she emerged from the eddy and the current struck her
nose. The sounding concussion and the quivering would have been about
the same if she had come full speed against a sand-bank. Under the
lightning flashes one could see the plantation cabins and the goodly
acres tumble into the river; and the crash they made was not a bad
effort at thunder. Once, when we spun around, we only missed a house
about twenty feet, that had a light burning in the window; and in the
same instant that house went overboard. Nobody could stay on our
forecastle; the water swept across it in a torrent every time we plunged
athwart the current. At the end of our fourth effort we brought up in
the woods two miles below the cut-off; all the country there was
overflowed, of course.
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