First of all, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantlycultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection.
Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory.
He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so;he must know it; for this is eminently one of the 'exact' sciences.
With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times,if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase 'I think,'
instead of the vigorous one 'I know!' One cannot easily realizewhat a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelvehundred miles of river and know it with absolute exactness.
If you will take the longest street in New York, and travel upand down it, conning its features patiently until you know everyhouse and window and door and lamp-post and big and little signby heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantlyname the one you are abreast of when you are set down at randomin that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will thenhave a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of apilot's knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head.
And then if you will go on until you know every street crossing,the character, size, and position of the crossing-stones,and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places,you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in orderto keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if youwill take half of the signs in that long street, and CHANGE THEIRPLACES once a month, and still manage to know their new positionsaccurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changeswithout making any mistakes, you will understand what is requiredof a pilot's peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi.
I think a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thingin the world. To know the Old and New Testaments by heart,and be able to recite them glibly, forward or backward,or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite both waysand never trip or make a mistake, is no extravagant massof knowledge, and no marvelous facility, compared to a pilot'smassed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvelous facilityin the handling of it. I make this comparison deliberately,and believe I am not expanding the truth when I do it.
Many will think my figure too strong, but pilots will not.
And how easily and comfortably the pilot's memory does its work;how placidly effortless is its way; how UNCONSCIOUSLY it lays upits vast stores, hour by hour, day by day, and never loses ormislays a single valuable package of them all! Take an instance.
Let a leadsman cry, 'Half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain!
half twain!' until it become as monotonous as the ticking of a clock;let conversation be going on all the time, and the pilot be doinghis share of the talking, and no longer consciously listeningto the leadsman; and in the midst of this endless string of halftwains let a single 'quarter twain!' be interjected, without emphasis,and then the half twain cry go on again, just as before:
two or three weeks later that pilot can describe with precisionthe boat's position in the river when that quarter twainwas uttered, and give you such a lot of head-marks, stern-marks,and side-marks to guide you, that you ought to be able to takethe boat there and put her in that same spot again yourself!
The cry of 'quarter twain' did not really take his mind from his talk,but his trained faculties instantly photographed the bearings,noted the change of depth, and laid up the important details for futurereference without requiring any assistance from him in the matter.
If you were walking and talking with a friend, and another friendat your side kept up a monotonous repetition of the vowel sound A,for a couple of blocks, and then in the midst interjected an R,thus, A, A, A, A, A, R, A, A, A, etc., and gave the R no emphasis,you would not be able to state, two or three weeks afterward,that the R had been put in, nor be able to tell what objects youwere passing at the moment it was done. But you could if yourmemory had been patiently and laboriously trained to do that sortof thing mechanically.
Give a man a tolerably fair memory to start with, and pilotingwill develop it into a very colossus of capability.
But ONLY IN THE MATTERS IT IS DAILY DRILLED IN.
A time would come when the man's faculties could not helpnoticing landmarks and soundings, and his memory could nothelp holding on to them with the grip of a vise; but if youasked that same man at noon what he had had for breakfast,it would be ten chances to one that he could not tell you.
Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you willdevote it faithfully to one particular line of business.
At the time that wages soared so high on the Missouri River, my chief,Mr. Bixby, went up there and learned more than a thousand milesof that stream with an ease and rapidity that were astonishing.
When he had seen each division once in the daytime and once at night,his education was so nearly complete that he took out a 'daylight' license;a few trips later he took out a full license, and went to piloting dayand night--and he ranked A 1, too.
Mr. Bixby placed me as steersman for a while under a pilot whose featsof memory were a constant marvel to me. However, his memory was bornin him, I think, not built. For instance, somebody would mention a name.
Instantly Mr. Brown would break in--'Oh, I knew HIM. Sallow-faced, red-headed fellow, with alittle scar on the side of his throat, like a splinter underthe flesh. He was only in the Southern trade six months.
That was thirteen years ago. I made a trip with him.
There was five feet in the upper river then; the "Henry Blake"grounded at the foot of Tower Island drawing four and a half;the "George Elliott" unshipped her rudder on the wreckof the "Sunflower"----'
'Why, the "Sunflower" didn't sink until----'
'I know when she sunk; it was three years before that, on the 2nd of December;Asa Hardy was captain of her, and his brother John was first clerk;and it was his first trip in her, too; Tom Jones told me these thingsa week afterward in New Orleans; he was first mate of the "Sunflower."Captain Hardy stuck a nail in his foot the 6th of July of the next year,and died of the lockjaw on the 15th. His brother died two years after3rd of March,--erysipelas. I never saw either of the Hardys,--they wereAlleghany River men,--but people who knew them told me all these things.
And they said Captain Hardy wore yarn socks winter and summer just the same,and his first wife's name was Jane Shook--she was from New England--and his second one died in a lunatic asylum. It was in the blood.
She was from Lexington, Kentucky. Name was Horton before she was married.'
And so on, by the hour, the man's tongue would go.
He could NOT forget any thing. It was simply impossible.
The most trivial details remained as distinct and luminous in his head,after they had lain there for years, as the most memorable events.
His was not simply a pilot's memory; its grasp was universal.
If he were talking about a trifling letter he had received sevenyears before, he was pretty sure to deliver you the entire screedfrom memory. And then without observing that he was departingfrom the true line of his talk, he was more than likely to hurlin a long-drawn parenthetical biography of the writer of that letter;and you were lucky indeed if he did not take up that writer's relatives,one by one, and give you their biographies, too.
Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occurrencesare of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interestingcircumstance from an uninteresting one. As a talker, he is boundto clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himselfan insufferable bore. Moreover, he cannot stick to his subject.
He picks up every little grain of memory he discerns in his way,and so is led aside. Mr. Brown would start out with the honestintention of telling you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog.
He would be 'so full of laugh' that he could hardly begin; then hismemory would start with the dog's breed and personal appearance;drift into a history of his owner; of his owner's family,with descriptions of weddings and burials that had occurred in it,together with recitals of congratulatory verses and obituary poetryprovoked by the same: then this memory would recollect that oneof these events occurred during the celebrated 'hard winter'
of such and such a year, and a minute description of that winterwould follow, along with the names of people who were frozen to death,and statistics showing the high figures which pork and hay went up to.
Pork and hay would suggest corn and fodder; corn and fodder wouldsuggest cows and horses; cows and horses would suggest the circusand certain celebrated bare-back riders; the transition fromthe circus to the menagerie was easy and natural; from the elephantto equatorial Africa was but a step; then of course the heathensavages would suggest religion; and at the end of three or four hours'
tedious jaw, the watch would change, and Brown would go outof the pilot-house muttering extracts from sermons he had heardyears before about the efficacy of prayer as a means of grace.
And the original first mention would be all you had learned about that dog,after all this waiting and hungering.
A pilot must have a memory; but there are two higher qualitieswhich he must also have. He must have good and quick judgmentand decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake.
Give a man the merest trifle of pluck to start with, and by the timehe has become a pilot he cannot be unmanned by any danger a steamboatcan get into; but one cannot quite say the same for judgment.
Judgment is a matter of brains, and a man must START with a goodstock of that article or he will never succeed as a pilot.
The growth of courage in the pilot-house is steady all the time,but it does not reach a high and satisfactory condition untilsome time after the young pilot has been 'standing his own watch,'
alone and under the staggering weight of all the responsibilitiesconnected with the position. When an apprentice has become prettythoroughly acquainted with the river, he goes clattering alongso fearlessly with his steamboat, night or day, that he presentlybegins to imagine that it is HIS courage that animates him;but the first time the pilot steps out and leaves him to hisown devices he finds out it was the other man's. He discoversthat the article has been left out of his own cargo altogether.
The whole river is bristling with exigencies in a moment;he is not prepared for them; he does not know how to meet them;all his knowledge forsakes him; and within fifteen minuteshe is as white as a sheet and scared almost to death.
Therefore pilots wisely train these cubs by various strategictricks to look danger in the face a little more calmly.
A favorite way of theirs is to play a friendly swindle uponthe candidate.
Mr. Bixby served me in this fashion once, and for years afterwardI used to blush even in my sleep when I thought of it.
I had become a good steersman; so good, indeed, that I had allthe work to do on our watch, night and day; Mr. Bixby seldommade a suggestion to me; all he ever did was to take the wheelon particularly bad nights or in particularly bad crossings,land the boat when she needed to be landed, play gentlemanof leisure nine-tenths of the watch, and collect the wages.
The lower river was about bank-full, and if anybody had questionedmy ability to run any crossing between Cairo and New Orleanswithout help or instruction, I should have felt irreparably hurt.
The idea of being afraid of any crossing in the lot,in the DAY-TIME, was a thing too preposterous for contemplation.
Well, one matchless summer's day I was bowling down the bendabove island 66, brimful of self-conceit and carrying my noseas high as a giraffe's, when Mr. Bixby said--'I am going below a while. I suppose you know the next crossing?'
This was almost an affront. It was about the plainest and simplest crossingin the whole river. One couldn't come to any harm, whether he ran itright or not; and as for depth, there never had been any bottom there.
I knew all this, perfectly well.
'Know how to RUN it? Why, I can run it with my eyes shut.'
'How much water is there in it?'
'Well, that is an odd question. I couldn't get bottom therewith a church steeple.'
'You think so, do you?'
The very tone of the question shook my confidence.
That was what Mr. Bixby was expecting. He left, without sayinganything more. I began to imagine all sorts of things.
Mr. Bixby, unknown to me, of course, sent somebody down tothe forecastle with some mysterious instructions to the leadsmen,another messenger was sent to whisper among the officers,and then Mr. Bixby went into hiding behind a smoke-stack wherehe could observe results. Presently the captain stepped out onthe hurricane deck; next the chief mate appeared; then a clerk.
Every moment or two a straggler was added to my audience;and before I got to the head of the island I had fifteenor twenty people assembled down there under my nose.
I began to wonder what the trouble was. As I started across,the captain glanced aloft at me and said, with a sham uneasinessin his voice--'Where is Mr. Bixby?'
'Gone below, sir.'
But that did the business for me. My imagination began to constructdangers out of nothing, and they multiplied faster than I could keepthe run of them. All at once I imagined I saw shoal water ahead!
The wave of coward agony that surged through me then came near dislocatingevery joint in me. All my confidence in that crossing vanished.
I seized the bell-rope; dropped it, ashamed; seized it again;dropped it once more; clutched it tremblingly one again,and pulled it so feebly that I could hardly hear the stroke myself.
Captain and mate sang out instantly, and both together--'Starboard lead there! and quick about it!'
This was another shock. I began to climb the wheel like a squirrel;but I would hardly get the boat started to port before I would see newdangers on that side, and away I would spin to the other; only to findperils accumulating to starboard, and be crazy to get to port again.
Then came the leadsman's sepulchral cry--'D-e-e-p four!'
Deep four in a bottomless crossing! The terror of it took my breath away.
'M-a-r-k three!... M-a-r-k three... Quarter less three!...
Half twain!'
This was frightful! I seized the bell-ropes and stopped the engines.
'Quarter twain! Quarter twain! MARK twain!'
I was helpless. I did not know what in the world to do.
I was quaking from head to foot, and I could have hung my hat onmy eyes, they stuck out so far.
'Quarter LESS twain! Nine and a HALF!'
We were DRAWING nine! My hands were in a nerveless flutter.
I could not ring a bell intelligibly with them. I flew to thespeaking-tube and shouted to the engineer--'Oh, Ben, if you love me, BACK her! Quick, Ben! Oh, back the immortalSOUL out of her! '
I heard the door close gently. I looked around, and there stoodMr. Bixby, smiling a bland, sweet smile. Then the audience onthe hurricane deck sent up a thundergust of humiliating laughter.
I saw it all, now, and I felt meaner than the meanest man inhuman 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 heavethe 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 elseto 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 hadto hear a phrase which I had conceived a particular distaste for.
It was, 'Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her!'
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