The South-West Volume I Part 1

The South-West.

by Joseph Holt Ingraham.

Volume 1

INTRODUCTION.

The succeeding pages grew out of a private correspondence, which the author, at the solicitation of his friends, has been led to throw into the present form, modifying in a great measure the epistolary vein, and excluding, so far as possible, such portions of the original papers as were of too personal a nature to be intruded upon the majesty of the public;--while he has embodied, so far as was compatible with the new arrangement, every thing likely to interest the general reader.

The author has not written exclusively as a traveller or journalist. His aim has been to present the result of his experience and observations during a residence of several years in the South-West. This extensive and important section of the United States is but little known. Perhaps there is no region between the Mississippi river and the Atlantic sh.o.r.es, of which so little accurate information is before the public; a flying tourist only, having occasionally added a note to his diary, as he skirted its forest-lined borders.

New-York, Sept. 1835.

I.

A state of bliss--Cabin pa.s.senger--Honey-hunting--Sea-life --Its effects--Green horns--Reading--Tempicide--Monotony-- Wish for excitement--Superlative misery--Log--Combustible materials--Cook and bucket--Contrary winds--All ready, good Sirs--Impatient pa.s.sengers--Signal for sailing--Under weigh.

To be a "Cabin pa.s.senger" fifteen or twenty days _out_, in a Yankee merchantman, is to be in a state as nearly resembling that of a half-a.s.soilzied soul in purgatory, as flesh and blood can well be placed in. A meridian sun--a cloudless sky--a sea of gla.s.s, like a vast burning reflector, giving back a twin-heaven inverted--a dry, hot air, as though exhaled from a Babylonian furnace, and a deck, with each plank heated to the foot like a plate of hot steel--with the "Horse lat.i.tudes," for the scene, might, perhaps, heighten the resemblance.

Zimmerman, in his excellent essay upon Solitude, has described man, in a "state of solitary indolence and inactivity, as sinking by degrees, like stagnant water, into impurity and corruption." Had he intended to describe from experience, the state of man as "Cabin pa.s.senger" after the novelty of his new situation upon the heaving bosom of the "dark blue sea," had given place to the tiresome monotony of never-varying, daily repeated scenes, he could not have ill.u.s.trated it by a more striking figure. This is a state of which you are happily ignorant.

Herein, ignorance is the height of bliss, although, should a Yankee propensity for peregrinating stimulate you to become wiser by experience, I will not say that your folly will be more apparent than your wisdom. But if you continue to vegetate in the lovely valley of your nativity, one of "New-England's yeomanry," as you are wont, not a little proudly, to term yourself--burying for that distinctive honour your collegiate laurels beneath the broad-brim of the farmer--exchanging your "gown" for his frock--"Esq." for plain "squire," and the Mantuan's Georgics for those of the Maine Farmer's Almanac--I will cheerfully travel for you; though, as I shall have the benefit of the wear and tear, rubs and bruises--it will be like honey-hunting in our school-boy days, when one fought the bees while the other secured the sweet plunder.

This sea life, to one who is not a sailor, is a sad enough existence--if it may be termed such. The tomb-stone inscription "Hic jacet," becomes prematurely his own, with the consolatory adjunct _et non resurgam_. A condition intermediate between life and death, but more a.s.similated to the latter than the former, it is pa.s.sed, almost invariably, in that proverbial inactivity, mental and corporeal, which is the well-known and unavoidable consequence of a long pa.s.sage. It is a state in which existence is burthensome and almost insupportable, destroying that healthy tone of mind and body, so necessary to the preservation of the economy of the frame of man.--Nothing will so injure a good disposition, as a long voyage. Seeds of impatience and of indolence are there sown, which will be for a long period painfully manifest. The sweetest tempered woman I ever knew, after a pa.s.sage of sixty days, was converted into a querulous Xantippe; and a gentleman of the most active habits, after a voyage of much longer duration, acquired such indolent ones, that his usefulness as a man of business was for a long time destroyed; and it was only by the strongest application of high, moral energy, emanating from a mind of no common order, that he was at length enabled wholly to be himself again. There is but one antidote for this disease, which should be nosologically cla.s.sed as _Melancholia Oceana_, and that is employment. But on ship-board, this remedy, like many other good ones on sh.o.r.e, cannot always be found. A meddling, bustling pa.s.senger, whose sphere on land has been one of action, and who pants to move in his little circ.u.mscribed orbit at sea, is always a "lubberly green horn," or "clumsy marine," in every tar's way--in whose eye the "pa.s.senger" is only fit to thin hen-coops, bask in the sun, talk to the helmsman, or, now and then, desperately venture up through the "lubber's hole" to look for _land_ a hundred leagues in mid ocean, or, cry "sail ho!" as the snowy mane of a distant wave, or the silvery crest of a miniature cloud upon the horizon, flashes for an instant upon his unpractised vision.

A well-selected library, which is a great luxury at sea, and like most luxuries very rare, does wonders toward lessening this evil; but it is still far from const.i.tuting a _panacea_. I know not how it is, unless the patient begins in reality to suspect that he is taking _reading_ as a prescription against the foe, and converting his volumes into pill boxes--which by and by gets to be too painfully the truth--but the appet.i.te soon becomes sated, the mind wearied, and the most fascinating and favourite authors "pall upon the sense" with a tiresome familiarity.

Reading becomes hateful, for the very reason that it has become necessary. Amus.e.m.e.nts are exhausted, invented, changed, varied, and again exhausted. Every thing upon which the attention fixes itself, vainly wooing something novel, soon becomes insipid. Chess, back-gammon, letter-writing, journalizing, smoking, eating, drinking, and sleeping, may at first contribute not a little to the discomfiture of old Time, who walks the _sea_ shod with leaden sandals. The last three enumerated items, however, generally hold out to the last undisabled. But three Wellingtons could not have won Waterloo unsupported; nor, able and doughty as are these bold three--much as they prolong the combat--manfully as they fight, can they hold good their ground for ever; the obstinate, scythe-armed warrior, with his twenty-four body guards following him like his shadow, will still maintain the broadest portion of his diurnal territory, over which, manoeuvre as they may, these discomfited worthies cannot extend their front.

Few situations are less enviable, than that of the worn voyager, as day after day "drags its slow length along," presenting to his restless, listless eyes, as he stretches them wearily over the leaden waste around him--the same unbroken horizon, forming the periphery of a circle, of which his vessel seems to be the immovable and everlasting centre--the same blue, unmeaning skies above--the same blue sea beneath and around--the same gigantic tracery of ropes and spars, whose fortuitous combinations of strange geometrical figures he has demonstrated, till they are as familiar as the diagrams on a turtle's back to an alderman; and the same dull white sails, with whose patches he has become as familiar as with the excrescences and other innocent defects upon the visages of his fellow-sufferers.

On leaving port, I commenced a journal, or rather, as I am in a nautical atmosphere, a "log," the choicest chips of which shall be hewn off, basketed in fools-cap, and duly transmitted to you. Like other chips they may be useful to kindle the fire withal. "What may not warm the feelings may--the toes," is a truism of which you need not be reminded: and if you test it practically, it will not be the first time good has been elicited from evil. But the sameness of a sea-life will by no means afford me many combustible incidents. Somebody has said "the will is equal to the deed, if the deed cannot be." Now I have the will to pile a hecatomb, but if I can pile only a couple of straws, it will be, of course, the same thing in the abstract. Mine, perchance, may be the fate of that poor journalist who, in a voyage across the Atlantic, could obtain but one wretched item wherewith to fill his journal--which he should have published, by the way. What a rare sort of a book it would have been! So soon read too! In this age when type-blotted books are generative, it would immortalize the author. Tenderly handed down from one generation to another, it would survive the "fall of empires, and the crash of worlds." "At three and a quarter P. M., ship going two and a half knots per hour, the cook lost his bucket over-board--jolly boat lowered, and Jack and Peter rowed after it."

"Half-past three, P. M.--Cook has got his bucket again--and a broken head into the bargain."

To one who has never "played with Ocean's mane," nor, borne by his white-winged coursers, scoured his pathless fields, there may be, even in the common-place descriptions of sea-scenes, something, which wears the charm of novelty. If my hasty sketches can contribute to your entertainment "o' winter nights," or, to the gratification of your curiosity, they will possess an influence which I do not promise or predict for them.

Unfavourable winds had detained our ship several days, and all who had taken pa.s.sage were on the "tiptoe of expectation" for the signal for sailing. Trunks, boxes, chests, cases, carpet-bags, and all the paraphernalia of travelling equipage, had long been packed, locked, and shipped--and our eyes had hourly watched the fickle gyrations of a horizontal gilt figure, which surmounted the spire of a neighbouring church, till they ached again. Had the image been Eolus himself, it could not have commanded more devoted worshippers.

A week elapsed--and patience, which hitherto had been admirably sustained, began to flag; murmurings proceeded from the lips of more than one of the impatient pa.s.sengers, as by twos and threes, they would meet by a kind of sympathetic affinity at the corners of the streets, where an un.o.bstructed view could be obtained of some church-vane, all of which, throughout our city of churches, had taken a most unaccommodating fancy to kick their golden-shod heels at the Northern Bear.

At precisely twenty minutes before three of the clock, on the afternoon of the first of November instant, the phlegmatic personage in the gilt robe, very obligingly, after he had worn our patience to shreds by his obstinacy, let his head and heels exchange places. At the same moment, ere he had ceased vibrating and settled himself steadily in his new position, the welcome signal was made, and in less than half an hour afterward, we were all, with bag and baggage, on board the ship, which rode at her anchor two hundred fathoms from the sh.o.r.e.

The top-sails, already loosed, were bellying and wildly collapsing with a loud noise, in the wind; but bounding to their posts at the command of their superior officer, the active seamen soon extended them upon the spars--immense fields of swelling canva.s.s; and our vessel gracefully moved from her moorings, and glided through the water with the lightness of a swan.

As we moved rapidly down the n.o.ble harbour, which, half a century since, bore upon its bosom the hostile fleet of the proud island of the north, the swelling ocean was sending in its evening tribute to the continent, in vast scrolls, which rolled silently, but irresistibly onward, and majestically unfolded upon the beach--or, with a hoa.r.s.e roar, resounded along the cliffs, and surged among the rocky throats of the promontory, impressing the mind with emotions of sublimity and awe.

II.

A tar's headway on land--A gentleman's at sea--An agreeable trio--Musical sounds--Helmsman--Supper--Steward--A truism-- Helmsman's cry--Effect--Cases for bipeds--Lullaby--Sleep.

The motion was just sufficiently lively to inspirit one--making the blood frolic through the veins, and the heart beat more proudly. The old tars, as they cruised about the decks, walked as steadily as on land.

This proves nothing, you may say, if you have witnessed Jack's pendulating, uncertain--"right and left oblique" advance on a sh.o.r.e cruise.

Our tyros of the sea, in their venturesome projections of their persons from one given point in their eye to another, in the hope of accomplishing a straight line, after vacillating most appallingly, would finally succeed "haud pa.s.sibus aequis" in reaching the position aimed for, fortunate if a lee-lurch did not accommodate them with a dry bed in the "lee scuppers."

Of all laughter-exciting locomotives which most create sensations of the ludicrously serious, commend me to an old land-crab teaching its young one to "go _ahead_"--a drunkard, reeling homeward through a broad street on a Sat.u.r.day night--and a "gentleman pa.s.senger" three days at sea in his strange evolutions over the deck.

Stretched before me upon the weather hen-coop, enveloped in his cloak, lay one of our "goodlie companie." If his sensations were such as I imagined them to be, he must have felt that the simplest chicken under him wore the stoutest heart.

On the lee hen-coop reposed another pa.s.senger in sympathy with his fellow, to whose feelings I felt a disposition to do equal justice.

Abaft the wheel, coiled up in the rigging, an agreeable subst.i.tute for a bed of down, lay half obscured within the shadow of the lofty stern, another overdone toper--a victim of Neptune, not of the "jolly G.o.d"--but whose sensations have been experienced by many of the latter's pupils, who have never tasted other salt water than their own tears.

It has been said or sung by some one, that the "ear is the road to the heart." That it was so to the stomach, I already began to feel, could not be disputed; and as certain "guttural sounds" began to multiply from various quarters, with startling emphasis, lest I should be induced to sympathize with the fallen novitiates around me, by some _overt_ act, I hastily glided by the helmsman, who stood alone like the sole survivor of a battle-field--his weather-beaten visage illuminated at the moment with a strange glare from the "binnacle-lamp" which, concealed within a case like a single-windowed pigeon house, and open in front of him, burned nightly at his feet. The next moment I was in the cabin, now lighted up by a single lamp suspended from the centre of the ceiling, casting rather shade than light upon a small table--studiously arranged for supper by the steward--that non-descript _loc.u.m tenens_ for valet--waiter--chambermaid--shoe-black--cook's-mate, and swearing-post for irascible captains to vent stray oaths upon, when the wind is ahead--with a flying commission for here, there, and nowhere! when most wanted.

But the supper! ay, the supper. Those for whom the inviting display was made, were, I am sorry to say it, most unhesitatingly "floored" and quite _hors du combat_. What a deal of melancholy truth there is in that aphorism, which teaches us that the "brave must yield to the braver!"

As I stood beside the helmsman, I could feel the gallant vessel springing away from under me, quivering through every oaken nerve, like a high-mettled racer with his goal but a bound before him. As she encountered some more formidable wave, there would be a tremendous outlay of animal-like energy, a momentary struggle, a half recoil, a plunging, trembling--_onward_ rush--then a triumphant riding over the conquered foe, scattering the gems from its shivered crest in glittering showers over her bows. Then gliding with velocity over the gla.s.sy concave beyond, swaying to its up-lifting impulse with a graceful inclination of her lofty masts, and almost sweeping the sea with her yards, she would majestically recover herself in time to gather power for a fresh victory.

Within an hour after clearing the last head-land, whose lights, level with the plain of the sea, gleamed afar off, twinkling and lessened like stars, with which they were almost undistinguishably mingled on the horizon--we had exchanged the abrupt, irregular "seas" of the bay, for the regular, majestically rolling billows of the ocean.

I had been for some time pacing the deck, with the "officer of the watch" to recover my sea-legs, when the helmsman suddenly shouted in a wild startling cry, heard, mingling with the wind high above the booming of the sea, the pa.s.sing hour of the night watch.--"Four bells."--"Four bells," repeated the only one awake on the forecastle, and the next moment the ship's bell rung out loud and clear--wildly swelling upon the gale, then mournfully dying away in the distance as the toll ceased, like the far-off strains of unearthly music--

"----Died the solemn knell As a trumpet music dies, By the night wind borne away Through the wild and stormy skies."

There is something so awful in the loud voice of a man mingling with the deep tones of a bell, heard at night upon the sea, that familiar as my ear was with the sounds--the blood chilled at my heart as this "lonely watchman's cry" broke suddenly upon the night.

When he again told the hour I was safely stowed away in a comfortable berth, not so large as that of Goliah of Gath by some cubits, yet admirably adapted to the sea, which serves most discourteously the children of Somnus, unless they fit their berths like a modern M. D. his sulkey, lulled to sleep by the rattling of cordage, the measured tread of the watch directly over me, the moanings, _et caetera_, of sleepless neighbours, the roaring of the sea, the howling of the wind, and the gurgling and surging of the water, as the ship rushed through it, shaking the waves from her sides, as the lion scatters the dew from his mane, and the musical rippling of the eddies--like a gla.s.sichord, rapidly run over by light fingers--curling and singing under the keel.

III.

Shakspeare--Suicide or a 'fowl' deed--A conscientious fable --Fishing smacks--A pretty boy--Old Skipper, Skipper junior, and little Skipper--A young Caliban--An alliterate Man-- Fishermen--Nurseries--Navy--The Way to train up a Child-- Gulf Stream--Humboldt--Crossing the Gulf--Ice-ships--Yellow fields--Flying fish--A game at bowls--Bermuda--A post of observation--Men, dwellings, and women of Bermuda--St.

George--English society--Washing decks--Mornings at sea-- Evenings at sea--A Moonlight scene--The ocean on fire--Its phosph.o.r.escence--Hypotheses.