A life's voyage; a diary of a sailor and land, jotted down during a seventy-years' voyage

Preface

It is well known, in the philosophy of nature, that the world was created and formed by and through a combination of particles; some of those particles possessing great value, others but little or no value, yet absolutely necessary to form the great mysterious structure, the cradle of all life.

The world of letters or literature has its combination of parts and particles, valuable and valueless, and it is only second in grandeur and greatness to the material world, and is the cradle of man's greatness.

Without question man's nearest approach to God is in his intellect and in his resolution, for resolution is omnipotent.

Herein it is the intention, the premeditated design, to navigate both the deep, the shoal, the pacific, and the boisterous waters of the historical and the literary seas, and should necessity require. I shall sail close to the wind, but I must endeavor to steer clear of the dangerous rocks. Parody and Travesty. Some superficial critic may cry egotism. It would be beneficial to all such to peruse the immortal *' Vicar of Wakefield."

Mark! Wreckers will receive no salvage.

Self is absolutely necessary in a life voyage. Herein no space exists for the presence of extravagant illusions, but strict allegiance to solemnity and facts. No magnifying ink will be used, but unadorned occurrences: and Nature will be called upon to man the helm ; yet no shade of gloom will appear to mar a life's voyage.

To economize space and time in filling up blanks and names and recollections, now defaced upon the tablet of my memory by the accumulated moss of the big end of a century past and gone, I will use the words, They and We, as the more enlightened are permitted to do.

tii

IV

PREFACE.

I will not draw Utopian shadows, but present substantial realities.

A considerate world should grant a sailor a wide leeway, an unbounded latitude on the historical and literary sea. A diary is entitled to privileges that history, fiction, and mere composition are not.

I well know that it requires courage to abandon the sea, the briny deep, to sail on a more dangerous sea — the sea of ink.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Ocean Soundings, i

II. A Voyage on the Yazoo River, 4

Chapter I. Ocean Soundings

A T an early day, when James Monroe was President, Sailor I opened a diary and took notes of spoken and published history and acts that attracted my attention, and also objects, acts, and occurrences personally experienced or witnessed; all of which occupy many thousands of hastily jotted down pages, a few of which I here place on record.

In 183 1 I entered the Mississippi River, by Pass a la Loutre, from off the North Atlantic Ocean, under adverse circumstances. At that day this Pass was the main northern in- and out-let. The Southwest Pass was used by the Mexicans and the South American commerce. The now South or Getty outlet was virtually abandoned, as it passed but little over three fathoms of water at low tide, but it was subject to a change at any time, through the river's annual flood.

Since I first used the passes of the Mississippi River, the land has formed and extended seaward over ij league. I have noticed its constant formation, and know of what I speak. Where then you could with safety sail your ship, or use the ponderous towboats, the " Porpoise " and " Grampus " of that day, now, in 1898, shrubs and trees appear. The ever moving, flowing sediment within the waters of the rivers and the bayous has created this annexed territory. Mark! Mark! This creation and annexation of territory through invasion, to drive the Gulf Stream seaward and curtail the Atlantic's latitude and longitude, has not ceased, but has just begun.

Without question the earth, sand, and gravel, now passing down the Mississippi and many other rivers, are three times the bulk of that which made the same voyage a half century now past. The great change has been wrought through the settlement and cultivation of the vast South and Northwest extending to the Rocky Mountains. Where timber or fixed prairie sward once existed and protected the surface from washing, and held back the water from rains and melted snow, now cultivated fields appear, all adding to the supply of alluvial, and the supply will not diminish, but increase.

Where small, transparent rills once meandered through the valleys, or trickled over the bluffs, now destructive torrents with fury rush, cutting vast gulches within their course.

Those dredge boats of Nature, and their transport scows, do not operate alone, for the dust of a thousand valleys is swept up with care, and the summer's sun and winter's frosts disintegrate and rasp the mountain's rocks, to be dumped within the ocean, not one speck of which ever leaves its watery bed to return to its home from whence it came.

In 183 1, and previous, I took soundings between Pensacola and Cuba, and between New Orleans and Jamaica and other ports, and also at a later date, and noted the situation.

In 1 88 1 I also stood by and saw those same soundings taken, and found that the bottom of the ocean had risen by being filled during this interval of fifty years.

The well-known water-marks upon the land witnessed that the ocean had not receded, and in the meantime Uncle Sam had placed numerous buoys upon the created shoals to mark their presence, a precaution uncalled for in 183 1.

The ocean does not, cannot, control and dictate to the land, but the land controls and dictates to the ocean, and will in time sidetrack the Gulf.

That a constant fill is taking place within the Atlantic is self-evident, and Uncle Sam should safely house his Galveston harbor and inlet plows and scrapers, for his labor there is never done.

On May 12, 1877, soon after a voyage to one of the West

OCEAN SOUNDINGS. 3

India Islands, I jotted down more fully this momentous ocean change within Editor W. F. Storey's Chicago ''Times." A copy of that day and date now lies before me, dingy and begrimed through the lapse of time, a witness of the distant past; and the intelligent reading world, during a third of a century, well know that the Chicago " Times " did not pass through its columns any sailor's mere sea-foam yarn; that science and philosophy were the passport through which that journal was entered.

Mark! in centuries, many centuries yet to come, all fathomable seas will be filled above their present surface, to be the home of man; such action is nothing new.

New Orleans, and a vast number of coast plantations, now rest upon the once ocean's bed, and other thousands reside where once the ocean rolled.

In the beginning it was not the design that over two-thirds of the world's surface should remain a boisterous waste. Economy for a time called for the act, but when all present space is filled, and Nature's human angel man requires a farm, he will find it where the now proud ocean's billows in triumph wave.

CHAPTER 11.

A VOYAGE ON THE YAZOO RIVER.

rA URING 183 1 I made a second voyage, and upon again landing at New Orleans, although I did not then consider '' on shore " a safe abiding place for man, — the houses might blow over and crush him, or fire might break out at night and no watch on deck to rouse him up, and no sea water at hand to quench the lire, but a small supply of any kind of water; and the sea's pure salt atmosphere is a tonic that gives elasticity and life to man, — yet I desired to view the land of the State of Mississippi, at that period claimed to be the long-sought El Dorado, and many of the Louisiana sugar planters were sending their sons and kin into Southern Mississippi, with negro slaves and drivers to open up cotton plantations.

I made a voyage up the Yazoo River to a point then known as Manchester Landing, as a deck passenger, on board of the steamer ''Yellowstone," the first boat and trip to ship cotton from that now historic river. No untoward or other event took place to excite or mar the voyage except that one night the boat took a sheer on the man at the helm, and one of the smokestacks struck the projecting limb of a huge cypress tree growing on the contracted river's border, which carried away the stack's stays and launched it onto the hurricane deck. We cast anchor, watered out the fires, and it was soon reinstated in a wrecked condition.

I might also mention that, when near the landing, a mulatto fireman, one of the captain's two slaves, slipped and fell overboard whilst hoisting a bucket of water from the river, and disappeared beneath the boat's revolving wheel,upon which the captain exclaimed, " There goes my nine-hundred-dollar nigger overboard! When I purchased him in New Orleans from the Jew

A VOYAGE ON THE YAZOO RIVER. 5

Jake Florance, he told me that he sold him cheap because he was the most unlucky nigger he ever owned; that he had lately been sent for wine, left the valve of a two-hundred-dollar cask of the best French wine open, and flooded the storeroom, to the great damage of other property; that whipping him done but little good, and now he has gone to the bottom, and my nine hundred dollars has gone with him, and we are short of hands on the boat; and if the white trash on the Yazoo are as worthless as they are on Red River, I would not give a picayune for a deckload of them."

Slave No. 2 said " that was not the worst of it; that when Jake went overboard he had nearly a whole plug of tobacco in his pocket."

The yawl was immediately launched and manned, but no Jake was in sight. The Yazoo had emancipated the slave, and claimed him as her own.

CHAPTER III. A night's journey through the deserted home of the

CHICKASAWS.

A LL within our port of entry and the outside surroundings was rough and new. Three small log dwellings, two cotton sheds, a blacksmith's shop, and a cabaret comprised the settlement within sight.

The quarters at Manchester Landing did not appear inviting, and a bright starlight night with over a half moon in their midst was approaching, and a cotton-team road led to the town of Benton, and I had a long lay-off from duty and felt that I could weather a long watch, so I resolved to use the first and second watch of that night on the lonely road toward Benton before I went into camp.

The plantations and houses were few and widely spread, and the same situation existed at all points where I journeyed within the State.

All was new save a few bark and log abodes of the departed Chickasaw Indians, who had been driven from their ancient homes to give space to the pale-face invader. I passed with sadness over their well-worn trails and through their once cultivated fields, and looked with awe upon the apparently blanketed ghostlike bleaching and decaying orchards of peach and other trees; and there at midnight's hour, as I trudged along, I inwardly prayed for a cock to crow, or the owl of night to shriek, and break tlie long and ghostly monotony. Those trees, upon their parting from their homes and dead, they had girdled with their tomahawks, to prevent the unhallowed pale-face from feasting on their fruit, and reaping where he did not sow.

CHAPTER IV. DAVY Crockett's talk at benton, miss

W

HEN I arrived at Benton I learned that the renowned and natural orator, Colonel Davy Crockett, a Whig and a member of Congress from Tennessee, was to address the people. The hour arrived; an old cart was run into the arena to be used as a rostrum. This was my first entry before a backwoods orator, and I used my best endeavor to place his words upon my memory, but sixty-seven years obliterate and deface a threehours' talk. His purity in eloquence and technical precision could not be surpassed by a Cicero. He spoke of the useful lives, the actions, the greatness, and the exemption from oblivion of Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Euclid, Pericles, and others of renown, whose wisdom and eloquence astonished an intelligent world many centuries before the birth of Christ; and he spoke of the greatness of Mohammed and of his ever-living acts, and said that worth and greatness were also embodied in the man that cleared the thicket, drained the marsh, built ships, erected mansions and factories to give employment and bread to his fellow-men; he said ''Apollo built the walls of Troy many long years before the birth of Christ! Those walls gave him ceaseless life." Colonel Crockett came down to home affairs, and spoke of President Andrew Jackson lacking executive ability; said that he had spread desolation and distress throughout a once prosperous and happy land, where perfect felicity had long dwelt, and that he had wrecked the ship of state, leaving a very small salvage for the people. He then gave the Jackson Cabinet a broadside with his heaviest guns, and set into motion a tidal wave of eloquence which hoisted me aloft, to float upon an upper gently waving sea of bliss, from which I descended again to earth with bewildered eyes and regret.

Without a doubt Colonel Crockett astonished with his eloquence the Benton portion of creation, and convinced them, as he had many others, that he was Tennessee's Crassus, and a more than Zeno, and would have done credit to Greece and Rome in their palmy days. Yet Tennessee's forests possessed no Epicurean academy, no vast marble structures, no Stoic school upon her Indian trails; yet Crockett was an astronomer and a philosopher, as well as an orator. Poor sailor I admired his flow of soul and flight of mind, although I had very soon to come down to the hard-pan of fate's reality.

Chapter V. A Canebrake Couch

'T^HE steamer *' Yellowstone " had long since cleared from the waters of the Yazoo, and no steamer could be counted on previous to the next season's cotton crop, and I was adrift upon an unknown sea, with but a small sum of money in my locker. Colonel Crockett's words constantly sounded within my ears, and gave me courage. I resolved to set out on foot for Vicksburg, and thence to the sailor's Alma Mater, the waving deep.

At early dawn I commenced my lonely journey through the primitive forest, guided on my course by a bright sun. Habitations were few, and near night not one could be sighted, nor was T positive in respect to my bearings. I had entered a vast canebrake in search of water; had found none when darkness surrounded me; to move in the right direction was impossible, so I created a light, and gathered up a supply of fuel to secure a. constant fire to keep of¥ the wolves and bears, which were as abundant as dogs within the poor man's quarter of a town. My weather education plainly told me that there would be a rainstorm, so as a prudent sailor I gathered up a lot of broken cane and formed a couch upon the damp earth soon to be wet by rain, and then bent the standing growing cane from all sides except the fire side, over my couch, and with my sailor's sheath knife I cut some cane to fill in the vacant spaces and form a Sioux tepee as best I could ; a canopy to shed off the coming rainstorm, and also to form a rampart against wild beasts. When I lay me down to sleep, I thrust the point of my keen sheath knife into a cane stock at my side, with its handle toward my hand, that I could clutch it instantly if my couch should be invaded by wolves or bears. Whilst lo A LIFE'S VOYAGE.

lying wrapped in my Indian blanket before that camp-fire within the lonely canebrake, and wolves howling round me, though the midnight hour had passed, sleep refused to visit me. I there debated with myself the question whether I had acted wisely in leaving a good and comfortable Eastern farm-house home where I could exercise myself planting corn, hoeing potatoes, and picking stones from oi¥ the fields in early spring, and husking corn on the crisp, frosty mornings of the fall. Better a pleasant chamber with a feather bed to sleep on than a bunch of sticks upon the cold earth within a Mississippi canebrake, with wolves howling round me with gleaming, wistful eyes; or a ship's contracted forecastle deprived of air and light, subject to shipwreck with trials and hardships beyond belief, which would appall the brave. Besides, to be frequently cut down to half rations of cheap, common food and water, and whilst passing through this life-consuming ordeal, to be called upon during all hours of the night or day to stand at the helm, go aloft and furl sleety sails, handle a gasket with benumbed hands, or encounter a flapping sail to knock me from my foothold, and cause my head to ring from the well-directed and unerring blow, whilst death, with grim visage and open skeleton arms, waited to receive me on the deck below.

Notwithstanding my apparent forlorn situation, — a canebrake couch, no. rations, no water, — I was not discouraged. Colonel Crockett had raised my expectations to a premium, and I was in a state of perfect felicity. There was a world, a wide world, and a future — yes, a future — before me for energy and resolution. What more could I desire? No anchor, no hawser placed upon me to confine me to limited moorings, yet tired nature was claiming sleep. Time slowly passed and I surveyed the sky for the break of morn; no break appeared, and I resolved to leave my camp and couch to enter on a new and advancing life.

T tramped on to Vicksburg, took boat for New Orleans, purchased some scientific books, and shipped before the mast for the distant foreign port of Valparaiso, Chili. The sea's disaster lay in wait for our coming, and with more than the fury of a mountain avalanche rushed upon us. The passengers and crew were

A CANEBRAKE COUCH. H

apparently beyond all hope of safety, doomed to be swallowed by an angry sea. Gloom and despair reigned within and without; the wind whistled through the rigging; gigantic waves swept the deck from stem to stern; the power and strife of the enraged elements were tremendous; the prospect of instant death took possession of the hearts of all. The firm masts swayed, the women prayed, and I cast myself within the very jaws of death to give them life upon a rocky shore.

1 advanced from sixteen dollars per month as a conunon sailor before the mast to second mate, first mate, captain, and owner in rapid succession.

Time's clock struck its hours for years; 1 went on shore, studied architecture and mechanism through actual performance; procureil a bank account, erected many edifices and factories for self, with the ease and facility with whicli I had erected corncob houses in my toddling days, before the bright kitchen fire within the mammoth fireplace at the old farm-house. I had no trouble at all to climb the ladder of progress to independence and worth. I projected and consunuuated the construction of railroads, gave employment and bread to hundreds, and homes to many; commanded armies in a foreign comitry, made laws for a great and prosperous people, and changed the supposed destiny of a nation. T did not desire riches, I did not desire power. At that period 1 would not have parted with a single mechanical attainment for John T'icob Astor's rentroll. or exchanged a scientific thought to become the ruler of an empire. T rested upon a downy bed within a maQ"nificent chateau; mv thouc^hts reverted back to the miserable and long night when I lay in distress upon the ground in the Mississippi canebrake. At this moment I heard a tremendous crash; a thunderbolt had rolled from ofif the dark clouds above, and toppled down to earth, and caused the canebrake to quake and tremble like a coward. My fire was out, rain was falling upon me, and T was yet within the canebrake. All my prosperity, all my greatness was but a dream, yes, a dream. Soon after I had surveyed the heavens to find the approach of the morning's dawn I had fallen to sleep; Morpheus had visited me.

I rose from off my damp and dingy blanket. The wolves and bears, the dreaded inhabitants of the forest, had retreated to their unexplored recesses within the dense thickets. A bright sun soon appeared and steamed vapor from my dripping blanket and scanty clothing, and I with an empty stomach, parched tongue, and blistered feet, continued my lonely tramp to Vicksburg, but all that day, as I trudged on my wearisome journey, I keenly felt my great loss of station, wealth, and power that I had possessed while on my canebrake couch, with Morpheus kneeling over me. I had supposed that I was a combination of steel springs and live-oak knots, and could stand any strain, but my faith in self was somewhat shaken by that night's repose and morning's thunderbolt. Within the vast primitive forest I lost my bearings, struck the Big Black River instead of the Mississippi River, but in the latitude of the Big Black I found more habitations and population, plenty to eat at a reasonable cost, and an abundance of pure drink from God's distillery in the sky, deposited in cisterns and in the rippling brook.

I now had before me, within my course, well-known soundings. It was a lovely day; the sun shone brightly in the heavens. All Nature appeared to rejoice; hope and joy were apparent within all life, and I passed over hill and dale, upon Nature's primitive carpet of green, made vocal by a thousand warbling songsters. And here within a miniature valley appears one of creation's tiny lakes which in stillness rests, with its gorgeous trimmings of water violets and water lilies, and ferns of beauty line its outer borders. A lonely snipe slowly parades along its northern verge, and ever and anon thrusts its bayonet-like beak into the marshy earth. Highly favored and happy snipe, to monopolize so much of nature's silent grandeur, and never restricted to a short allowance of food and water ! And no raging ocean surrounds you. Yes, happy snipe! And here the willows' boughs, entwining, cast a shadow o'er the plain to give comfort to the sailor from off his couch of cane. Soon I sighted several stately mansions with expansive lawns, vineyards, and wellselected shrubbery; rare exotics appeared in profusion, and fra-

AlCANEBRAKE COtJCH. 1^

grant jessamines lined the walks. All, all here, is luxuriously beautiful; the highly favored residents must possess Aladdin's lamp; or was all this gorgeous equipage, and to me astonishing display, with its companion ease and comfort, produced by the sinews and muscles of African slavery and untimely graves, through neglect and hardships, of thousands? Here are no howling wolves, no ravenous bears, no drizzling rain upon a canebrake couch, to lengthen night and mar its hours, and place a stranded sailor's brain upon the rack. I was within the environs of Vicksburg.

Chapter VI. A Deck Passage

A STEAMER from Louisville bound to New Orleans was an- ***■ chored in the harbor. I boarded her and paid for a deck passage to New Orleans. At that day, 183 1, a deck passage was about one-sixth of the price of a cabin passage. You received no food, no bed. Your total outfit and privilege were the lower deck aft to stand on, sit on, or lie on, and this was a boon to me and to thousands of others. Deck passengers laid in their own ship stores at the port from whence they sailed, or purchased as best they could when making a landing, and thousands have journeyed by sea and by river on half rations or less. Many emigrants have their bedding and furniture, yet many lone adventurers have but their blankets, bearskins, or buffalo robe. My shipmates on this voyage were two large families from Kentucky, bound for New Orleans, and a number of the blanket and buffalo class, and also four first-class carriage horses bound for the same port. The horses occupied a portion of our deck in their stalls aft the wheelhouse, and with their heavy iron shoes within a few feet of me opened up a concert of tramping on the boards laid for their tramp and bed upon the deck that banished sleep, and I concluded that there might be worse quarters for sleep and rest than a ship's forecastle. We were not one single night alone on the horse stable deck, but many, for we had a large bulk of freight to pick up on the voyage at various ports and landings, arri the sturdy roustabouts, in their thoughtless way, usurped a large portion of our and the horses' territory with their cotton bales, raw hides, and numerous barrels and boxes. When the raw hides, which cried aloud with their odors, were cast upon our deck, the horses dilated their nostrils, and a Kentucky

A DECK PASSAGE. 15

kid exclaimed that there was a dead mule some place not far off. Several of the roustabouts were negro slaves, who have the utmost contempt for poor white trash, but they treated me with marked consideration because I was a sailor, and a sailor in their eyes was a demigod and a walker on the water. I there, as the horses tramped through the night's hours, thought my destiny had been harshly shaped, but Neptune to me had confirmed the published report that when Christ, when more helpless than I, had been quartered in a stable at Bethlehem, and thereafter, upon landing within Jerusalem, had been roughly handled by the citizens, and he a non-combatant. Whilst on the horses' stable deck of the steamboat, wrapped in my blanket, I resolved not to lead an oyster life.

On my return to New Orleans after this inland cruise I again shipped for sea, but I secured by purchase and charter a stock of books, but not such as many sailors purchase. To know and be competent to navigate the intellectual and historical sea, I selected works on astronomy, chemistry, navigation, architecture, algebra, philosophy, modern and ancient history; some works published in the sixteenth century, and reaching back to the Olympic Era (which commenced in 776), the founding of Rome in 753, and yet back to the founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus in 559 before Christ, together with the more modern occurrences just previous to the birth of Christ, and I have with untiring energy used my best ability to keep posted up to date.

The settling up of Australia, Hawaii, and opening up of vast Africa and other rapid changes throughout the world, have caused the undertaking to be no bagatelle. Eugene Aram committed murder to procure books, Sailor I plowed the briny deep at small wages for the same purpose; yet knowledge personally obtained through keen and untiring study and observation, with an eye to the philosophy of all things, celestial and terrestrial, surpasses in utility and worth any and all knowledge procured through any books ever published by man; self-obtained knowledge adheres to the mind and soul of man as do barnacles to the hull of an old ship. Books are but tools to work with; yet, as I said, the talented Eugene Aram committed murder to obtain the tools, and he became the superior of his teachers.

Within the early years of this century, especially in the farming districts, no schools existed except during a few months in the winters, and most of them were presided over by some learned farmer who had to take hold of the plow in the early spring, and they were located miles distant from sailor me, but a good Quakeress mother, a graduate of the Weston Pennsylvania Quaker boarding school of the last century, laid the keel and drafted the hull of the ship of letters, to be completed and to receive its sails and rigging.

Experience told me that a vast majority of even far-distant sea voyages were quite tame affairs ; hardships may be many and severe, yet life exists to be repeated, hoping each voyage for better fate. The sailor that doubles Cape Horn with sleepless nights and aching limbs will ship to double that cape again, and even desire to meet the death-dealing monsoon once more, and the frozen Arctic explorer will return to the frigid North to freeze again, and sailor I did the same — shipped again.

The sailor's pay has always been at a low figure; back when Madison was President, and George III. desired to be our king, and many years thereafter, twelve dollars to sixteen dollars per month was the sailor's pay, and considered to be a fair allowance, and the pay to officers was at low figures. To be a Jack Tar, in the common conception, is to drop self down into the very bilge-water of degradation. Uninformed and mistaken world! Since the days of sailor Noah, many have been whose monuments should now sweep the clouds, and upon them should be written in indelible letters of gold, The brave, the noble, the great. The spirit of the imperishable Trismegistus possesses a monument, and had not the then rakish, but now immortal Edgar Allen Poe, when stranded and a wreck, shipped " incog " as a common sailor, on board of a Baltimore topsail schooner bound for Jamaica, and quartered in a forecastle, a halfway house between Pandemonium and Paradise, and fed on pork and beans, the literary world would have never have strained its vision to