Problems of Pilotage
by
SUNDOWNER
OCTOBER 5
in New Zealand could not eat. If they could not sail quickly and cheaply shepherds could not eat as often as they do or go to as many football matches. So I do not pray for blessings on Colonel Nasser. But that is not why I found myself reading about pilots this week. Ii ships could not sail, shepherds
It happened that a friend whose wife has a painting and decor-
ating fever asked me to take a bundle of books out of the way of her brush and that one book in the bundle\ was Life onthe Mississippi: piloting by the most famous pilot in history since Charon. Like Charon’s, too, it is river pilotage, and although the Mississippi is a little bigger than the Styx, it is no less dismal if Captain Marryat was a good reporter: It is not like most rivers, beautiful to the sight, bestowing fertility in its course; not one that the eye loves to dwell upon as it sweeps along, nor can you wander upon its bank, or trust yourself without danger to its stream. It is a furious, rapid, desolating torrent, loaded with alluvial soil; and few of those who are received into its waters ever rise again. . . It contains the coarsest and most uneatable of fish, such as catfish and such genus, and, as you descend, its banks are occupied by the fetid alligator, while the panther basks at its edge in the cane-brakes. There are, of course, some (including Mark Twain) who believe that Marryat was not a good reporter, or a good writer, or a good man. I don’t know where his bones lie, but if they are west of the Atlantic I should not like to guarantee that they will never be disturbed. The Mississippi is the greatest river in history, all Americans know, but a good deal of the history has still to happen. Well, I am not a historian, or I would be more careful with my superlatives. I had a day on the Mississippi once, in the company of a man who is said to know most about the river today ("Steamboat Bill" Petersen, Professor of History in Iowa State University), and as the guest of a steel-master who owned his own river steamer and wanted to return some of the hospitality New Zealand had extended to him 40 years earlier. It was a happy party, with good food and good drink, a turn at the wheel for each guest, wearing the captain’s hat and filling the lens of a
camera; but I somehow or other failed to grasp the size of the river or to show the proper historical excitement at finding myself afloat on it. Nor cid I realise when I crossed and recrossed it in a car-three times by bridges hundreds of miles apart-that it was never less than a mile wide; and when I sat looking at it in Hannibal, where Mark Twain himself caught river fever as a boy, the other side seemed no further away than the hotel from the store in Beaumont, or the cows across the river in Cambridge from the willows on the Cambricge side. It was 15 to 20 times as far away; but it requires imagination to grasp distance in the absence of landmarks, and my _landmarks were 8000 miles away. So, that day, was my mind,
OCTOBER 6
be \VHAT I meant to say yesterday was that piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi in Mark Twain’s piloting days was a hundred times more difficult, more dangerous, and more exciting than taking the biggest liner the channel will carry through Suez in the day of Colonel Nasser, I had read Mark’s story before, but all I remembered were the lacerations of his vani-
ties by his teachers and the fatal -accident to his brother
Henry. This time I have read it with Colonel Nasser’s spittle flying past my glasses and the cheers of some of his friends in my ears. But without that stimulation I would still have read it with amazement and delight. Mark’s stretch of river was from New Orleans to St.. Louis, 1250 miles before a flood, 1300 or 1200 or some figure above or below those limits when the course became stable again. I knew in a general way what flooding meant, and can mean still in the Mississippi valley, but it is necessary to follow the story with a man to realise how often the river has changed its course; how many _ inland towns it has made riparian; how many fiver-bank settlements it has pushed inland; how, many islands it has made into mainland; how much main-
land it has cut off and isolated; how many shoals it has created or sunk; how many thousands of trees it uprooted before it was controlled; how many hundreds of traps it could set in one night; how great a strain these uncertainties maintained on a pilot’s nerves; what a burden they laid on his memory; how many landmarks he had to carry in his headand water-marks, too, since in fog or darkness the face of the water was the pilot’s only guide, and not to know the face was to be lost. Mark fills more than 100 pages explaining what a pilot must learn, and how perfectly he must learn it: . If you will take the longest street in New York, and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every house and window and lamppost and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky black night if you will go on until you know every street crossing, the character, size and position of the crossing stones, and t..2 varying depth of mud in each of, those numberless places . . . if you wifl take half of ‘the signs in that long street, and change their. places once a. month, and still manage to know their new positions accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required of a pilot’s memory. Those days are gone. The few vessels that still use the Mississippi steam as safely by day and night as a tramcar. on rails. Engineers control the banks, move shoals and snags ds they are deposited, signal dangers, floodlight islands and bends and crossings and stopping places, build locks and regulate depths, till the Mississippi’ of Mark Twain’s book is geographically as well as historically a relic. But the book is still good reading and profitable pon-dering-and it would surprise me to know that it has been read by a single member of those conferences called this month -to say who will pilot ships through a formed channel 112. miles long and in most places not quite 112 yards wide. (To be continued)
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19561026.2.20.1
Bibliographic details
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 899, 26 October 1956, Page 9
Word count
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1,174Problems of Pilotage New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 899, 26 October 1956, Page 9
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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