Steamboat Quotes

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?

The young man walks by himself, fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough (faces slide out of sight, talk trails into tattered scraps, footsteps tap fainter in alleys); he must catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats, register at all the hotels, work in the cities, answer the wantads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boardinghouses, sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough. At night, head swimming with wants, he walks by himself alone.

I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move an atom more or less than God wishes – that every particle of spray that dashes against the steamboat has its orbit, as well as the sun in the heavens – that the chaff from the hand of the winnower is steered as the stars in their courses. The creeping of an aphid over the rosebud is as much fixed as the march of the devastating pestilence – the fall of . . . leaves from a poplar is as fully ordained as the tumbling of an avalanche.

All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.

When its steamboat time you steamboat

Steamboats by this time were becoming a familiar presence on the rivers and coastal waters of America, but not until 1838 did steam-powered ships cross the Atlantic.

The world admires wealth and velocity—these are the things for which everyone strives. Railroads, the post, steamboats, and all possible modes of communication are the means by which the world overeducates itself and freezes itself in mediocrity.

It isn't as it used to be in the old times. Then everybody traveled by steamboat, everybody drank, and everybody treated everybody else. 'Now most everybody goes by railroad, and the rest don't drink.

Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea. When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red wind-socks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel; and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another’s heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair. In the coastline’s haze, the sailor discerns the form of a camel’s withers, an embroidered saddle with glittering fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and swaying; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wine-skins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees’ jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils, and half-revealed. Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts.

It avails not, time nor place--distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh'd, Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried, Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd.

You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and M a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedoms swift winged angels, that fly around the world; I am confined in the bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that if I were on one of your gallant decks, under your protecting wing! Alas! Betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O, that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God! Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand. Get caught, or clear, I'll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing. Only think of it; 100 miles straight north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God is helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This is very bay shall yet bear me into freedom. The steamboats steered in the Northeast course from Northpoint. I will do the same; and when I get to the head of the bay, I will turn my canoe adrift, and walked straight through Delaware into Pennsylvania. When I get there, I shall not be required to have a pass; I can travel without being disturbed. Let but the first opportunity offer, and, come what will, I am off. Meanwhile, I will try to bear up under the yoke. I am not the only slave in the world. Why should I be free? I can bear as much as any of them. Besides I am but a boy, and all boys are bound to some one. It may be that my misery and slavery will only increase the happiness when I get free there is a better day coming. [62 – 63]

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the spirit of the Mountain was thinking; and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great western slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the eastern Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. And beyond, beyond, over the Sierras the other side if Carson sink was bejeweled bay-encircled nightlike old Frisco of my dreams. We were situated on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess - across the night, eastward over the plains where somewhere a man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word and would arrive any minute and make us silent.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day — at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them.

does the price matter, if the trick be well done? You do your tricks very well. And I didn't do badly either, since I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first trip. It's a wonder to me yet. Imagine a blindfolded man set to

No influential friend would have served me better. She [the steamboat] had given me a chance to come out a bit-to find out what I could do. No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work-no man does-but I like what is in the work,-the chance to find yourself. Your own reality-for yourself, not for others-what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and can never tell what it really means.

Both the steamboat service to Albany and the Erie Canal were destined to be swiftly fleeting marvels, eclipsed by the next idea. Only seven years after the Seneca Chief brought whitefish to New York Harbor, the city’s railroad age had begun. The

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter – we never need read of another. [...] To a philosopher all “news”, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.

it was not what you did in this life that you regretted, but the opportunities you allowed to pass you by.

What a head for just a boy to have! If I had Tom Sawyer’s head, I wouldn’t trade it off to be a duke, nor mate of a steamboat, nor clown in a circus, nor nothing I can think of.

the steamboat left the harbor and it was something in this world, the paddle thundering, the smokestack blowing, and people lined up on the top deck waving handkerchiefs. I watched it

If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up . . . we may never need read of another. One is enough.

Because I live in south Florida I store cans of black beans and gallons of water in my closet in preparation for hurricane season. I throw a hurricane party in January. You’re my only guest. We play Marco Polo in bed. The sheets are wet like the roof caved in. There’s a million of me in you. You try to count me as I taste the sweat on the back of your neck. I call you Sexy Sexy, and we do everything twice. After, still sweating, we drink Crystal Light out of plastic water bottles. We discuss the pros and cons of vasectomies. It’s not invasive you say. I wrap the bedsheet around my waist. Minor surgery you say. You slur the word surgery, like it’s a garnish on a dish you just prepared. I eat your hair until you agree to no longer talk about vasectomies. We agree to have children someday, and that they will be beautiful even if they’re not. As I watch your eyes grow heavy like soggy clothes, I tell you When I grow up I’m going to be a famous writer. When I’m famous I’ll sign autographs on Etch-A-Sketches. I’ll write poems about writing other poems, so other poets will get me. You open your eyes long enough to tell me that when you grow up, you’re going to be a steamboat operator. Your pores can never be too clean you say. I say I like your pores just fine. I say Your pores are tops. I kiss you with my whole mouth, and you fall asleep next to my molars. In the morning, we eat french toast with powdered sugar. I wear the sugar like a mustache. You wear earmuffs and pretend we’re in a silent movie. I mouth Olive juice, but I really do love you. This is an awesome hurricane party you say, but it comes out as a yell because you can’t gauge your own volume with the earmuffs on. You yell I want to make something cute with you. I say Let me kiss the insides of your arms. You have no idea what I just said, but you like the way I smile.

As she stepped into the steamboat at Dover which was to convey her to scenes so new, Lucilla felt more and more that she who held the reorganisation of society in Carlingford in her hands was a woman with a mission.

What would the new teacher, representing France, teach us? Railroading? No. France knows nothing valuable about railroading. Steamshipping? No. France has no superiorities over us in that matter. Steamboating? No. French steamboating is still of Fulton's date--1809. Postal service? No. France is a back number there. Telegraphy? No, we taught her that ourselves. Journalism? No. Magazining? No, that is our own specialty. Government? No; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Nobility, Democracy, Adultery the system is too variegated for our climate. Religion? No, not variegated enough for our climate. Morals? No, we cannot rob the poor to enrich ourselves.

How solemn and beautiful is the thought, that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary—but always whiskey! Such is the case. Look history over; you will see. The missionary comes after the whiskey—I mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous rush; next, the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee brings the undertaker. All these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and a jail—and

Then Indiana fields again, and St. Louis as ever in its great valley clouds of afternoon. The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the ancient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. The endless poem.

Except for Lefranc, few Europeans working for the regime left records of their shock at the sight of officially sanctioned terror. The white men who passed through the territory as military officers, steamboat captains, or state or concession company officials generally accepted the use of the chicotte as unthinkingly as hundreds of thousands of other men in uniform would accept their assignments, a half-century later, to staff the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. "Monsters exist," wrote Primo Levi of his experience at Auschwitz. "But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are ... the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.

Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark-- which was a candle in a cabin window... It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened; Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could 'a' laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable... because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest. Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and her powwow shut off and leave the river still again; and by and by her waves would get to us, a long time after she was gone, and joggle the raft a bit, and after that you wouldn't hear nothing for you couldn't tell how long, except maybe frogs or something.

There were railroads in the wilderness now; people who used to go overland by carriage or horseback to the River landings for the Memphis and New Orleans steamboats could take the train from almost anywhere now. And presently Pullmans too, all the way from Chicago and the Northern cities and the Northern money, the Yankee dollars arriving between sheets and even in drawing rooms to open the wilderness, nudge it further and further toward obsolescence with the whine of saws; what had been one vast unbroken virgin span was now booming with cotton and timber both. Or rather, booming with simple money: increment's troglodyte which had fathered twin ones: solvency and bankruptcy, the three of them booming money into the land so fast now that the problem was to get rid of it before it whelmed you into strangulation.

When I came to myself again, I said — ‘When I get so that I can do that, I’ll be able to raise the dead, and then I won’t have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. I want to retire from this business. I want a slush-bucket and a brush; I’m only fit for a roustabout. I haven’t got brains enough to be a pilot; and if I had I wouldn’t have strength enough to carry them around, unless I went on crutches.’ ‘Now drop that! When I say I’ll learn {footnote [‘Teach’ is not in the river vocabulary.]} a man the river, I mean it. And you can depend on it, I’ll learn him or kill him.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life—I wrote this some years ago—that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?

My conduct, Pugstyles,' said Mr Gregsbury, looking round upon the deputation with gracious magnanimity—'my conduct has been, and ever will be, regulated by a sincere regard for the true and real interests of this great and happy country. Whether I look at home, or abroad; whether I behold the peaceful industrious communities of our island home: her rivers covered with steamboats, her roads with locomotives, her streets with cabs, her skies with balloons of a power and magnitude hitherto unknown in the history of aeronautics in this or any other nation—I say, whether I look merely at home, or, stretching my eyes farther, contemplate the boundless prospect of conquest and possession—achieved by British perseverance and British valour—which is outspread before me, I clasp my hands, and turning my eyes to the broad expanse above my head, exclaim, "Thank Heaven, I am a Briton!

I had no time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a look-out for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden

One day, putting my finger on a spot in the very middle of the then white heart of Africa, I declared that some day I would go there ... It is a fact that, about eighteen years afterwards, a wretched little stern-wheel steamboat I commanded lay moored to the bank of an African river. Everything was dark under the stars. Every other white man on board was asleep. I was glad to be alone on deck, smoking the pipe of peace after an anxious day. The subdued thundering mutter of the Stanley Falls hung in the heavy night air of the last navigable reach of the Upper Congo ... Away in the middle of the stream, on a little island nestling all black in the foam of the broken water, a solitary little light glimmered feebly, and I said to myself with awe, 'This is the very spot of my boyish boast.' A great melancholy descended on me. Yes, this was the very spot. But there was no shadowy friend to stand by my side in the night of the enormous wilderness, no great haunting memory, but only the ... distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration. What an end to the idealised realities of a boy's daydreams!... Still, the fact remains that I have smoked a pipe of peace at midnight in the very heart of the African continent, and felt very lonely there.

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. IN the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess.

no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused. 

The Scottish vernacular is rich in colourful euphemisms for inebriation: ‘stocious’, ‘stotting’, ‘guttered’, ‘steaming’, ‘steamboats’, ‘wellied’ and ‘hoolit’ are just a few. Another is ‘mortal’, as in ‘I was fair mortal last night’ (meaning ‘I was very drunk indeed’). So ‘Mortal Causes’ evoked, in my mind, the demon drink, just as surely as it did any darker and more violent imagery.

Ironically, it is familiarity that estranges people. We repeat the same things 'til we run out of new ways to say them. Then we grow tired of saying them and of hearing them said, and our guarded silence turning into a way of life 'til we find ourselves drifting like two rudderless steamboats with their engines off. We misstake familiarty for intimacy. It is not intimacy. All it is, is habit. And habit is a shorthand for silence.

When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburgh, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.

Slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before the law; taxation had been equalized. The telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the typewriter, the sewing machine, and all the thousand willing and handy servants of steam and electricity were working their way into favor. We had a steamboat or two on the Thames, we had steam warships, and the beginnings of a steam commercial marine; I was getting ready to send out an expedition to discover America.

Steamboat Willie put Walt Disney on the map as an animator. Business success was another story. Disney’s first studio went bankrupt. His films were monstrously expensive to produce, and financed at outrageous terms. By the mid-1930s Disney had produced more than 400 cartoons. Most of them were short, most of them were beloved by viewers, and most of them lost a fortune. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs changed everything. The $8 million it earned in the first six months of 1938 was an order of magnitude higher than anything the company earned previously. It transformed Disney Studios. All company debts were paid off. Key employees got retention bonuses. The company purchased a new state-of-the-art studio in Burbank, where it remains today. An Oscar turned Walt from famous to full-blown celebrity. By 1938 he had produced several hundred hours of film. But in business terms, the 83 minutes of Snow White were all that mattered.

Well, the first I knowed the king got a-going, and you could hear him over everybody; and next he went a-charging up on to the platform, and the preacher he begged him to speak to the people, and he done it. He told them he was a pirate— been a pirate for thirty years out in the Indian Ocean—and his crew was thinned out considerable last spring in a fight, and he was home now to take out some fresh men, and thanks to goodness he’d been robbed last night and put ashore off of a steamboat without a cent, and he was glad of it; it was the blessedest thing that ever happened to him, because he was a changed man now, and happy for the first time in his life; and, poor as he was, he was going to start right off and work his way back to the Indian Ocean, and put in the rest of his life trying to turn the pirates into the true path; for he could do it better than anybody else, being acquainted with all pirate crews in that ocean; and though it would take him a long time to get there without money, he would get there anyway, and every time he convinced a pirate he would say to him, “Don’t you thank me, don’t you give me no credit; it all belongs to them dear people in Pokeville camp-meeting, natural brothers and benefactors of the race, and that dear preacher there, the truest friend a pirate ever had!” And then he busted into tears, and so did everybody. Then somebody sings out, “Take up a collection for him, take up a collection!” Well, a half a dozen made a jump to do it, but somebody sings out, “Let HIM pass the hat around!” Then everybody said it, the preacher too. So

In 1840 Britain duly declared war on China in the name of ‘free trade’. It was a walkover. The overconfident Chinese were no match for Britain’s new wonder weapons – steamboats, heavy artillery, rockets and rapid-fire rifles. Under the subsequent peace treaty, China agreed not to constrain the activities of British drug merchants and to compensate them for damages inflicted by the Chinese police. Furthermore, the British demanded and received control of Hong Kong, which they proceeded to use as a secure base for drug trafficking (Hong Kong remained in British hands until 1997).

The young man walks by himself, fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough (faces slide out of sight, talk trails into tattered scraps, footsteps tap fainter in alleys); he must catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats, register at all the hotels, work in the cities, answer the wantads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boardinghouses, sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough. At night, head swimming with wants, he walks by himself alone. John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (U.S.A., #1)

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a look-out for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily.

In 1840 Britain duly declared war on China in the name of ‘free trade’. It was a walkover. The overconfident Chinese were no match for Britain’s new wonder weapons – steamboats, heavy artillery, rockets and rapid-fire rifles. Under the subsequent peace treaty, China agreed not to constrain the activities of British drug merchants and to compensate them for damages inflicted by the Chinese police. Furthermore, the British demanded and received control of Hong Kong, which they proceeded to use as a secure base for drug trafficking (Hong Kong remained in British hands until 1997). In the late nineteenth century, about 40 million Chinese, a tenth of the country’s population, were opium addicts.3

channel was down the Missouri shore at that place, so we warn’t afraid of anybody running across us. We laid there all day, and watched the rafts and steamboats spin down the Missouri shore, and up-bound steamboats fight the big river in the middle. I told Jim all about the time I had jabbering with that woman; and Jim said she was a smart one, and if she was to start after us herself she wouldn’t set down and watch a camp fire—no, sir, she’d fetch a dog. Well, then, I said, why couldn’t she tell her husband to fetch a dog? Jim said he bet she did think of it by the time the men was ready to start, and he believed they must a gone up-town to get a dog and so they lost all that time, or else we wouldn’t be here on a tow-head sixteen

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in the darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess—across the night, eastward over the Plains...

Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on--which was just what you wanted it to do. Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don't know. To some place where they expected to get something, I bet! For me it crawled toward Kurtz--exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started leaking we crawled very slow. The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the woodcutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us--who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign--and no memories.

There's no such thing as witches. But there used to be. It used to be the air was so thick with magic you could taste it on your tongue like ash. Witches lurked in every tangled wood and waited at every midnight-crossroad with sharp-toothed smiles. They conversed with dragons on lonely mountaintops and rode rowan-wood brooms across full moons; they charmed the stars to dance beside them on the summer solstice and rode to battle with familiars at their heels. It used to be witches were wild as crows and fearless as foxes, because magic blazed bright and the night was theirs. But then came the plague and the purges. The dragons were slain and the witches were burned and the night belonged to men with torches and crosses. Witching isn’t all gone, of course. My grandmother, Mama Mags, says they can’t ever kill magic because it beats like a great red heartbeat on the other side of everything, that if you close your eyes you can feel it thrumming beneath the soles of your feet, thumpthumpthump. It’s just a lot better-behaved than it used to be. Most respectable folk can’t even light a candle with witching, these days, but us poor folk still dabble here and there. Witch-blood runs thick in the sewers, the saying goes. Back home every mama teaches her daughters a few little charms to keep the soup-pot from boiling over or make the peonies bloom out of season. Every daddy teaches his sons how to spell ax-handles against breaking and rooftops against leaking. Our daddy never taught us shit, except what a fox teaches chickens — how to run, how to tremble, how to outlive the bastard — and our mama died before she could teach us much of anything. But we had Mama Mags, our mother’s mother, and she didn’t fool around with soup-pots and flowers. The preacher back home says it was God’s will that purged the witches from the world. He says women are sinful by nature and that magic in their hands turns naturally to rot and ruin, like the first witch Eve who poisoned the Garden and doomed mankind, like her daughter’s daughters who poisoned the world with the plague. He says the purges purified the earth and shepherded us into the modern era of Gatling guns and steamboats, and the Indians and Africans ought to be thanking us on their knees for freeing them from their own savage magics. Mama Mags said that was horseshit, and that wickedness was like beauty: in the eye of the beholder. She said proper witching is just a conversation with that red heartbeat, which only ever takes three things: the will to listen to it, the words to speak with it, and the way to let it into the world. The will, the words, and the way. She taught us everything important comes in threes: little pigs, bill goats gruff, chances to guess unguessable names. Sisters. There wer ethree of us Eastwood sisters, me and Agnes and Bella, so maybe they'll tell our story like a witch-tale. Once upon a time there were three sisters. Mags would like that, I think — she always said nobody paid enough attention to witch-tales and whatnot, the stories grannies tell their babies, the secret rhymes children chant among themselves, the songs women sing as they work. Or maybe they won't tell our story at all, because it isn't finished yet. Maybe we're just the very beginning, and all the fuss and mess we made was nothing but the first strike of the flint, the first shower of sparks. There's still no such thing as witches. But there will be.

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess—across the night, eastward over the Plains, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent.

I took the Washington bus; wasted some time there wandering around; went out of my way to see the Blue Ridge, heard the bird of Shenandoah and visited Stonewall Jackson’s grave; at dusk stood expectorating in the Kanawha River and walked the hillbilly night of Charleston, West Virginia; at midnight Ashland, Kentucky, and a lonely girl under the marquee of a closed-up show. The dark and mysterious Ohio, and Cincinnati at dawn. Then Indiana fields again, and St. Louis as ever in its great valley clouds of afternoon. The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the ancient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. The endless poem. By night Missouri, Kansas fields, Kansas night-cows in the secret wides, crackerbox towns with a sea for the end of every street; dawn in Abilene. East Kansas grasses become West Kansas rangelands that climb up to the hill of the Western night.

All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave. Corrine was no different, and it was why, relentless as she was against slavery, she could so casually condemn me to the hole, condemn Georgie Parks to death, and mock an outrage put upon Sophia.

This Levantine spirit developed gradually in Beirut after the Industrial Revolution, as the burgeoning Lebanese silk trade and the invention of the steamboat combined to bring men and women of America and Western Europe in large numbers to the Levant. These settlers from the West were Catholic and Protestant missionaries, diplomats, and merchants, Jewish traders, travelers and physicians; and they brought with them Western commerce, manners, and ideas and, most of all, a certain genteel, open, tolerant attitude toward life and toward other cultures. Their mores and manners were gradually imitated by elite elements of the local native populations, who made a highly intelligent blend of these Western ideas with their own indigenous Arabic, Greek, and Turkish cultures, which had their own traditions of tolerance. “To be a Levantine,” wrote Hourani, “is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either.” In

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life—I wrote this some years ago—that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter,—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

FOOL, n. A person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscience, omnipotent. He it was who invented letters, printing, the railroad, the steamboat, the telegraph, the platitude and the circle of the sciences. He created patriotism and taught the nations war — founded theology, philosophy, law, medicine and Chicago. He established monarchical and republican government. He is from everlasting to everlasting — such as creation's dawn beheld he fooleth now. In the morning of time he sang upon primitive hills, and in the noonday of existence headed the procession of being. His grandmotherly hand was warmly tucked-in the set sun of civilization, and in the twilight he prepares Man's evening meal of milk-and-morality and turns down the covers of the universal grave. And after the rest of us shall have retired for the night of eternal oblivion he will sit up to write a history of human civilization.

He moves through the white glare of a Key West afternoon in that curious, rolling, cantilevered, ball-of-the-foot, and just-off-kilter gait that suggests a kind of subtle menace. He’s on dense and narrow and aromatic streets bearing people’s first names—Olivia, Petronia, Thomas, Emma, Angela, Geraldine. He’s Tom Sawyer on a Saturday in Hannibal, tooting like a steamboat, rid now of Aunt Polly’s clutches, left to his own devices, not to show back home until the sun is slanting in long bars. He’s Jake Barnes on a spring morning in Paris, when the horse chestnut trees are in bloom in the Luxembourg gardens. Jake is expert at shortcutting down the Boul’Mich’ to the rue Soufflot, where he hops on the back platform of an S bus, and rides it to the Madeleine, and then jumps off and strolls along the boulevard des Capucines to l’Opéra, where he then turns in at his building and rides the elevator up to his office to read the mail and sit at the typewriter and prepare a few cables for his newspaper across the Atlantic. “There was the pleasant early-morning feel of a hot day,” is the way Jake’s creator, living in this different region of light, had said it at the start of chapter 5 of The Sun Also Rises.

Then a great pall of smoke sent out by countless steam-boats was spread over the restless mirror of the Infinite. The hand of the engineer tore down the veil of the terrible beauty in order that greedy and faithless landlubbers might pocket dividends. The mystery was destroyed. Like all mysteries, it lived only in the hearts of its worshippers. The hearts changed; the men changed. The once loving and devoted servants went out armed with fire and iron, and conquering the fear of their own hearts became a calculating crowd of cold and exacting masters. The sea of the past was an incomparably beautiful mistress, with inscrutable face, with cruel and promising eyes. The sea of to-day is a used-up drudge, wrinkled and defaced by the churned-up wakes of brutal propellers, robbed of the enslaving charm of its vastness, stripped of its beauty, of its mystery and of its promise.

As our steamboat touched at Port Townsend, Muir received a long telegram from a San Francisco newspaper, offering him a large sum if he would go over the mountains and down the Yukon to the Klondyke, and write them letters about conditions there. He brought the telegram to me, laughing heartily at the absurdity of anybody making him such a proposition. "Do they think I'm daft," he asked, "like a' the lave o' thae puir bodies? When I go into that wild it will not be in a crowd like this or on such a sordid mission. Ah! my old friend, they'll be spoiling our grand Alaska." He offered to secure for me the reporter's job tendered to him. I refused, urging my lack of training for such work and my more important and responsible position. "Why, that same paper has a host of reporters on the way to the Klondyke now," I said. "There is ——" (naming a noted poet and author of the Coast). "He must be half-way down to Dawson by this time." "—— doesn't count," replied Muir, "for the patent reason that everybody knows he can't tell the truth. The poor fellow is not to blame for it. He was just made that way. Everybody will read with delight his wonderful tales of the trail, but nobody will believe him. We all know him too well." Muir

In addition, I feel a personal connection. In April 1855 my great-granduncle Alexander Carter Jr. and his younger brother, Thomas Marion Carter, left their home in Scioto County, Ohio, and headed west. Starting by steamboat, the two brothers floated down the Ohio River until it joined the Mississippi and then traveled upstream to St. Louis. In St. Louis they found little transportation west, so they walked, hitched rides, and rode horseback to reach St. Joseph, Missouri. There they caught a stagecoach to Council Bluffs, Iowa, riding on top of the stage, with seventeen men and women-a three-day ordeal.

In the early days of the country, before we had railroads, telegraphs and steamboats—in a word, rapid transit of any sort—the States were each almost a separate nationality. At that time the subject of slavery caused but little or no disturbance to the public mind. But the country grew, rapid transit was established, and trade and commerce between the States got to be so much greater than before, that the power of the National government became more felt and recognized and, therefore, had to be enlisted in the cause of this institution.

You are valuable just because you exist. Not because of what you do or what you have done, but simply because you are. Remember that the next time you are left bobbing in the wake of someone’s steamboat ambition. Remember that the next time some trickster tries to hang a bargain basement price tag on your self-worth. The next time someone tries to pass you off as a cheap buy, just think about the way Jesus honors you … and smile. I do. I smile because I know I don’t deserve love like that. None of us do.

The child I had been came and made his motions, out and about and around, down to the store, down to the garden, down to the barn, up to the house, up to the henhouse, across the river in Uncle Othy's johnboat, up the river in the buggy, over to the Thripples, up to Port William on Sunday morning, down to the river to see the steamboats land and unload and load, up into the woods--weaving over the ground a web of ways, as present and as passing as the spiders' webs in the grass that catch the dew early in the morning.

There is some evidence that Lee Shelton took the name from the riverboat Stack Lee. Many of the riverboats were the subjects of "coonjining" (conjoining) songs. These songs, according to Garnett Laidlaw Eskew, "eulogized the boats themselves." "There was something intensely personal about a steamboat. To the men who manned and owned and operated them, steamboats had personality. Hence the qualities of certain boats live today in Coonjine songs." 18

First Officer William Warms had given the order. It is almost certain there would have been no fire drill if Captain Robert Wilmott had been in full command. Warms’s order directly contradicted a policy the master of the Morro Castle first instituted on June 16, 1934. On that day—in violation of the seaworthy certificate issued by the government’s Bureau of Navigation and Steamboat Inspection, and at the risk of endangering the lives of everybody on board—Captain Wilmott had banned all further fire drills. His order could lay him open to prosecution, imprisonment, and the certain loss of his master’s license. Confronted by the classic dilemma of the company man, Wilmott had acted in what he believed to be the Ward Line’s best interests. The basis for his decision was simple. In May 1934, during a fire drill, a woman passenger had fallen on a deck wet down by a leaking joint connection between a fire hose and its hydrant. She fractured an ankle and hired a good lawyer, and the Ward Line settled out of court for twenty-five thousand dollars. Captain Wilmott, after a visit to the shipping line office, ordered the Morro Castledeck fire hydrants capped and sealed; 2100 feet of fire hose was locked away, along with nozzles, outlets, and wrenches for each length of hose. Whether the captain received positive instructions from an executive of the Ward Line, or whether he acted independently, is not known, nor is it important. What is known is that as a result of Wilmott’s order, the pride of the American merchant marine, one of the fastest and most luxurious liners afloat, became from that moment on, a floating fire hazard in all but its cargo holds. If a fire started in any of the passenger areas, the only pieces of equipment readily available to fight it were seventy-three half-gallon portable fire extinguishers and twenty-one carbon tetrachloride extinguishers.

After Missouri required the police to suppress educational and religious gatherings for enslaved and free Black people in the 1840s, Black Baptist minister John Berry Meachum moved his freedom school to a steamboat on the Mississippi River where the police lacked jurisdiction to enforce state

Meanwhile, the death of Timothy Meaher in 1892 reminded the nation of the story of the Clotilda and kindled new interest into what had become of her passengers. Obituaries in the Mobile Daily Advertiser and Register, the New York Times, and papers all over the nation, described Meaher as “the venerable steamboat man” and “swashbuckling.” But most of the ink in every obituary was spent telling the story of the Clotilda and the creation of Africatown. Many of the obituaries included descriptions of the settlement, such as this from the hometown Daily Advertiser and Register: “They mix very little with other negroes and preserve many of their native customs, using their native language, speaking English with difficulty and being ruled by a queen of their own choosing. They enjoy a high reputation for honesty and industry.

Grieving for their future, men and women often took their own lives. Others died when they could not maintain the feverish pace of the march. While the mortality rate of slaves during the Second Middle Passage never approached that of the transatlantic transfer, it surpassed the death rate of those who remained in the seaboard states. Over time some of the hazards of the long march abated, as slave traders - intent on the safe delivery of a valuable commodity - standardized their routes and relied more on flatboats, steamboats, and eventually railroads for transportation. The largest traders established 'jails,' where slaves could be warehoused, inspected, rehabilitated if necessary, and auctioned, sometimes to minor traders who served as middlemen in the expanding transcontinental enterprise. But while the rationalization of the slave trade may have reduced the slaves' mortality rate, it did nothing to mitigate the essential brutality or the profound alienation that accompanied separation from the physical and social moorings of home and family. ... [T]he Second Middle Passage was extraordinarily lonely, debilitating, and dispiriting. Capturing the mournful character of one southward marching coffle, an observer characterized it as 'a procession of men, women, and children resembling that of a funeral.' Indeed, with men and women dying on the march or being sold and resold, slaves became not merely commodified but cut off from nearly every human attachment. Surrendering to despair, many deportees had difficulties establishing friendships or even maintaining old ones. After a while, some simply resigned themselves to their fate, turned inward, and became reclusive, trying to protect a shred of humanity in a circumstance that denied it. Others exhibited a sort of manic glee, singing loudly and laughing conspicuously to compensate for the sad fate that had befallen them. Yet others fell into a deep depression and determined to march no further. Charles Ball, like others caught in the tide, 'longed to die, and escape from the bonds of my tormentors.' But many who survived the transcontinental trek formed strong bonds of friendships akin to those forged by shipmates on the voyage across the Atlantic. Indeed, the Second Middle Passage itself became a site for remaking African-American society. Mutual trust became a basis of resistance, which began almost simultaneously with the long march. Waiting for their first opportunity and calculating their chances carefully, a few slaves broke free and turned on their enslavers. Murder and mayhem made the Second Middle Passage almost as dangerous for traders as it was for slaves, which was why the men were chained tightly and guarded closely.

In all, the next big things of the early nineteenth century—enabling man to travel through and over nature in new ways, with steamboats, canals, and railroads—began as intricate public/private partnerships. The government activities of setting in place the infrastructure, reconciling federal and state laws, permitting limited liability, and defining and balancing the conflicts of property rights, evolved into the operating system of its economy, upon which was placed the dynamic layer of free-market creativity and the vibrant applications of entrepreneurial activity.

In America generally,” he wrote in the same essay, “the traveler who would behold the finest landscapes, must seek them not by the railroad, nor by the steamboat, nor by the stagecoach, nor in his private carriage, nor yet even on horseback—but on foot. He must walk, he must leap ravines, he must risk his neck among precipices, or he must leave unseen the truest, the richest, and most unspeakable glories of the land.

Like all Americans, I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat-fields, railroads, and herds of cattle too, big factories, steamboats, and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefitted by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue … each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune. Here we are not ruled over by others, as is the case in Europe; here we rule ourselves.…

I was born in a small town on the shore of a sea canal. In front of it, there is the sea with sailboats and steamboats passing by without, mostly, entering the harbor; on the other side of the water, there is a distant, lavender-colored land with a long mountain range; behind the town, there's a rugged area adorned with vineyards and olive groves.

that wretched, old, mangled steamboat

This steamboat was exactly like a decked scow. On the deck, there were two little teakwood houses, with doors and windows. The boiler was in the fore-end, and the machinery right astern. yOver the whole there was a light roof, supported on stanchions. The funnel projected through that roof, and in front of the funnel a small cabin built of light planks served for a pilot-house. It contained a couch, two camp-stools, a loaded Martini-Henry leaning in one corner, a tiny table, and the steering-wheel. It had a wide door in front and a broad shutter at each side. All these were always thrown open, of course. I spent my days perched up there on the extreme fore-end of that roof, before the door.

As for the scenes we shared in the Piazza Unita that day in 1897, I can hear the music still, but all the rest is phantom. The last passenger liner sailed long ago. The schooners, steamboats and barges have disappeared. No tram has crossed the piazza for years. The Caffe Flora changed its name to Nazionale when the opportunity arose, and is now defunct. The Governor's Palace is now only the Palace of the Prefect and the Lloyd Austriaco headquarters, having metamorphosed into Lloyd Triestino when the Austrians left, are now government offices: wistfully the marble tritons blow their their horns, regretfully Neptune and Mercury linger upon their entablatures. Those silken and epauletted passengers, with all they represented, have vanished from the face of Europe, and I am left all alone listening to the band.

Blackbirders”—stalkers who were not above seizing free blacks and shipping them into slavery—began prowling the city on a regular basis. Their only opposition consisted of sporadic and spontaneous riots by local African Americans. In 1819 forty blacks on Barclay Street tried and failed to rescue a man being taken by a slavecatcher and a city marshal to a Hudson River steamboat dock. In 1826 blacks bombarded a slavecatcher giving evidence at City Hall with bricks, sticks, and stones but were suppressed by the police and given severe sentences.

Abraham Lincoln was the only president to be granted a patent. In May of 1849, Abraham Lincoln invented a device to free steamboats or other vessels that ran aground. It did this by using adjustable buoyant air chambers enabling their draft to be lessened, enabling them to pass over sand bars. .

A few weeks after, on our downward passage, the boat took on board, at Hannibal, a drove of slaves, bound for the New Orleans market. They numbered from fifty to sixty, consisting of men and women from eighteen to forty years of age. A drove of slaves on a southern steamboat, bound for the cotton or sugar regions, is an occurrence so common, that no one, not even the passengers, appear to notice it, though they clank their chains at every step. There

Would it surprise you to learn that I’ve already settled my affections on a specific lady?” Stanley blinked. “I have yet to witness you paying any of the ladies who’ve visited Ravenwood any special attention.” “That’s because this lady has never been to Ravenwood. Truth be told, I’ve not actually been formally introduced to her.” Stanley abandoned his toast. “That seems a bit curious, sir.” “Indeed, but you see, the reason I have yet to be properly introduced to her is because she’s a delicate sort, possessed of fragile and tender sensibilities.” Stanley’s brows drew together. “You believe a lady with tender sensibilities is an appropriate choice for you to settle your affections on, sir?” “She’s perfect for me—lovely, charming, demure. Why, I can’t think of another lady I’d want to settle my affections on. But even given her delicate nature, she’s a lady in very high demand. Gentlemen flock around her, but because of her tender sensibilities, she seems reluctant to enter into a relationship with any of them, in fact, more often than not, she’s given them the cut direct.” Bram blotted his lips with a linen napkin. “That right there is why I’ve been biding my time, waiting for just the right moment to become introduced to her. I don’t want to scare her off and lose any chance I might have of securing her interest.” “I think you’re forgetting a very important fact, sir. You’re Mr. Bram Haverstein, a gentleman in possession of a very fine fortune, your own castle, a summer house on Long Island, more carriages than I care to count, a steamboat, and you’re apparently possessed of a face that all the ladies find swoon-worthy. On top of that, I’ve heard more than one young lady whispering about that fine dark hair you have on your head.” Stanley grinned. “Apparently, it’s a huge mark in your favor.” Bram rolled his eyes. “I don’t believe I’ve ever caused a lady to swoon before, and honestly, my hair is a very nondescript shade of brown. I hardly think it’s unusual enough to have the ladies whispering about it.” “You’re missing the point. You’re a catch, Mr. Haverstein, and that means this lady of yours, be she in high demand or not, will be more than receptive to accepting your attention.” “I’ve never gotten the impression this particular lady is impressed by things such as fortunes and handsome faces, let alone nondescript brown hair.” “Every lady is appreciative of a handsome face, sir, and throw in a fortune and a castle to go with that face, and you can’t lose.” Stanley’s brow furrowed. “Although, you might not want to tell her straight off that Ravenwood is haunted. That might not be a mark in your favor, unless she enjoys ghosts and creatures of the night, but if she’s truly a delicate sort . . . hmm . . . best keep that under wraps until she’s fully committed to you.” “Ravenwood is not haunted, Stanley.” Stanley

it wasn’t that we had been so brave or bold, but that we’d simply traded one fear for another—afraid of what we were about to do for the fear of what we might not. “How

I couldn't help but make a growling noise. "How long does she have?" "I don't know, but the airspace in her chest cavity is growing and has collapsed the lung; it's now crowding her heart, Walter, to the point that it will no longer be able to pump the blood needed to keep her alive." I set my jaw. "Well, we're going to have to get all western on this, aren't we?

So did John Parker of Ripley, a former slave who had walked shackled with four hundred other slaves from Richmond to Alabama. Once free, he became famous for risky ventures, such as returning to snatch the baby of a slave couple from the arms of the baby girl’s sleeping master after already rescuing the baby’s parents. He reportedly helped free more than one thousand slaves. The Ripley home of the Reverend John Rankin also became the doorway to freedom for at least four thousand fugitives who crossed the Ohio River. Fugitives who arrived in Cleveland from Ripley often showed up with written messages for a free black man named Bynum Hunt, who found short-term jobs for them around the docks and then put them on a Detroit-bound steamboat.

Onderdonk’s gonna get a steamboat through Hell’s Gate if it kills him.” “Who’s Onderdonk?” Jasmine asked.

Big Sur So much for the city Tell me that you'll dance to the end Just tell me that you'll dance to the end Hey hey you're The Monkeys And people said you monkeyed around But nobody's listening now Just don't go back to Big Sur Hanging around Lettin' your old man down Just don't go back to Big Sur Baby, baby please don't go Oh, baby, baby please don't go So much for the streetlights They're never gonna guide you home No they're never gonna guide you home Down at the steamboat show Yeah, all the kids started spittin' I guess I didn't live up to the billing Just don't go back to Big Sur Hanging around Lettin' your old man down Just don't go back to Big Sur Baby, baby please don't go Oh, baby, baby please don't go Just don't go back to Big Sur Hanging around Lettin' your old man down Just don't go back to Big Sur Oh, baby, baby please don't go Oh, baby, baby please don't go

And you, Ivanhoe,' Skaggs said, 'intend to find her and fetch her home?' 'I do intend to find her. If she is at the ends of the earth, I shall find her. And to stay with her forever if she'll allow me.' Duff stared in admiration: the ends of the earth. He had never heard anyone but a priest use that phrase. He felt a wave of love for Ben, and suddenly saw his chance. 'I'll come along with you,' he said, practically shouting, he was so excited. 'West.' Ben smiled, and clasped Duff's hand, thumb hooked to thumb. 'Wait, wait, wait...' It had fallen to Skaggs, of all people, to challenge their quest on practical grounds. 'How shall you possibly find her? She has been two weeks on the road already. They might be anywheres between Ohio and the desert.' 'We shall obtain from Mr. Brisbane a copy of his little guide,' Ben said, 'and follow it like a map from east to west. The only question is our fastest route. Speed is paramount.' Skaggs saw that his friend would not be deterred. 'Well, a steamboat to Albany, railways to Buffalo, then a steamer across Lake Erie. It sickens me even to describe the route. But you could be in Cleveland before the end of the week.' He paused. 'I cannot believe that I am describing a speedy arrival in Cleveland as a desirable thing.

Benoit began life in the year 1889, with the coming of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad. There was never any plan to run track through the plantations south of Rosedale, but James Richardson, the largest individual cotton grower in the world at that time, offered the railroad free use of his land if, in turn, the company built him a station. James was the eldest son of Edmund Richardson, a planter whose holdings at one time included banks, steamboats, and railroads. He owned three-dozen cotton plantations and had a controlling interest in Mississippi Mills, the largest textile plant in the Lower South. His New Orleans-based brokerage house, Richardson and May, handled more than 250,000 bales of cotton every year. Edmund Richardson was not always so prosperous. By the end of the Civil War, he had lost almost his entire net worth, close to $1 million. So in 1868, Richardson struck a deal with the federal authorities in Mississippi to contract labor from the state penitentiary, which was overflowing with ex-slaves, and work the men outside prison walls. He promised to feed and clothe the prisoners, and in return, the government agreed to pay him $18,000 a year for their maintenance. The contract struck between Richardson and the State of Mississippi began an era of convict leasing that would spread throughout the South. Before it was over, a generation of black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions that were in many cases worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves. Confining his laborers to primitive camps, Richardson forced the convicts to clear hundreds of acres of dense woodland throughout the Yazoo Delta. When the land was cleared, he put prisoners to work raising and picking cotton on the plowed gound. Through this new system, Richardson regained his fortune. By 1880 he had built a mansion in New Orleans, another in Jackson, and a sprawling plantation house known as Refuge in the Yazoo Delta. When he died in 1886, he left his holdings to his eldest son, James. As an inveterate gambler and drunk, James decided to spend his inheritance building a new town, developed solely as a center for sport. He bought racehorses and designed a racetrack. He built five brick stores and four homes. In 1889, when the station stop was finally completed for his new city, James told the railroad to call the town Benoit, after the family auditor. James’s sudden death in 1898 put an end to his ambitions for the town. But decades later, a Richardson Street still ran through Benoit, westward toward the river, in crumbling tribute to the man.

He started to use the alias Mark Twain during the Civil War and it was under this pen name that he became a famous travel writer. He took the name from his steam-boat days - it was the river pilots' cry to let their men know that the water was two fathoms deep.

After graduating from Harvard College in 1880, Roosevelt won a seat in the New York assembly the next year. He spent the decade publishing a number of books, both about his adventures in the American West and on history. He adored Big Sky country; while in the Dakotas in the summer of 1886, he gave a Fourth of July address in Dickinson that weaved together his sundry passions. “Like all Americans,” he said, “I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads, and herds of cattle, too, big factories, steamboats and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefitted by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.

The regret in her voice weighed a thousand tons and was heavy enough to sink a steamboat. If she was walking around with so heavy a burden, then no wonder she was sad and withdrawn. If he could, he'd take the load from her and carry it on his own back. But he didn't know how to do that. The least he could do was offer to bear it with her.

Among all the public worthies whom the approach of Majesty called into action, as the return of spring does the busy bees, none were more alert and alive to the dignity and importance of their office than the worshipful municipality of Leith. Some unknown power, which deemed itself appalling to the whole Magistracy of the ancient and loyal town, ordained that the King should land on the odiferous shores of the fishing village of Newhaven. But Bailie Macfie, as he sat at the head of the Council board with his valient peers, the intrepid Bailie Reoch and Bailie Newton, snapped his fingers at the huge bugbear, and it fled wailing away, discomfited like the spirit of Loda from the spear of Fingal, and was visible no more.

I’ve accepted employment from Lieutenant John C. Fremont. I met him on a steamboat on the Missouri River

WONDER WOMAN Standing at the swell of the muddy Mississippi after the urgent care doctor had just said, Well, sometimes shit happens, I fell fast and hard for New Orleans all over again. Pain pills swirled in the purse along with a spell for later. It’s taken a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle with my body, a spinal column thirty-five degrees bent, vertigo that comes and goes like a DC Comics villain nobody can kill. Invisible pain is both a blessing and a curse. You always look so happy, said a stranger once as I shifted to my good side grinning. But that day, alone on the riverbank, brass blaring from the Steamboat Natchez, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl, maybe half my age, dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman. She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible, eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have), she bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth— a woman, by a river, indestructible.

In short, the period during which the main conditions of life for the vast majority of men have been subject to repeated and revolutionary changes had not even begun until the Renaissance and the great voyages, and did not assume anything like the accelerated pace which we now take for granted until well into the nineteenth century. Under these circumstances, there is no use in looking anywhere in earlier history for parallels to the successful inventions of the steam engine, the steamboat, the locomotive, the modern smelting of metals, the telegraph, the transoceanic cable, the introduction of electric power, dynamite and the modern high explosive missile, the airplane, the electric valve, and the atomic bomb. The inventions in metallurgy which heralded the origin of the Bronze Age are neither so concentrated in time nor so manifold as to offer a good counter-example.

In the meantime, his majesty, who has lived in dignified retirement since he came to the throne, has taken up his abode, with rural felicity, in a cottage in Windsor Forest; where he now, contemning all the pomp and follies of his youth, and this metropolis, passes his days amidst his cabbages, like Dioclesian, with innocence and tranquility, far from the intrigues of courtiers, and insensible to the murmering waves of the fluctuating populace...

Chapter 2 “THE UTTER FAILURE OF THE MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT OF MEMPHIS” The economic success achieved in the 1850s simply could not have been accomplished without the backbreaking labor of enslaved human beings. African American slaves picked the cotton that was shipped through the Bluff City and worked the docks that loaded the white gold onto steamboats. Slaves also constructed railroads and worked in many of the city’s manufacturing concerns. In addition, the buying and selling of slaves was also one of the most lucrative businesses in Memphis. For example, the slave-trading firm owned by city alderman Nathan Bedford Forrest charged between $800 and $1,000 for individual chattel, and in a good year, Forrest and his partner, Byrd Hill, sold more than 1,000 slaves. By 1860 there were 16,953 slaves residing in Shelby County, and the majority of them made their way into Memphis either through the cotton trade or being rented to businesses in the city. Because of Memphis’s dependence on cotton and slaves for its economic growth, the city was often referred to as “the Charleston of the West.” The large numbers of slaves passing through the city made government officials very nervous. As a result, the mayor and board of aldermen passed several ordinances designed to control the number of slaves and free persons of color who resided or worked in Memphis. On March 27, 1850, an omnibus bill was passed that severely restricted the movements of African Americans in Memphis: State laws against slaves, free blacks and mulattoes to be enforced by city marshal. Slaves not allowed to be entertained or permitted to visit or remain on Sabbath in the house of any free person of colour. Large collection of slaves banned, except for public worship conducted in an orderly manner under superintendence of a white person. Unlawful for slaves to remain in corporate limits of city after sun set or any part of the Sabbath, except by permission of owner specifying limit of time. Collection of negroes in tippling houses [saloons and bars] not to be allowed.

I write these last lines on Sauvie's Island - the Wappatto of the Indians - sitting upon the bank of the river, beneath the gnarled and ancient cottonwood that still marks the spot where the old Columbia trail led up from the water to the interior of the island. Stately and beautiful are the far snow-peaks and the sweeping forest. The woods are rich in the colors of an Oregon autumn. The white wappatto blooms along the marshes, its roots ungathered, the dusky hands that once reaped the harvest long crumbled into dust. Blue and majestic in the sunlight flows the Columbia, river of many names -- the Wauna and the Wemath of the Indians, the St. Roque of the Spaniards, the Oregon of poetry -- always vast and grand, always flowing placidly to the sea. Steamboats of the present; batteaux of the fur traders; ships, Grey's and Vancouver's, of discovery; Indian canoes of the old unknown time -- the stately river has seen them all come and go, and yet holds its way past forest and promontory, still beautiful and unchanging. Generation after generation, daring hunter, ardent discoverer, silent Indian -- all the shadowy peoples of the past have sailed its waters as we sail them, have lived perplexed and haunted by mystery as we live, have gone out into the Great Darkness with hearts full of wistful doubt and questioning, as we go; and still the river holds its course, bright, beautiful, inscrutable. It stays; we go. It there anything beyond the darkness into which generation follows generation and race follows race? Surely there is an after-life, where light and peace shall come to all who, however defeated, have tried to be true and loyal; where the burden shall be lifted and the heartache shall cease; where all the love and hope that slipped away from us here shall be given back to us again, and given back forever Via crucis, via lucis.

But no serious student of the subject would claim that the constitutional grant of authority to Congress to regulate “commerce among the several states” was limited to the regulation of sailing ships and stagecoaches to the exclusion of steamboats, railroads, automobiles, and airplanes.

I must have entered a time warp or I've fallen into the Twilight Zone. Which is it?" "Neither. You're at the harbor in San Felipe, and you're looking at your home for the next two weeks." "Good lord, an honest-to-God steamboat with a walking beam engine and side paddlewheels." "I must admit it does have an air of Mark Twain about it." "What do you want to bet it ferried Grant's troops across the Mississippi to Vicksburg?