Across the Endless River (9 page)

Living on board the small steamboat had taken some getting used to. Its engine ran constantly and the paddle wheels churned to keep them in the channel and added to the downstream momentum. The lack of effort was the hardest part to accept, and the absence of contact with the water. In a canoe, the steady rhythm of one's paddling became as automatic as breathing. He felt cut off, idly watching the banks roll by and sleeping on the boat, rather than making camp on the shore.

At first the countryside was familiar, and boyhood memories returned as they steamed past places that held meaning: the broad sandy island in a bend of the river where he had shot and dressed his first buck; the flat shoals along which he and his father had camped twelve years earlier and been roused from their sleep by a tremendous shaking of the ground that turned the river into rapids wherever they looked; the fast-moving channel where a friend had drowned with his entire family when their flatboat smashed against submerged rocks.

In those first days, too, they had passed the tiny group of wooden buildings on a sheltered inlet—a two-story tavern and three low shacks—where men stopped for an hour or two of pleasure with one of the women who lived there. Baptiste had visited a number of times in the last year with his earnings from Curtis & Woods, and he shrugged as he recalled the peculiar mix of longing, relief, and sadness that stayed with him after these encounters. Young women in the Mandan villages had encouraged his first awkward advances years ago, but since then he had understood that, in the white man's world, marriage or payment were the only sure ways to be with a woman. The last time, it had been a Creole girl from downriver no older than him. When they had finished, she bit his ear as he sat up, then rubbed herself down with a cloth like an animal that has been exercised.

Gradually he had watched the banks of the river change, and two days after they had passed the place where the Ohio joined the Mississippi, he became aware that he had never been so far downstream. He would not see any of these places for a long time, Baptiste realized, but the thought did not make him unhappy. He only wondered when he would return, and what sort of person he would have become. These and a thousand other thoughts filled his mind as they made their steady way toward the mouth of this river that was longer than he had imagined.

Something set New Orleans apart from all the towns he had ever visited. In St. Louis, the men talked about setting off for the upper Missouri, loading up with supplies for their trips to the trading posts. Leaving with traps and guns and ammunition, they wouldn't be seen for a couple of seasons or a whole year at a time. When you left St. Louis and headed upriver, you left behind the white man's ways and entered the world of Indians. In New Orleans, there was no sense of being on a frontier. The long stretch between St. Louis and New Orleans was no longer wild and separate. The towns and settlements they stopped at along the route confirmed his impression that the white man was in possession of the river and the surrounding land.

From Baptiste's earliest years, he had known that other tribes were sometimes to be feared, and this sense of menace had always been a part of the landscape. For the first time in his life, he now came across a long stretch of the river where Indians not only were not feared—as they sometimes still were even in St. Louis—but thought of as shiftless louts or, at best, godless heathens, to be pitied and converted to Christianity. This was at odds with everything he had known before. In St. Louis, Indians were often vilified, but they were never dismissed as insignificant.

The Indians in St. Louis were generally trading parties of Pawnee or Omaha, occasionally a group of Mandan or Crow that had made the trip downriver from the far north. They kept to themselves, doing business with one of the agents in town in the daytime and camping in the clearings across the river at night. Only a few Indians lived in town by themselves, cut off from their tribes for one reason or another. They were sad cases who helped at the livery stables or the blacksmiths and lived in shacks or haylofts behind the main buildings. Most often you would see them in a drunken stupor down by the water, but everyone understood that they were exceptions, and even the Indians who passed through scorned them pitilessly.

In New Orleans, what he saw shocked him. Rather than a handful of individuals with a vacant look and a liking for whiskey, there were dozens of exhausted Indians wandering the streets or slumped in the shadows, sometimes in the company of similarly wretched Negroes or Mexicans who also seemed lost. Men, women, and whole families sat on the boardwalks or along the levee, begging handouts from passersby. No vestige of tribal clothing remained; rags and cast-off garments covered them. The look of despair in their eyes was like the look of frightened animals. Only the color of their skin showed that they were Indians.

The memory of a chance encounter in New Orleans still troubled Baptiste. He had been walking along one of the arcaded streets near the cathedral in the company of Schlape when he was startled by a Mandan cry. A woman leaning against one of the arcade's pillars yelled, “Young one!”

The sound of Mandan so surprised him that he looked up at once, and as their eyes met there was no doubt she had been calling to him. She repeated the words more softly, and the familiar sounds resonated deep within. The woman stared as if she were looking through him to a place that only she could see. Her tone was so personal that at first he wondered if he knew her. Was she from the villages he had lived in as a young boy, a friend of his mother, perhaps, come to grief on the streets of this city? But he saw nothing familiar in her features, nor she in his, other than the sight of another Indian, incongruously dressed in a suit of clothes and conversing with a white man in a foreign tongue. Her eyes showed dismay.

Schlape had broken the spell by producing a coin from his pocket and laying it at the squaw's feet. She did not acknowledge the gesture, and Baptiste felt her eyes follow him as they passed by. He could at least have responded with a few words of Mandan, but words failed him, in any language.
What had she wanted? Was it in his power to give
it to her?
Baptiste shook his head and tried to banish her memory. Here at the end of the Mississippi, the longest part of their voyage was about to begin.

S
EVEN

F
EBRUARY 11, 1824
A
BOARD THE
S
MYRNA

Dear Captain Clark,

I write to you near the end of our sea voyage. I have in mind your advice to commit my new experiences to paper and to send them your way when I can. These two sheets do not permit a full account of all that has happened since the Duke and I left St. Louis, but I will mention some of the things I have seen during my seven weeks aboard ship.

Our ocean passage got off to a slow start. The day before Christmas, we boarded the
Smyrna
in New Orleans, twenty passengers all together, with all the Duke's “specimens” in the hold. Then we set sail for the mouth of the Mississippi, but after a day the winds gave out and the current wasn't strong enough to carry us on its own since the tide comes up the river so strongly. It wasn't until the
7
th of January that the wind shifted and we could leave the pilothouse at Balize and set out to sea. It was strange to leave the land behind, but pretty soon it seemed normal. I even got used to eating my meals at a table that rolled back and forth like a canoe in bad rapids.

We saw the coast of Cuba and then some islands off Florida, but that was the last land we set eyes on. It was warm for the first couple of weeks, with a steady wind to keep us going. The water was so clear we could see fish every day, large bonitos and dorados, little ones with wings that sometimes flew right up onto the deck, and groups of dolphins that swam and jumped close to the ship. Duke Paul told me that dolphins are actually mammals and have to come up to breathe, like whales. We saw many whales the second week, not more than a hundred yards from the ship. Of course I thought of the story you told me about my mother holding me inside the whale skeleton. They make a loud snort, like a dozen buffalo bulls in rut, then they shoot a fountain of water from the nose hole on their backs.

Around Newfoundland in Canada (I noted the latitude and longitude:
40
°
36
´ north,
54
°
21
´ west) the wind came up from the west and the sea turned as nasty as the clouds in a twister. The temperature dropped like a stone. We got hail, snow, and sleet, and even lightning and thunder. We lost gear overboard, some of the rigging blew away, and we all got wet, even inside with the doors closed. The waves were like mountains that moved, and all we did was go up one side of the mountain and down the other for ten days. The
Smyrna
is three times the size of your house, yet in that sea it felt small and flimsy. But, as you would say, we proceeded on—what else could we do? There were a couple of times when it seemed like we'd be headed straight to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean—even the other passengers felt so—but somehow we came through the storms in one piece and no one overboard.

The crew race around the masts and rigging like squirrels. I learned how to climb up to a platform called the maintop, way up the mainmast, where the crew let me sit and watch as long as the weather was clear and the wind steady. It was like being in the tallest tree you can think of, with no branches to block the view, planted right in the middle of the ocean. It was a relief to get away from the others when I could; a ship gets mighty close when you're on top of each other all day and night, too.

Other than the weather, the only big run-in we had was when Duke Paul went down into the hold to see how his specimens had come through the storms. He found that the crew had broken into two of the crates and drunk the preserving alcohol out of the jars. The animals (mostly birds) had rotted and had to be dumped overboard. The Duke has a temper—I've learned that—and it built into a white fury. He and the captain had words. The next morning three of the men were whipped. They were tied down the way the Blackfoot do it, and flogged until their blood covered the deck. It seemed harsh. When we were in the tropics, these same men had gone out in small boats and collected the carcasses of the birds Duke Paul shot from the deck.

We entered the English Channel today (my birthday) in a fog as thick as any I've seen, worse than the Missouri in August. In two or three days we are to land in Havre-de-Grâce, hopefully on a clear, calm afternoon. I'll post this as soon as we arrive so you'll know we made it across.

Please remember me kindly to Mrs. Clark and the children, and to those associates of Mr. Pratte and Mr. Chouteau who may be in St. Louis. As ever, your affectionate,

Pomp

P.S. We spoke English on the ship, and some Spanish (two of the other passengers were from Veracruz), and Duke Paul and Mr. Schlape started me on German lessons. Soon it will be nothing but French.

E
IGHT

F
EBRUARY 12, 1824

A
shrill cry echoed from overhead. Baptiste shifted in his hammock and pulled the thin pillow over his ears. The cry was repeated, and this time unclear words played upon his torpor. To the shouting was soon added the commotion of feet on the deck above, and more voices. It was not crew members changing the watch—he was sure there had been no bell—so it must be other passengers making their way onto the brig's foredeck at an uncommonly early hour. He lay in the lightly swaying hammock, suspended between wakefulness and sleep, until one of the words being called by the top watch suddenly separated itself from the others, swooped down, and spoke clearly in his ear: “Land!”

The simple word, so long anticipated, galvanized his spirit and body and propelled him from his berth. For days the passengers had speculated about how long it would be before they sighted land, and only yesterday the captain had told them that he expected to raise a landfall within a day. He threw on his clothes, wrestled his feet into his soft boots, and splashed a tumbler of water onto his face before he hurriedly made his way to the upper deck, dabbing his features with a handkerchief as he ran a damp hand through his hair. Outside it was only slightly less dark than in the ship's close and dank interior, but when he scrambled up the companionway to the foredeck, he saw the faint lightening to the east that signaled dawn.

About half the ship's passengers—ten or twelve in all—were gathered at the front of the vessel, peering off to the left and pointing at what looked to Baptiste like another bank of gray clouds low on the horizon, the same endless vista that had surrounded the ship much of the last several weeks. As he approached the rail, though, and gazed intently where the others pointed, he saw a thin line of white along the horizon. The narrow band stretched to the north and tapered off into the haze, bracketed by the rolling sea below and scudding clouds above. Baptiste felt a giddy sense of joy rise up within him.

He could smell the land now, a distinct heaviness in his nostrils different from the previous seven weeks of sea air, and he was reminded of the awful moment of departure from the mouth of the Mississippi, when another odor had overwhelmed him. A slave ship had dropped anchor two hundred yards from where they were moored at Balize; the putrid stench that emanated from it smelled like the buffalo carcasses that lay rotting at the bottom of cliffs after the Indians ran a herd off the edge, butchering all they needed but leaving a mound of bodies to the wolves and vultures. As his ship prepared to make sail, curses and shouts arose from the slave ship, distinctly audible in the morning calm. They were followed by thumps and resonant splashes. When the wind rose and they began to make way, Baptiste's hunter's eye saw the V-shaped waves of crocodiles circling the slaver in the flat water near shore. Now he breathed deeply of this new, earthy smell to clear the image from his head.