第36章 A Pilot's Needs(2)

'Why,the "Sunflower"didn't sink until----'

'I know when she sunk;it was three years before that,on the 2nd of December;Asa Hardy was captain of her,and his brother John was first clerk;and it was his first trip in her,too;Tom Jones told me these things a week afterward in New Orleans;he was first mate of the "Sunflower."Captain Hardy stuck a nail in his foot the 6th of July of the next year,and died of the lockjaw on the 15th.His brother died two years after 3rd of March,--erysipelas.I never saw either of the Hardys,--they were Alleghany River men,--but people who knew them told me all these things.

And they said Captain Hardy wore yarn socks winter and summer just the same,and his first wife's name was Jane Shook--she was from New England--and his second one died in a lunatic asylum.It was in the blood.

She was from Lexington,Kentucky.Name was Horton before she was married.

And so on,by the hour,the man's tongue would go.

He could NOT forget any thing.It was simply impossible.

The most trivial details remained as distinct and luminous in his head,after they had lain there for years,as the most memorable events.

His was not simply a pilot's memory;its grasp was universal.

If he were talking about a trifling letter he had received seven years before,he was pretty sure to deliver you the entire screed from memory.And then without observing that he was departing from the true line of his talk,he was more than likely to hurl in a long-drawn parenthetical biography of the writer of that letter;and you were lucky indeed if he did not take up that writer's relatives,one by one,and give you their biographies,too.

Such a memory as that is a great misfortune.To it,all occurrences are of the same size.Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting circumstance from an uninteresting one.As a talker,he is bound to clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself an insufferable bore.Moreover,he cannot stick to his subject.

He picks up every little grain of memory he discerns in his way,and so is led aside.Mr.Brown would start out with the honest intention of telling you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog.

He would be 'so full of laugh'that he could hardly begin;then his memory would start with the dog's breed and personal appearance;drift into a history of his owner;of his owner's family,with deions of weddings and burials that had occurred in it,together with recitals of congratulatory verses and obituary poetry provoked by the same:then this memory would recollect that one of these events occurred during the celebrated 'hard winter'of such and such a year,and a minute deion of that winter would follow,along with the names of people who were frozen to death,and statistics showing the high figures which pork and hay went up to.

Pork and hay would suggest corn and fodder;corn and fodder would suggest cows and horses;cows and horses would suggest the circus and certain celebrated bare-back riders;the transition from the circus to the menagerie was easy and natural;from the elephant to equatorial Africa was but a step;then of course the heathen savages would suggest religion;and at the end of three or four hours'tedious jaw,the watch would change,and Brown would go out of the pilot-house muttering extracts from sermons he had heard years before about the efficacy of prayer as a means of grace.

And the original first mention would be all you had learned about that dog,after all this waiting and hungering.

A pilot must have a memory;but there are two higher qualities which he must also have.He must have good and quick judgment and decision,and a cool,calm courage that no peril can shake.

Give a man the merest trifle of pluck to start with,and by the time he has become a pilot he cannot be unmanned by any danger a steamboat can get into;but one cannot quite say the same for judgment.

Judgment is a matter of brains,and a man must START with a good stock of that article or he will never succeed as a pilot.

The growth of courage in the pilot-house is steady all the time,but it does not reach a high and satisfactory condition until some time after the young pilot has been 'standing his own watch,'alone and under the staggering weight of all the responsibilities connected with the position.When an apprentice has become pretty thoroughly acquainted with the river,he goes clattering along so fearlessly with his steamboat,night or day,that he presently begins to imagine that it is HIS courage that animates him;but the first time the pilot steps out and leaves him to his own devices he finds out it was the other man's.He discovers that the article has been left out of his own cargo altogether.

The whole river is bristling with exigencies in a moment;he is not prepared for them;he does not know how to meet them;all his knowledge forsakes him;and within fifteen minutes he is as white as a sheet and scared almost to death.

Therefore pilots wisely train these cubs by various strategic tricks to look danger in the face a little more calmly.

A favorite way of theirs is to play a friendly swindle upon the candidate.