226 NEW MADKID. [CHAP. XXXIII. 



in the alluvial plain is either encroaching a foot or 

 more annually, so as to wash away buildings, if there 

 be any on the bank, or is retreating, so that a port 

 soon becomes an inland town. The people of Mem 

 phis are ambitious that their city should be a great 

 naval arsenal, and there are considerable naval stores 

 here ; but as frigates require from eighteen to twenty- 

 three feet water, and men-of-war thirty feet, while 

 the bar at the mouth of the Mississippi affords at 

 present no more than sixteen feet water, their 

 hopes cannot be realised till a ship canal is made 

 from some point on the Mississippi to the Gulf of 

 Mexico. 



After we left Memphis, we were shown, on the 

 Tennessee bank of the river, a log cabin, where they 

 said General Jackson began his career ; one of his 

 claims to popularity with the democratic party con 

 sisting in his having risen from a very humble origin. 

 The advantages of a more liberal education, which a 

 rival might have possessed who had begun life in 

 easier circumstances, would not have countervailed, in 

 the present stage of progress of the Union, the prestige 

 which attaches to the idea of a man s having made his 

 way by his own merits. 



March 25. From Memphis we sailed in a smaller 

 steamer for 170 miles, first between the States of Ten 

 nessee and Arkansas, and then between Tennessee 

 and Missouri, and arrived very late at night at New 

 Madrid, a small village on the western bank of the 

 river, where I intended to stay and make geolo 

 gical observations on the region shaken by the great 

 earthquake of 1811-12. So many of our American 



