CHAP. XXIX.] CHARLEVOIX S MAPS. U9 



Dr. Carpenter had brought with him Chaiievoix s maps of the 

 river mouths or &quot;passes,&quot; published 112 years ago, and referring 

 to the state of things about 130 years ago. We were surprised 

 to find how accurately this survey represents, for the most part, 

 the number, shape, and form of the mud-banks and bayous, or 

 channels, as they now exist around the Balize. The pilots, to 

 whom we showed the charts, admitted that one might imagine 

 them to have been constructed last year, were it not that bars 

 had been thrown across the mouths of every bayou, because they 

 are no longer scoured out as they used to be when the principal 

 discharge of the Mississippi was at this point. We then went 

 within a mile of the old Spanish building, called the Magazine, 

 correctly laid down in Charlevoix s map, and now 600 yards 

 nearer the sea than formerly, showing that the mud-banks have 

 given way, or that the salt water has encroached in times when 

 a smaller body of fresh water has been bringing down its sedi 

 ment to this point. 



The southwest pass is now the principal entrance of the 

 Mississippi, and till lately there was eighteen feet water in it, 

 but the channel has grown shallower by two feet. When it is 

 considered that a fleet of the largest men-of-war could sail for a 

 thousand rniles into the interior, were it not for the bars thrown 

 across the entrance of each of the mouths or passes, one can not 

 wonder that efforts should have been made to deepen the main 

 channel artificially. But no human undertaking seems more 

 hopeless; for, after a great expenditure of money in 1838 and 

 1839, and the excavation, by means of powerful steam dredges, 

 of a deep passage, the river filled up the entire cavity with mud 

 during a single flood. 



One of the chief pilots told us, that since 1839, or in six years, 

 he had seen an advance of the prominent mouths of the river of 

 more than a mile. But Linton, the oldest and most experienced 

 of them, admitted that the three passes called the northeast, 

 southeast, and southwest, had in the last twenty-four years only 

 advanced one mile each. Even this fact would furnish no ground 

 for estimating the general rate at which the delta advances, for 

 on each of these narrow strips of land, or river-banks, the sea 



