CHAP. XXX.] FLAT BOATS. 131 



great city. He himself had probably returned to the north in a 

 steamer ; having found the substantial floating mansion, in which 

 he had lived for several weeks or months, quite unsaleable, al 

 though containing so much good timber shaped into planks. It 

 is the duty of the wharfinger at New Orleans to see that the 

 river is not blocked up with such incumbrances, and to set them 

 adrift. After wandering for several hundred miles in the Gulf, 

 they are sometimes cast ashore at Pensacola. 



Soon afterward, when we were taking in wood at a landing, 

 I entered another of these flat boats, just arrived there, and dis 

 covered that it was a shop, containing all kinds of grocery and 

 other provisions, tea, sugar, lard, cheese, flour, beef, and whiskey. 

 It was furnished with a chimney, and I was surprised to see a 

 large family of inmates in two spacious cabins, for no one would 

 suspect these boats to be so roomy below water, as they are 

 usually sunk deep in the river by a heavy freight. They had a 

 fiddle on board, and were preparing to get up a dance for the 

 negroes. A fellow-traveler told me that these peddlers are com 

 monly called chicken-thieves, and, the day after they move off&quot;, 

 the planters not unfrequently miss many of their fowls. 



Pointing to an old levee with a higher embankment newly 

 made behind it, the captain told me, that a breach had been 

 made there in 1844, through which the Mississippi burst, inun 

 dating the low cultivated lands between the highest part of the 

 bank and the swamp. In this manner, thousands of valuable 

 acres were injured. He had seen the water rush through the 

 opening at the rate of ten miles an hour, sucking in several flat 

 boats, and carrying them over a watery waste into a dense swamp 

 forest. Here the voyagers might remain entangled among the 

 trees unheard of and unheeded till they were starved, if canoes 

 were not sent to traverse the swamps in every direction, in the 

 hope of rescuing such wanderers from destruction. When we 

 consider how many hair- breadth escapes these flat boats have 

 experienced, how often they have been nearly run down in the 

 night, or even in the day, during dense fogs, and sent to the bot 

 tom by collision with a huge steamer, it is strange to reflect, 

 that at length, when their owners have caught sight of the 



