he judged that the steamer was about on the reef;
saw that the buoy was gone, but supposed that the
steamer had already run over it; he went on with his
talk; he noticed that the steamer was getting very
close on him, but that was the correct thing; it was
her business to shave him closely, for convenience
in taking him aboard; he was expecting her to sheer
off, until the last moment; then it flashed upon him
that she was trying to run him down, mistaking his
lantern for the buoy-light; so he sang out, ‘Stand
by to spring for the guard, men!’ and the next
instant the jump was made.
But I am wandering from what I was intending
to do, that is, make plainer than perhaps appears
in the previous chapters, some of the peculiar requirements
of the science of piloting. First of all, there
is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate
until he has brought it to absolute perfection.
Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty
is memory. He cannot stop with merely thinking
a thing is so and so; he must know it; for this is
eminently one of the ‘exact’ sciences.
With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old
times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble
phrase ‘I think,’ instead of the vigorous
one ‘I know!’ One cannot easily realize
what a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial
detail of twelve hundred miles of river and know it
with absolute exactness. If you will take the
longest street in New York, and travel up and down
it, conning its features patiently until you know
every house and window and door and lamp-post and
big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately
that you can instantly name the one you are abreast
of when you are set down at random in that street
in the middle of an inky black night, you will then
have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness
of a pilot’s knowledge who carries the Mississippi
River in his head. And then if you will go on
until you know every street crossing, the character,
size, and position of the crossing-stones, and the
varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places,
you will have some idea of what the pilot must know
in order to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble.
Next, if you will take half of the signs in that long
street, and change their places once
a month, and still manage to know their new positions
accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these
repeated changes without making any mistakes, you will
understand what is required of a pilot’s peerless
memory by the fickle Mississippi.
I think a pilot’s memory is about the most wonderful
thing in the world. To know the Old and New Testaments
by heart, and be able to recite them glibly, forward
or backward, or begin at random anywhere in the book
and recite both ways and never trip or make a mistake,
is no extravagant mass of knowledge, and no marvelous
facility, compared to a pilot’s massed knowledge
of the Mississippi and his marvelous facility in the
handling of it. I make this comparison deliberately,
and believe I am not expanding the truth when I do
it. Many will think my figure too strong, but
pilots will not.
