We breakfasted in silence, and with the crew standing ready at the oars and Xavier scanning the wide expanse of waters ahead, seeking for that unmarked point whence to embark on this perilous journey, we floated down the stream.  The prospect was sufficiently disquieting on that murky day.  Below us, on the one hand, a rocky bluff reached out into the river, and on the far side was a timber-clad point round which the Mississippi doubled and flowed back on itself.  It needed no trained eye to guess at the perils of the place.  On the one side the mighty current charged against the bluff and, furious at the obstacle, lashed itself into a hundred sucks and whirls, their course marked by the flotsam plundered from the forests above.  Woe betide the boat that got into this devil’s caldron!  And on the other side, near the timbered point, ran a counter current marked by forest wreckage flowing up-stream.  To venture too far on this side was to be grounded or at least to be sent back to embark once more on the trial.

But where was the channel?  We watched Xavier with bated breath.  Not once did he take his eyes from the swirling water ahead, but gave the tiller a touch from time to time, now right, now left, and called in a monotone for the port or starboard oars.  Nearer and nearer we sped, dodging the snags, until the water boiled around us, and suddenly the boat shot forward as in a mill-race, and we clutched the cabin’s roof.  A triumphant gleam was in Xavier’s eyes, for he had hit the channel squarely.  And then, like a monster out of the deep, the scaly, black back of a great northern pine was flung up beside us and sheered us across the channel until we were at the very edge of the foam-specked, spinning water.  But Xavier saw it, and quick as lightning brought his helm over and laughed as he heard it crunching along our keel.  And so we came swiftly around the bend and into safety once more.  The next day there was the Petite Gulf, which bothered Xavier very little, and the day after that we came in sight of Natchez on her heights and guided our boat in amongst the others that lined the shore, scowled at by lounging Indians there, and eyed suspiciously by a hatchet-faced Spaniard in a tawdry uniform who represented his Majesty’s customs.  Here we stopped for a day and a night that Xavier and his crew might get properly drunk on tafia, while Nick and I walked about the town and waited until his Excellency, the commandant, had finished dinner that we might present our letters and obtain his passport.  Natchez at that date was a sufficiently unkempt and evil place of dirty, ramshackle houses and gambling dens, where men of the four nations gamed and quarrelled and fought.  We were glad enough to get away the following morning, Xavier somewhat saddened by the loss of thirty livres of which he had no memory, and Nick and myself relieved at having the passports in our pockets.  I have mine yet among my papers.

         “Natchez, 29 de Junio, de 1789.