Down on the Batture

Rivermen

- 70 Rivermen You might see a couple of them at the rail of the big tankers, thirty feet above the water, looking at the batture as they go by. They rarely wave back. They seem like distant prisoners on a traveling jail, serving out their time. The other day the paper reported that a couple of them had jumped ship just north of the city, swimming to shore. The sheriff ’s office was said to be looking. They were a Chinese crew, apparently, on a ship owned by a Greek businessman, registered in Liberia, last inspected in Panama , piloted by an Armenian captain, picking up oil in Louisiana for a company in Japan, each of them a separate entity in the elaborate shell game of admiralty law that begins with“flags of convenience” and goes underground from there. Comes an accident, finding out who is liable can stump accountants and lawyers for years. I am not just looking at a big boat out there; I am looking at a floating triumph of legal artifice. Whether they found the Chinese men I never found out, but the story seemed rather sad. I felt the same sadness when I came across a tugboat pilot in the woods shortly after Katrina, waiting for orders on his next cargo from someplace up in Tennessee. He was pleasantly drunk, his large white belly open to the breeze, and I could smell the urine around his resting spot near the boat, the Sweet Miss Marie. This is what had become of the rivermen of the Mississippi, no more legendary set of creatures in American history , half horse and half alligator, a bigger threat to public order - 71 Rivermen in the river towns than the river itself and the scourge of New Orleans . They were also the lifeblood of New Orleans for nearly fifty formative years. I can see them out there, riding the middle current where the water is swift and hides fewer snags, the flatboat barges in all sizes, slapped together back on the farm, and hoping to finish one long journey with a load of whiskey, piglets, fabrics, or early corn, and the sleeker keelboats, made to last and topped by slant-roofed cabins with sweep poles that ran their length like a boom. The crew are in the open, lounging like hunting dogs, shooting dice, playing cards, spinning yarns, and towards evening, the corn whiskey, the sounds of whoops, and a song. I am trying to think of who, engaged in what occupation, still sings songs these days. These boats were the first queens of the river trade and the early months of 1801 recorded nearly five hundred flatboats, two dozen keelboats, a brig, two schooners, and seven pirogues landing from the north on the batture of New Orleans. But the kings of the trade were the wild men who brought them down, manning the sweeps and poles, dodging snags or a roiling log that could rip open the hull in a heartbeat, navigating by brute force and the grace of a God whose name they took in vain by the hour. It was not pretty country down here. The rolling hills above Natchez gave way to muddy banks, quicksand, and invisible bars, an “inhospitable and impenetrable wilderness.” This is before one describes the mosquitoes. Few of the men could swim. It would not have made much difference . A historian of the period writes,“But to swim this thing! To fight this cruel, invulnerable, resistless giant that went roaring down the world with a huge, uprooted oak tree in its mouth for a toothpick . . . this dare-devil boy-god that sauntered along with a town in its pocket, and a steepled church under its arm for a moment ’s toy!” Many rivermen drowned, unrecorded. It was an event as unremarkable as a cloudburst. Wherever the rivermen landed, like their brother, the river, they created a havoc of their own. It was a badge of honor. When a boatman was arrested for a misdeed in Memphis, several hundred - 72 Rivermen others rose up together, set him free, and then shut down the town. In New Orleans, where constables were scarce, the rivermen faced little challenge except from their own ranks. Which, nonetheless, could be considerable. A song of their iconic hero, Mike Fink, begins with the boast that he was“half-alligator” and could“ride tornaders ” and could“out-feather, out-jump...