Rafts and Other Rivercraft in Huckleberry Finn by Peter G. Beidler (review)

Rarely does a scholarly book totally change the way we read a work of literature, especially a novel that many of us have read a dozen or more times. Peter G. Beidler’s Rafts and Other Rivercraft in Huckleberry Finn does just that. It is groundbreaking, meticulous, original, and, on page after page, illuminating, even astonishing. I cannot overpraise this book.

Full disclosure: along with Tom Quirk, I am coeditor of the University of Missouri Press series Mark Twain and His Circle. That status might make my review suspect and suggest I have a stake in the book or a major role in its publication. I have neither. My role in the book’s publication was minimal. The acquisitions editor for the press, Gary Kass, emailed Tom Quirk and me, saying he had a book proposal on a topic he thought might be too arcane for most readers: a study of rafts and rivercraft in Twain’s novel. I shared Gary’s skepticism; the topic seemed quite narrow, and I agreed that it sounded more like a journal article than a book. Nonetheless, I asked Gary to send me the manuscript, figuring it would be easy to dismiss.

I was very wrong. From nearly the first page, I knew that Peter Beidler had accomplished a valuable and important scholarly feat. My only role, then, was to recommend enthusiastically that the book be published. Scholars and critics have written so many words about the raft: the raft as symbol, the raft as metaphor, the raft as brotherhood, the raft as home. But none have understood the raft as raft. Beidler has done just that, and as a result our understanding and conception of the novel will never be the same.

Beidler’s introduction notes how widely read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is, and how much critical attention the novel has received. Given that, he argues, “It is surprising, however, how little most readers know about the raft that carries Huck and Jim south toward Cairo, Illinois, and freedom—and then farther south from Cairo and freedom. It is surprising how little most readers know about the other kinds of rivercraft that Huck mentions” (3.) He poses a series of specific questions, such as the difference between a log raft and a lumber raft, questions that frame the book’s first three chapters. Then he poses two crucial questions: “Why have these basic questions so seldom been raised in the past or, if raised, answered so sloppily? Can we claim to understand the novel if we paddle around such questions?” (4). He argues, convincingly, that “we cannot fully understand or appreciate Mark Twain’s masterpiece if we regard such questions as peripheral, technical, unimportant, or boring” (4). He makes an apt comparison with Melville’s Moby-Dick, which we would not think of reading in total ignorance of whales, whaling ships, whaling terms, and whaling practices. Through internal evidence from Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and external evidence from contemporaneous sources about rafting and the river, Beidler rectifies those omissions.

The first chapter focuses on the raft. Contrary to common belief, a river raft was not intended as a means of conveyance for people, but as a vehicle for them to deliver the raft’s components—its wood—downstream. In the novel, Huck mentions both a log raft and a lumber raft. As Beidler shows, these two are not interchangeable. A log raft is made up of a row of logs, bound together, to be floated to a sawmill to be cut into lumber. A lumber raft is made of milled planks, boards, and beams, carefully constructed to be floated downstream, then dismantled. Most illustrators, including E. W. Kemble in the first edition, depict Huck and Jim on a log raft, so most readers have that picture in their minds. But as the novel shows, Huck and Jim find “a little section...