“Oh! I hadn’t thought of that.”
Uncle Dick grinned. “Well, maybe I wouldn’t, either, if I hadn’t been reading my Lewis and Clark Journal all over again. They speak of that very thing. Oh, this is a bad old river, all right. Those men had a hard time.”
“But, sir,” answered Rob, “if we load too far down by the bow, our stern motors won’t take hold so well. We’ve got to bury them.”
“That’s true, their weight throws the bow very high. I doubt if we can do much better than have an even keel, but if she’ll kick all right, keep her down all you can in front, for if we ever do ride a log, we’ll strip off the propellers, and maybe the end of the boat, too. Better be safe than sorry, always.”
“They didn’t have as good a boat as ours, did they?” John spoke with a good deal of pride as he cast an eye over the long, racy hull of the Adventurer, whose model was one evolved for easy travel upstream under oars.
“Well, no, but still they got along, in those days, after their own fashion. You see, they started out with three boats. First was a big keel boat, fifty-five feet long, with twenty-two oars and a big square sail. She drew three feet of water, loaded, and had a ten-foot deck forward, with lockers midship, which they could stack up for a breastworks against Indian attacks, if they had to. Oh, she was quite a ship, all right.
“Then they had a large red perogue—must have been something like ours, a rangy river skiff, built of boards; certainly not like the little cypress dugouts they call ‘peewoogs’ in Louisiana.
“Now they had a third boat, the ‘white peroque,’ they spell it. It was smaller, carrying six oars. The red skiff carried the eight French voyageurs——”
“We ought to have all their names, those fellows,” said Frank.