For the first time in my experience as a traveller I had entered a country where the miles were short. When fifteen years old I made my first journey alone and on foot from the vicinity of Boston to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. This boyish pedestrian trip occupied about twenty-one days, and covered some three hundred miles of hard tramping. New England gives honest measure on the finger-posts along her highways. The traveller learns by well-earned experience the length of her miles; but in the wilderness of the south there is no standard of five thousand two hundred and eighty feet to a statute mile, and the watermen along the sea-coast are ignorant of the fact that one-sixtieth of a degree of latitude (about six thousand and eighty feet) is the geographical and nautical mile of the cartographer, as well as the "knot" of the sailor.
At Piraway Ferry no two of the raftsmen and lumbermen, ignorant or educated, would give the same distance, either upon the lengths of surveyed roads or unmeasured rivers. "It is one hundred and sixty-five miles by river from Piraway Ferry to Conwayborough," said one who had travelled the route for years. The most moderate estimate made was that of ninety miles by river. The reader, therefore, must not accuse me of overstating distances while absent from the seaboard, as my friends of the Coast Survey Bureau have not yet penetrated into these interior regions with their theodolites, plane-tables, and telametrerods. To the canoeist, who is ambitious to score up miles instead of collecting geographical notes, these wild rivers afford an excellent opportunity to satisfy his aims.
From sixty to eighty miles can be rowed in ten hours as easily as forty miles can be gone over upon a river of slow current in the northern states. There is, I am sorry to say, a class of American travellers who "do" all the capitals of Europe in the same business-like way, and if they have anything to say in regard to every-day life in the countries through which they pass, they forget to thank the compiler of the guide-book for the information they possess.
There was but one room in the cabin of my new acquaintance, who represented that class of piny-woods people called in the south — because they subsist largely upon corn, — Corn Crackers, or Crackers. These Crackers are the "poor white folks" of the planter, and "de white trash" of the old slave, who now as a freedman is beginning to feel the responsibility of his position.
These Crackers are a very kind-hearted people, but few of them can read or write. The children of the negro, filled with curiosity and a newborn pride, whenever opportunity permits, attend the schools in large numbers; but the very indolent white man seems to be destitute of all ambition, and his children, in many places in the south, following close in the father's footsteps, grow up in an almost unimaginable ignorance.
The news of the arrival of the little Maria Theresa at Piraway Ferry spread with astonishing rapidity through the woods, and on Sunday, after "de shoutings," as the negroes call their meetings, were over, the blacks came in numbers to see "dat Yankee-man's paper canno."
These simple people eyed me from head to foot with a grave sort of curiosity, their great mouths open, displaying pearly teeth of which a white man might well be proud. "You is a good man, capt'n — we knows dat," they said; and when I asked why, the answer showed their childlike faith. "'Cause you couldn't hab come all dis way in a paper boat if de Lord hadn't helped you. He dono help only good folks."
The Cracker also came with his children to view the wonder, while the raftsmen were so struck with the advantages of my double paddle, which originated with the inhabitants of the Arctic regions, that they laid it upon a board and drew its outlines with chalk. They vowed they would introduce it upon the river.
These Crackers declared it would take more than "de shoutings," or any other religious service, to improve the moral condition of the blacks. They openly accused the colored preachers of disturbing the nocturnal rest of their hens and turkeys; and as to hog-stealing and cow-killing, "Why, we won't have any critters left ef this carpet-bag government lasts much longer!" they feelingly exclaimed.
"We does nothing to nobody. We lets the niggers alone; but niggers will steal — they can't help it, the poor devils; it's in 'em. Now, ef they eats us out of house and home, what can a poor man do? They puts 'em up for justices of peace, and sends 'em to the legislature, when they can't read more'n us; and they do say it's 'cause we fit in the Confederate sarvice that they razes the nigger over our heads. Now, does the folkes up north like to see white people tyrannized over by niggers? Jes tell 'em when you go back, stranger, that we's got soulds like yours up north, and we's got feelings too, by thunder! jes like other white men. This was a white man's country once — now it's all niggers and dogs. Why, them niggers in the legislature has spitboxes lined with gold to spit in! What's this country a-coming to? We wish the niggers no harm if they lets our hogs and chickens alone."