After leaving the Cooper River, the watercourses to Savannah were discolored by red or yellow mud. From Pine Island I descended New River two miles and a half to Wall's Cut, which is only a quarter of a mile in length, and through which I entered Wright's River, following it a couple of miles to the broad, yellow, turbulent current of the Savannah.
My thoughts now naturally turned to the early days of steamboat enterprise, when this river, as well as the Hudson, was conspicuous; for though the steamer Savannah was not the first steam-propelled vessel which cut the waves of the Atlantic, she was the first steamer that ever crossed it. Let us examine historical data. Colonel John Stevens, of New York, built the steamboat Phoenix about the year 1808, and was prevented from using it upon the Hudson River by the Fulton and Livingston monopoly charter.
The Phoenix made an ocean voyage to the Delaware River. The first English venture was that of the steamer Caledonia, which made a passage to Holland in 1817. The London Times of May 11, 1819, printed in its issue of that date the following item:
"GREAT EXPERIMENT. — A new vessel of three hundred tons has been built at New York for the express purpose of carrying passengers across the Atlantic. She is to come to Liverpool direct."
This ship-rigged steamer was the "Savannah," and the bold projector of this experiment of sending a steamboat across the Atlantic was Daniel Dodd. The Savannah was built in New York, by Francis Ficket, for Mr. Dodd. Stephen Vail, of Morristown, New Jersey, built her engines, and on the 22d of August, 1818, she was launched, gliding gracefully into the element which was to bear her to foreign lands, there to be crowned with the laurels of success. On May 25th this purely American-built vessel left Savannah, and glided out from this waste of marshes, under the command of Captain Moses Rogers, with Stephen Rogers as navigator. The port of New London, Conn., had furnished these able seamen.
The steamer reached Liverpool June 20th, the passage having occupied twenty-six days, upon eighteen of which she had used her paddles. A son of Mr. Dodd once told me of the sensation produced by the arrival of a smoking vessel on the coast of Ireland, and how Lieutenant John Bowie, of the king's cutter Kite, sent a boat-load of sailors to board the Savannah to assist her crew to extinguish the fires of what his Majesty's officers supposed to be a burning ship.
The Savannah, after visiting Liverpool, continued her voyage on July 23d, and reached St. Petersburg in safety. Leaving the latter port on October 10th, this adventurous craft completed the round voyage upon her arrival at Savannah, November 30th.
I pulled up the Savannah until within five miles of the city, and then left the river on its south side, where old rice-plantations are first met, and entered St. Augustine Creek, which is the steamboat thoroughfare of the inland route to Florida. Just outside the city of Savannah, near its beautiful cemetery, where tall trees with their graceful drapery of Spanish moss screen from wind and sun the quiet resting-places of the dead, my canoe was landed, and stored in a building of the German Greenwich Shooting Park, where Mr. John Hellwig, in a most hospitable manner, cared for it and its owner.
While awaiting the arrival of letters at the Savannah post-office, many of the ladies of that beautiful city came out to see the paper canoe. They seemed to have the mistaken idea that my little craft had come from the distant Dominion of Canada over the Atlantic Ocean. They also looked upon the voyage of the paper canoe as a very sentimental thing, while the canoeist had found it an intensely practical affair, though occasionally relieved by incidents of romantic or amusing character. As the ladies clustered round the boat while it rested upon the centre-table of Mr. Hellwig's parlor, they questioned me freely.
"Tell us," they said, "what were your thoughts while you rowed upon the broad ocean in the lonely hours of night?"