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Updated: June 22, 2025
It was now five o'clock of an August evening. Our work-day was properly done. But we were to camp somewhere, "anywhere out of the world" of railroads. The Penobscot glimmered winningly. Our birch looked wistful for its own element. Why not marry shallop to stream? Why not yield to the enticement of this current, fleet and clear, and gain a few beautiful miles before nightfall? All the world was before us where to choose our bivouac. We dismounted our birch from the truck, and laid its lightness upon the stream. Then we became stevedores, stowing cargo. Sheets of birch-bark served for dunnage. Cancut, in flamboyant shirt, ballasted the after-part of the craft. For the present, I, in flamboyant shirt, paddled in the bow, while Iglesias, similarly glowing, sat
As the boat must be well ballasted, she must have limited breadth of beam, as also limited side buoyancy. By being properly ballasted, a boat can pass either through or over a sea without being driven astern. The raised air chambers prevent the sea breaking over her at the bow or stern; while, if she dips into the sea, she instantly rises again.
While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a whole lake's contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She carries years' water in her.
The community is bored by the conceit and egotism of the innovators; so it is by that of poets and artists, orators and statesmen; but if we knew how heavily ballasted all these poor fellows need to be, to keep an even keel amid so many conflicting tempests of blame and praise, we should hardly reproach them.
The steersman had a box in the rear and in this there was room for Janice to ride, too. The sheet-tender likewise ballasted the boat by lying out on one or the other end of the crosspiece. There was a keen wind, not exactly fair for the trip down the lake; yet their sheet filled nicely on the longer tack, and the Fly-by-Night swept out from the Poketown dock at a very satisfactory speed.
It was attached to a long stout cord which was fastened to the body of the car, and by the violent jerks that ensued I knew that I was not too late to snatch at an anchorage and the chance of a rescue. The balloon, heavily ballasted, was drifting along near the ground with the grappling-iron tearing through hedges and fences and trees, right in the direction of our farm.
In other localities the stagnant waters through which the road lay had been avoided, not by bridges, but by tottering platforms ballasted with thick layers of clay, whose joists shook like a too weak plank thrown across an abyss. Some of these platforms extended over three hundred feet, and travelers by tarantass, when crossing them have experienced a nausea like sea-sickness.
He had no one with him who could manage the engine alone, so he was obliged to get up again, and endeavour to struggle on to Talca; but after going a few miles further, the engine suddenly ran off the track, at a part of the unfinished line that had not yet been sufficiently ballasted.
We knew what that meant; and to escape another sleepless night in the mosquito lowland, we were ready to take almost any risk. Having critically examined our oar-locks, and carefully ballasted our boats, we pulled into the rough water. The light-keeper shouted encouragingly to us from his high porch, "You'll get across all right, and will have a good camp to-night!"
The Union Pacific Railroad, now a double-tracked, transcontinental highway, laid with ninety and one hundred pound steel rails, and ballasted with disintegrated granite, a model of railroad construction, equipment, and maintenance, was, after the close of the Civil War, being pushed with light iron rails and heavy gradients across what was then known to geographers as the Great American Desert, and the project of a transcontinental railroad was meant at that time to unite the chief port of the Pacific coast, San Francisco, with the leading cities of the Atlantic seaboard.
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