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Updated: May 1, 2025
Through valleys most of this long route lies, valleys always open to higher valleys, while the road ascends, valleys between mountains with rice-fields ascending their slopes by successions of diked terraces which look like enormous green flights of steps.
The majority of the negroes were absent working within the diked enclosures of this large estate, which before the war had produced forty thousand bushels of rice annually. Now the place was leased by a former slave, and but little work was accomplished under the present management. Seba Gillings, a powerfully built negro, came to the dike upon which I had landed the canoe.
They have a beauty of their own, these great fens, even now, when they are diked and drained, tilled and fenced, a beauty as of the sea, of boundless expanse and freedom. Much more had they that beauty eight hundred years ago, when they were still, for the most part, as God had made them, or rather was making them even then.
So they cut down the trees, and burned their stumps that the grass might grow sweet for their kine and sheep and horses; and they diked the river where need was all through the plain, and far up into the wild-wood to bridle the winter floods: and they made them boats to ferry them over, and to float down stream and track up-stream: they fished the river's eddies also with net and with line; and drew drift from out of it of far- travelled wood and other matters; and the gravel of its shallows they washed for gold; and it became their friend, and they loved it, and gave it a name, and called it the Dusky, and the Glassy, and the Mirkwood-water; for the names of it changed with the generations of man.
Finch's experiment with ramie and jute would promise better were it not made on new land from which I believe only one crop had been taken. When these tule lands have been diked and drained, they are sold for from twenty to twenty-five dollars per acre.
Of the land which could be flooded with the tide, about fifteen hundred acres were diked and drained. About two-thirds of this appears to have been cropped in rice each year, and the rest in corn, oats and sweet potatoes. The steam-driven threshing apparatus was described as highly efficient.
These remarkable speculations the workings of a mind in which a powerful imagination allied itself with superior reasoning faculties, the marvellous current of whose thought ran only in the diked and guarded channels of mathematical demonstration he uniformly speaks of as "facts."
This lake had an area of 45,230 acres, an average depth of seventeen feet below low water, and was drained between 1848 and 1853. Being diked to exclude the waters which naturally flowed into it, three large engines were built in different places around it, and the work of pumping out 800,000,000 tons of water commenced.
The old Netherlandish chronicles are filled with the most startling accounts of the damage done by the irruptions of the ocean, from west winds or extraordinarily high tides, at times long before any considerable extent of seacoast was diked. Several hundreds of those terrible inundations are recorded, and in many of them the loss of human lives is estimated as high as one hundred thousand.
That is to say, their farm was made up chiefly of marsh, or diked meadow, which had been slowly deposited by the waters of the creek at high tide, then captured and broken into the service of man by the aid of long, imprisoned ramparts of sodded clay.
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