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Updated: May 2, 2025
Those paddle-wheel steamers that were built for the navy some forty years ago, although designed for capturing Cuban slavers, were certainly not remarkable for their speed, and the Porpoise was no exception to her class; so, what with her naturally slow rate of progression through the water, and the strict Admiralty circular limiting the consumption of coal even on special service like ours, we did not make a very rapid passage across the south Atlantic to Monte Video.
But the Deliverance is not noiseless, and, hearing the paddle-wheel, the hippo turned, saw us, and bolted for the river. The hippopotamus is as much at home in the water as the seal. To get to the water, if he is surprised out of it, and to get under it, if he is alarmed while in it, is instinct. If he does venture ashore, he goes only a few rods from the bank and then only to forage.
When Timar arrived within a cast of the mill, he took a coil of the anchor-rope in his right hand; a hook was fastened to its end. The rudderless mass came quickly nearer, like some drifting antediluvian monster blind chance guided it; its paddle-wheel turned swiftly with the motion of the water, and under the empty out-shoot the mill-stone revolved over the flour-bin as if it was working hard.
He paced up and down, Napoleon-like in his high boots, until finally he was brought to a stand by the blind night-wall, which no man can either scale or circumvent. Then he leaned on the railing and looked against the darkness. Not a light to be seen in heaven or on earth! The water below whispered and swirled past, torn to soft fragments by the gigantic paddle-wheel.
The whole thing was like a tremendous uncovered box, with its sides sloping up and in, and containing the battery, the machinery, and the paddle-wheel, while the smoke-stacks and the conical pilot-house stuck up out of the top. Captain Mahan says that they looked like gigantic turtles. Underneath the water, they were simply like flat-bottomed scows.
There is a rainbow of the cataract, of the paddle-wheel, of the falling wave: none of them is the rainbow, yet they are all of it; and if they vanish, so does the first, the arch-rainbow, the bow set in the cloud, while that which set it there, and will set it again, vanishes never. All things here pass; yet say not they are but hopes.
Fitch's second and third models were practically paddle-wheel models, one having the paddles at the side and the other at the stern. Ormsbee of Connecticut made a model, in 1792, on the plan of a duck's foot. Morey made what may be called the first real stern-wheeler in 1794. Two years later Fitch ran a veritable screw propeller on Collect Pond near New York City.
While eye and hand were thus engaged, the hunter's ear was attentive to sounds that he had been hearing for more than an hour. These were the puff of 'scape-pipes and plash of a paddle-wheel, evidently from a small steamer in the Company Canal. She was coming down it; that is, from the direction of the river and the city. Whither was she bound?
The bottom is made quite flat, and divided into compartments; the first deck being only about eighteen inches above the water, from which it is divided by no bulwarks or other protection. Upon this deck are placed the cargo and the driving machinery. A vertical boiler is fixed at the bow, and two horizontal engines, driving a large paddle-wheel, at the stern.
Yet he himself might believe more or less in magic. No one was untouched; all intellect was more or less enslaved. And when experiments at last began to be made in the mechanisms by which steam might be utilized they were such as boys now make for amusement; such as throwing a steam-jet against the vanes of a paddle-wheel.
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