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Updated: June 17, 2025
An engine was placed on a frame, fixed between two pleasure boats, and made to turn two paddle-wheels, one in front of the other the invention of William Symington which drove the improvised steamer across Dalswinton Loch, at the rate of five miles an hour.
The huge paddle-wheels make a perfect pudding of thousands of them, as they are dashed against the paddle-box and whipped into a froth like white of eggs or churned into a thick cream by the propeller blades. Sometimes the shoals are of great breadth, and then it veritably looks as though a crockery shop had been upset in the ocean, and ten thousand white dinner-plates had broken loose.
Not wishing, however, to give up his pleasant fishing trips, he determined to devise some means of lightening the labor. "He absented himself a week, having gone to Little Britain township to spend a few days at his aunt's; and while there he planned and completed a small working model of a fishing boat, with paddle-wheels.
Florida rivers are usually shallow, and when the water is high you can travel for miles across country behind oxen, with more or less river under you all the way. There are ancient jokes about Florida steamboats that travel on heavy dews, and use spades for paddle-wheels.
We paddled on as fast as we could, shouting and firing off a revolver until we had no more cartridges. We were resolved not to let that mysterious vessel escape us, and threw ourselves with energy into the novel excitement of chasing a steamboat in the dark. Then the lights began to swing around; the throbbing of paddle-wheels grew louder and louder; she was evidently coming straight toward us.
It was a narrow skiff, about twenty feet long, into which an antiquated gasolene-engine had been placed, which caused the little pair of patched-up paddle-wheels to beat the water with a great deal of vehemence and send the open skimming-dish over the water at a delightfully progressive rate of speed.
On our return down the river we passed La Crosse, at which we had embarked, and went down as far as Dubuque in Iowa. On our way down we came to grief and broke one of our paddle-wheels to pieces. We had no special accident. We struck against nothing above or below water.
For the purpose of better ventilating the mine, an enormous fan, forty feet in diameter, formed like the paddle-wheels of a steam-ship, and kept constantly revolving by steam-power, was placed over a shaft sunk for that sole object.
And so Charley carried the papers in his shoe. For a week the California sped on, over a smoothly rolling blue sea, accompanied by the gulls and porpoises and the steady thumps of her huge paddle-wheels. On the right, or east, the coastline was at first high and mountainous, but soon became only a bluish line, across the miles of water. The decks were hot, amidst this summer sea!
The "Ark of Delft," an enormous vessel, with shot-proof bulwarks, and moved by paddle-wheels turned by a crank, now arrived at Zoetermeer, and was soon followed by the whole fleet. After a brief delay, sufficient to allow the few remaining villagers to escape, both Zoetermeer and Benthuyzen, with the fortifications, were set on fire, and abandoned to their fate.
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