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Updated: June 22, 2025
During a large part of our journey we are therefore strongly impressed by this mighty stream, and perceive that it is a condition of existence to whole peoples and States. Innumerable boats navigate its channel from rowing-boats, ferries, and barges to steamers of heavy freight. They maintain communication between the series of towns with walls and houses reflected in the gliding water.
Procopius is their patron. Only the Bora disturbs their retail trade; for the swift current through the Iron Gate drives the rowing-boats toward the southern shore. Of course smuggling is done by tow-boats too, but that belongs to wholesale traffic, costs more than friendly business, and so is not for poor people: in them not only salt, but also tobacco and coffee are smuggled across the frontier.
They reached Prince Jerome's Gulf on the 8th of May, and the next day, sounding continually, slowly steamed up the river Han to a point where it was deemed advisable to man the tender and smaller rowing-boats with a view to completing the expedition in these.
None of them is so impertinent as to look at her or speak to her. Only Europeans she meets turn round. The slave does not go with her. She stops at the quay where the caiques, or long rowing-boats, lie. The boatmen rise and scream together. Each one extols with words and gestures the excellences of his boat. She makes her choice, and steps in and sits down on the cushions.
A large force of gun-boats and rowing-boats were furnished by the fleet, and following the river banks the expedition proceeded up the river. The French resistance was very feeble. Detached parties were taken or driven off, but there was no fighting of a serious character.
Anything that could float was pressed into service: merchant steamers, dredgers, ferry-boats, scows, barges, canal-boats, tugs, fishing craft, yachts, rowing-boats, launches, even extemporized rafts. There was no attempt to enforce order. The fear-frantic people piled aboard until there was not even standing room on the vessels' decks.
These steamers which run up and down the lake of Como and the Lago Maggiore, put out their passengers at the towns on the banks of the water by means of small rowing-boats, and the persons who are about to disembark generally have their own articles ready to their hands when their turn comes for leaving the steamer.
About three o'clock in the morning a confused sound could be heard. In two or three minutes every man was at his post. "There are only two, or at most three of them," Edgar said, in a tone of disappointment, "and I doubt whether they are not big rowing-boats. The strokes are too quick for either sweeps or for boats towing. What a beastly nuisance!
By this time all the girls had come to the window to watch the busy scene without the small sailing-boats and rowing-boats passing and repassing under the bows and stern of the brig, their occupants staring at the guns in the open ports or listening to the fiddling on the forecastle, where the men were dancing.
"It is impossible!" said the French doctor.... Four hundred thousand people were in flight from Antwerp, into which big shells were falling, as English correspondents flattened themselves against the walls and said, "God in heaven!" Two hundred and fifty thousand people coming across the Scheldt in rowing-boats, sailing-craft, rafts, invaded one village in Holland. They had no food.
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