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Updated: June 28, 2025
Who cares to sit down and spell out accounts of travels which he can make at less cost than the cost of the narrative? Who wants to peruse fictitious adventures, when railroads and steamboats woo him to adventures of his own? Egypt was once a land of mystery; now, every lad, on leaving Eton, yachts it to the pyramids. India was once a country to dream of over a book.
When the steamboats were first put on the Lake of Nicaragua, the natives complained that they were charged as much as they were in the bungos, although they got sometimes a week's sailing in the latter, and only one day in the steamboat. We were in a dilemma about mules.
Day and night the horizon was smoky-blue with forest fires ... one afternoon our deck was covered with birds that had flown out over the water to escape the flames.... And once we saw lifted in the sky three steamboats sailing upside down, a mirage ... and, once, a gleaming city in the clouds, that hung there spectrally for about five minutes, then imperceptibly faded out....
The cook wiped his face with a dirty cotton rag, which, afterwards, he tied round his neck. "That's how them firemen do in steamboats," he said, serenely, and much pleased with himself. "My work is as heavy as theirs I'm thinking and longer hours. Did you ever see them down the stokehold? Like fiends they look firing firing firing down there." He pointed his forefinger at the deck.
Hippopotamus and crocodile were numerous, and afforded sport for the nobles, and though steamboats and increased traffic have driven these away, on many a temple wall are pictured incidents of the chase, as well as records of their wars.
The two commands now being nearly out of supplies, the trail was abandoned, and the troops kept on down Powder river to its confluence with the Yellowstone, and remained there several days. Here we met General Mills, who reported that no Indians had as yet crossed the Yellowstone. Several steamboats soon arrived with a large quantity of supplies, and once more the "Boys in Blue" were made happy.
A streak of bright light trailed along the heavens in the west, and beneath it were steamboats so gigantic in proportions that they resembled illuminated palaces vaulting over the sea; while close off our starboard bow, there appeared advancing toward us a fairy like fleet, with low, rakish hulls, taut rig, and sails made whiter by the moonbeams playing upon them.
The Volga is a fine example of this, all the way from Tver to Astrachan, and the same feature is observable in most of the Siberian streams that reach the Arctic Ocean. Various conjectures account for it, but none are satisfactory to scientific men. Steamboats have ascended to Omsk, but there is not sufficient traffic to make regular navigation profitable.
If the distance traversed by a locomotive in an hour is represented by one tenth of an inch, it would need a line nine feet long to indicate the corresponding advance of the earth in the same time. But a tortoise, pursuing his ordinary gait without a wager, moves eleven hundred times slower than an express train. We have here a basis of comparison with the provincial steamboats.
I guess we have a right to brag o' that invention we trained the dear critters, so they don't think of striking the minutes and seconds no longer. "Now the folks of Halifax take it all out in talking. They talk of steamboats, whalers and railroads; but they all end where they begin in talk. I don't think I'd be out in my latitude if I was to say they beat the womenkind at that.
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