Editorial note — Chapter II · AGAINST THE WATERS[16]

Nicholas J. Roosevelt, a great-uncle of President Theodore Roosevelt, was one of the owners of the New Orleans, and commanded her on the historic voyage down the Mississippi, it being the honeymoon trip for Mr. Roosevelt and his bride. Eventful enough it proved, this early voyage. As though in protest at this invasion of its sanctity, the wilderness broke out in cataclysmic revolt. The great New Madrid earthquake, which changed the contour of hundreds of miles of Mississippi valley lands, greeted the vessel upon its first night on the great river. “A strange, weird, thrilling moan or high keyed sigh swept tremulously across the forest and cane-brakes, ending in a tremendous shriek, which again dropped to a long, low moan.” This tremendous warning was followed by the quaking, the upheaval and the subsidence of the earth in such fashion that the course of the mighty Mississippi itself was for the time reversed, and afterward forever altered, while vast forests were sunk like so many ranks of toys. A great tidal wave swept the New Orleans from her moorings, and Roosevelt and his wife barely escaped with life. The end of an older world and the beginning of a new had indeed come.

This first river-steamer was 116 feet over all, with twenty-feet beam, and was of only 400 tons burden; strange precursor of the swift and beautiful river-racers that were soon to follow, whose keen, trim hulls and dazzlingly ornamented superstructures were ere long to house another phase of transportation.