Four Months in a Sneak-Box is a masterpiece of
early American travel writing, ranking with Twain’s Life on the
Mississippi. In December, 1875, Nathaniel Holmes Bishop arrived in
Pittsburgh and launched his small boat into the Monongahela River, which
soon joined with the Allegheny to become the Ohio River, which took him
south to the Mississippi, then to the Gulf of Mexico and the mouth of the
Suwannee River 2,600 miles later.
His craft was a Barnegat Bay Sneak-Box – a cedar duck
hunting boat only 12’ long 4’ wide and 13” deep, which he christened the
“Centennial Republic.” While tiny, it was capable, riding atop ice flows,
hiding at night from “rough characters,” as well as the drunken crews of
shanty-boats, in eddies and drainage ditches at night, and slipping up on
wildlife.
Like Twain, Bishop is an omnivorous observer: he mulls
over steamboats, industry, politics, pollution, geography, and – most of
all – nature.
I peered through the branches of the forest to catch
a glimpse of what I had searched for through many hundred miles of
wilderness since my boyhood ... the Carolina Parrot.
People of all colors and cultures fill this narrative,
too, but the people of the shanty-boats particularly catch his eye. They
form floating towns all to themselves.
Cobblers ... tinsmiths... repairers of sewing
machines, grocers, saloon-keepers, barbers, and every trade indeed is
here represented on these floating dens. I saw one circus-boat with a
ring twenty-five feet in diameter upon it...
Bishop’s sense of joy in this highly entertaining,
historical, and off-beat travelogue is contagious.
One of the chief charms in a boatman's life is its
freedom, and what that freedom is no one knows until he throws aside the
chains of every-day life, steps out of the worn ruts, and, with his kit
beside him, his oar in his hand, feels himself master of his time, and
free.
Bishop’s two other wonderful books, The Voyage of the
Paper Canoe and The Pampas and Andes, are also published by The
Narrative Press.
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