Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008 - (Page 38)

The ship captain’s protest is a first-person declaration confessed before a notary by the master of a vessel in the port he has reached following trouble on the waters. The appearing party is usually the master of the vessel, accompanied by a pilot, a clerk, a navigator, or even a passenger to corroborate the story. The act also identifies the name and type of the vessel, the cargo, and the port and date of departure. The vessel type relates to the rigging, or the number and relative size of the masts and the shape and orientation of the sails, be they square or ship rigged and hung on yards, or more triangular and hung fore and aft from the masts. As with every river port, New Orleans received vessels from the ocean, coastal, and the river trades. Ocean-going vessels mentioned in the records include three-masted square-sailed ships, two-masted brigs and brigantines; three to five-masted barques and barkentines, along with cutters, and frigates. Vessels in the coasting or lake trade were usually sloops or schooners, which were doublemasted and gaff-rigged. Finally, in the river trade were the bateaux, barges, keelboats, pirogues, pilot boats, steamboats, ferryboats, towboats, and not the least, the sturdy flatboat. The flatboat was a square-ended, keel-less, flatbottomed craft with a wide bladed sweep on a pole at the rear used for steering and a cabin. It was usually built of oak or poplar, but could be of pine. The frame was fashioned of 6-inch sills or sleepers connected to the 2-foot sides or gunwales. Floor planks 2 inches thick, caulked with oakum, and connected by white oak pins rested on Detail from George Caleb Bingham’s Jolly Flatboatmen in Port (1857), from the collection of the St. Louis Museum of Art. THE VERSATILE, DURABLE FLATBOAT 38 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Fall 2008 the sleepers. The bow was raked or forward-leaning to offer less resistance to the water, but the flatboat, unlike the keelboat, never went upstream after reaching its destination. Inside, the cabin was a veritable home with a stove, necessity, windows, and even fireplaces and chimneys. It covered about a third of the boat’s 100 to 220-foot length, by its 12 to 20 foot width. The average capacity of a flatboat was 400-500 barrels, or four to 50 tons of cargo. This commonly consisted of flour in barrels, pork bellies, cotton, hogs, lard, pig iron, tar, pitch, salt, bricks, cords of wood, and even mules and horses. The flatboat came into use on the Midwestern waters about 1780. In the early years the farmer himself both built and manned the vessel, before the era of specialization. Although the flatboat declined after the Civil War, it survived until about 1900, which is why some very late shotgun houses in New Orleans were still built from planks of scrapped flatboats. Baldwin cites the peak years of flatboat usage as 1846-1847, a period when the records of a single notary, G.R. Stringer, record about 60 flatboat protests, (one of which is literally a bone-chilling story about a boat being stopped and then crushed as ice closed in). After the preliminaries of the ship captain’s protest, there is invariably a declaration that when the vessel left its home port bound for New Orleans, the boat was “stout, staunch, and strong, well manned and provisioned.” Now the captain’s recital begins — often a long and harrowing tale of watery woes, which finally culminates with the master solemnly protesting against the winds and the waves, the

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities New Orleans Immortelle The Historic New Orleans Collection Highland-Fairfield: The Historic Heart of Shreveport The Ogden Museum of Southern Art Perils of the Mississippi River Louisiana Foodways Harvest of Life King Oliver: The Forgotten King of Jazz Louisiana Architecture Jazz Notes Louisiana State Museum Eye of the Storm Louisiana Association of Museums Soul Resin Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008

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