Down the Great Unknown (5 page)

In boat design, every choice represents a trade-off. A sea kayak, for example, is intended for long-distance travel in a straight line and is therefore long and skinny, like an arrow pointing toward a distant destination. It has relatively little “rocker,” or curvature from bow to stern, so that it touches the water almost all the way along its length. A white-water kayak, which is designed to pivot away from danger at the touch of a paddle, has a different design. Comparatively short and stubby, it has a good deal of rocker, meaning that bow and stern are lifted up out of the water, so the boat is easy to turn. (So easy, in fact, that beginners in a white-water kayak are usually unable to paddle in a straight line, even on a lake.) In the case of Powell's boats, there were two main trade-offs. Whitehalls were heavy and sturdy, which made them rugged but hard to maneuver. They were round-bottomed, which made them fast but tippy in rough water.

From the front, the Whitehall looked like a conventional rowboat. Viewed from the rear, the boat resembled a wineglass in cross section. The wineglass look reflected the design of the keel. From about the midpoint of the Whitehall to the stern, the keel—the “breastbone” that runs the length of a boat—thickened into a rigid fin that acted like a rudder fixed in the “straight ahead” position. It made for an elegant look, but the design was eminently practical. “Maneuverability was not a high priority,” notes Robert Stephens, a modern-day boat builder and Whitehall aficionado, “since two or more strong oarsmen could manhandle her in close quarters by backing and filling, but steady tracking was very desirable in the open waters of a large harbor. Above all, speed was the overriding criterion—especially speed under oars [the boat could also be rigged with a sail], speed which was essential for procuring business, delivering passengers, capturing criminals,
or eluding police.”

This was crucial. The Whitehall had two distinguishing features—it was fast, and it was hard to knock off course. For nearly every purpose, that made it an ideal choice. Suppose, though, that you planned to bring your rowboat not to a lake or harbor but to a surging river. Suppose, further, that you needed desperately to keep from being smashed against house-sized boulders and plunged into boat-hungry whirlpools. Then the combination of speed and the inability to change direction would be the last things you wanted, and maneuverability would be beyond price. Your best hope would be a boat designed to inch its way through the minefield, poised at every instant to pirouette away from danger.

In hindsight, Powell may have had better options. Grand Banks dories, for instance, were sturdy, flat-bottomed fishing boats that were perhaps more maneuverable than Whitehalls. But their home base was the ocean off New England (the dories were stored on a schooner's deck and lowered into the sea) and no one had ever thought to try them on white water. In any case, hindsight was one of countless luxuries unavailable to Powell. In search of the best rowboat available, he had picked a Whitehall. In 1869, anyone might have done the same. Powell had made the natural choice, and it was all wrong. Now he was headed into a fire wearing a gasoline suit.

Powell's 1869 boats no longer exist, not even in drawings or photographs. (Nor, for that matter, do we have a group photo of Powell and his men.) There were four boats altogether, three of them built to identical specifications. Each of the three “freight boats,” as the men called them, was twenty-one feet long and four feet wide and could hold about four thousand pounds of cargo, though they were never loaded that heavily. Even empty, these long, narrow boats were a burden—it took four men to carry one empty boat. And as time passed and the boats grew waterlogged, they would grow heavier still.

They were far from empty. The gear and food together weighed seven thousand pounds. The plan was to carry supplies to last ten months, so that if the expedition was still under way in winter and the river froze, they could “winter over” until the spring thaw. The food was standard army issue—rice, flour, beans, coffee, sugar, bacon, dried apples. (Powell's trip to Washington to find government financing had not panned out, but in lieu of money he had been granted army rations for himself and his men.) They would supplement that dreary fare with fish and whatever fresh meat the hunters brought in.

The gear was as straightforward as the food. The men carried tents, ponchos, bedrolls, extra clothing, hundreds of feet of rope, knives, rifles, guns, traps, gold-panning equipment, axes, hammers, saws, nails, screws, and a miscellany of other tools, as well as sextants, chronometers, barometers, thermometers, and compasses. It was a lengthy and careful list, as it had to be for a caravan through the desert.

Vital as the tons of supplies were, they were dangerous as well. To upend a hardware store into a boat that was hard to maneuver even when empty was asking for trouble. The boats rode so low, Powell noted, that even without rapids to make life complicated, it required “the utmost care to float in the rough river without shipping water.”

Powell had anticipated that the boats would take a beating, so he had ordered them built of oak. They were “stanch and strong,” he noted proudly, “double-ribbed, with double stem and stern-posts.” At each end of the boat a decked-over bulkhead provided storage space. This was essentially an off-the-shelf design. The few modifications, notably the choice of oak, provided extra strength but made the boats heavier and more ungainly than they would have been otherwise.

Built of pine and only sixteen feet long, the fourth boat looked like the others except that it was smaller and lighter. This was Powell's boat, the
Emma Dean
. The food and supplies were divided into three identical parts and distributed among the three large boats, as a precaution in case a boat was lost. The
Emma Dean
carried only a few of the scientific instruments, three guns, and three bundles of clothing.

Not knowing what the river had in store for him and his men, Powell had devised a river-running plan intended to keep surprises to a minimum. His boat was faster than the others, because it was smaller and lighter and less heavily loaded. Powell's idea was to proceed downriver ahead of his clumsier companions and scout a safe course for them to follow. If no safe course presented itself, he would give a signal to pull to shore, and the men would begin the dangerous, exhausting business of wrestling the boats and their thousands of pounds of cargo around the foaming, mocking rapid in their path.

In theory, the system was simple and sound. “The boats were ordered to keep one hundred yards apart,” Sumner explained. “Flag signals were arranged as follows, always to be given by Major Powell from the pilot boat: flag waved right and left, then down, ‘Land at once'; waved to right, ‘Keep to right'; and waved to left, ‘Keep to left of pilot boat.' ” Everyone was well-pleased with the boats and the planning (and boaters running unknown rapids today follow a similar system). “We feel quite proud of our little fleet,” Powell acknowledged, and even Sumner, temperamentally allergic to gush, conceded that “we make a pretty show.”

Since the boats were so heavy, each needed two men at the oars, one seated in front of the other. Powell was in the
Emma Dean
, with Sumner and Dunn rowing. Walter Powell and Bradley crewed the
Maid of the Cañon,
Hall and Hawkins the
Kitty Clyde's Sister
, and the Howland brothers and Frank Goodman the
No Name.
The men rowed in the age-old fashion, facing upstream, their backs to the action. To row “backward” might sound odd to someone who has never tried it, but it has the great advantage of permitting the boatman to use the big muscles of his back and legs. (Rowing “forward,” facing downstream, places heavy demands on the boatman's arms.) And since a rowboat on flat water moves slowly, it is easy to keep on course by stealing an occasional peek over one shoulder or the other. For countless years, boatmen on harbors and lakes and lazy rivers have rowed in just this way.

In rapids, though, Powell and his men would not be moving slowly, and they would be headed—blind—into desperate danger. So Powell would be the eyes for the entire group. Not rowing, he was free to face forward and fix all his attention on perils downstream.
There he would stand
while Sumner and Dunn strained blindly at the oars, his left hand clutching a strap that ran across the boat, balancing like a circus rider on the back of a cantering pony, looking for trouble.

On the expedition's first day, the river was kind, as if allowing its fledgling challengers to get their bearings. After a shaky start, Powell and his men managed to fish their dropped oars back out of the river and point themselves downstream. They made their way more or less uneventfully for another seven or eight miles, where they made camp for the night. Hall and Hawkins, in the last boat, reacted too slowly. “I saw they were all landing,” Hawkins recalled, “and I told Andy they were camping at this point. The river was straight and the water smooth and Powell signalled to me and we tried to land, and did finally get to shore some four hundred yards below.” No one was much inclined to preach a sermon on a four-football-field miscalculation—the upstream boats joined their wayward colleagues and, in Hawkins's grumpy summary, “the rest of the boys had the laugh on us”—but everyone knew the story had a moral. It was easily put: The river was fast and strong,
and they were all novices; they had better hope they were quick learners.

Their problem, Hall and Hawkins decided, was that they were overloaded. Each of the boats was supposed to be carrying the same weight, but the
Kitty Clyde's Sister
seemed to be riding several inches lower than the others. Even in calm water, the river was within four inches of spilling into the boat. The two men set to work removing supplies, figuring that “we better unload some of the bacon and take chances of replacing it with venison and mountain sheep later on. So we unloaded five hundred pounds of bacon in the river.” At the time, throwing food overboard seemed like a good idea.

They camped that first night at the foot of an overhanging cliff, perhaps ten miles downstream from Green River Station. The two Powells and Bradley set out for “a couple of hours geologising.” While they searched for fossils, Oramel Howland and Dunn set out to hunt dinner. The two men returned at dark with one small rabbit. It made, Sumner noted dryly, “rather slim rations for ten hungry men.”

Camp was cheery, though it was wet and raw. Unfazed, the men did their best to keep dry and to outboast one another. We “exchanged tough stories at a fearful rate,” Sumner recalled, but the crew was still suffering the effects of the nights of hard drinking at Green River Station. Everyone turned in early.

The first day of the trip was complete. So far, so good.

While the men snore in their bedrolls, let us take a moment to talk about their journals. Powell, Sumner, and Bradley all kept diaries. (
Somehow the taciturn
Bradley managed to keep a detailed daily record of the trip without any of the others catching on.) Several of the others chimed in briefly, adding still more voices to the unruly chorus. We have two short accounts of the trip from Billy Hawkins, a few brief letters from Andy Hall, a long newspaper article by Walter Powell, two long newspaper stories by Oramel Howland.

The men had two favorite modes of speech, wild exaggeration and ludicrous understatement. Ideally, both were delivered deadpan. Time and again, the accounts overflow with an offhand vitality that reminds us that we are listening to Mark Twain's contemporaries. One remote spot was “desolate enough to suit a lovesick poet.” An eddy snagged a boat and “whirled it around quick enough to take the kinks out of a ram's horn.” In one especially wild rapid, “we broke many oars and most of the Ten Commandments.”

Some of the handwritten originals have been lost. But Powell's notes (or, more precisely, notes that cover just over half the expedition) survived a long journey, from the depths of the Grand Canyon to a silent, dusty archive at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. There, at a wooden table under flickering fluorescent lights, a visitor can hold the pages that Powell held and study the notes he scrawled on long, thin pages marked with water spots and splashes of coffee that fell more than a century ago. The handwriting is large and looping, and the words sit awkwardly on the page.

Bradley's journal has come to rest only a mile or two from Powell's, in the Library of Congress, a second message-in-a-bottle from a single shipwreck. Meticulously neat, it looks nothing like Powell's. Bradley wrote on small pages in impeccable but infinitesimal script, as if he were one of those people who can inscribe the Twenty-third Psalm on a grain of rice. From its appearance alone—with no bold underlinings, no exclamation points, no crossed-out words, no stars or arrows in the margin to hint at excitement—one might take Bradley's journal to be a record of experiments in a none-too-promising chemistry lab. No one would guess that it records one of the great American adventures.

It is tempting to see Powell's bold, sprawling handwriting as reflecting his taste for splash and melodrama, especially when his writing is compared with Bradley's tiny, finicky penmanship, but the true explanation is simpler. Powell had lost his right arm at Shiloh seven years before, and he had not quite mastered the art of writing with his left hand. Writing outdoors, in the wind, perhaps on a rock serving as a makeshift desk, made matters worse. A friend who came to know Powell later observed “the difficulty of writing with his left hand and keeping the paper from blowing away by trying to keep it in place with the stump. I have often seen him struggling this way.”

Powell's description of the 1869 expedition is the most compelling but the least straightforward of the firsthand accounts. He kept two journals, first of all, and the two are quite different. Powell's river diary contains short, spare entries, written in free moments in camp and not published in his lifetime. One day's entire entry, for example, reads: “Wrote until 10:00 A.M., and then came to camp with Walter.” (This is the diary at the National Museum of Natural History.) Powell's published account, which is the one nearly always cited when people quote him, was lovingly and painstakingly composed years after the expedition had ended.