 First edition | |
| Author | Jonathan Raban |
|---|---|
| Publisher | William Collins |
Publication date | 1981 |
| ISBN | 0-330-29229-3 |
| OCLC | 15664455 |
Old Glory is a travel book by Jonathan Raban. It is the winner of The Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.
Old Glory describes Raban's voyage down the Mississippi River in a 16-foot aluminium "Mirrocraft" powered by a 15 h.p. Johnson outboard engine. Inspired by his reading of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a seven-year-old boy living in Norfolk, in which his local stream is transformed into the Mississippi Valley in his imagination, Raban sets out on his own personal journey thirty years later.
It is in this book that the author develops his own unique writing style (starting to emerge in Arabia Through the Looking Glass ), with highly descriptive scenes of the landscape that he passes through, as well as ironic but highly incisive descriptions of the characters he meets along the way. This style is more fully developed in his later travelogues: Coasting (book) , Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America and Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings .
Raban's journey starts out in Minneapolis, 200 miles down from the Mississippi's source at Lake Itasca. The author feels a great deal of trepidation when he first takes out his skiff on the water, and has a quick two-hour instruction course from Herb Heichert, the friendly owner of Crystal Marine from whom he borrows the boat. He tells Raban to turn the prow of his boat into the stern wave of the huge passing tugs or towboats working the Mississippi, to watch out for floating logs and to avoid the wing-dams jutting out from the river's banks. After this crash course in river navigation, Raban then has to navigate his way through Lock No. 1, the first of twenty-six huge locks between Minneapolis and St Louis.
After a few days' cruising, the author starts to settle down and is able to take time out smoking on his corn cob pipe filled with pungent Captain Black. He stops off each night at one of the small towns lining the river: Red Wing, Lansing, Dubuque, Bellevue, Clinton, Nauvoo, Hannibal, etc. Most of them are all rather alike, with their run-down genteel shabbiness and old disused button-making factories that first arose with the decline of the river boats, following the introduction of the diesel engine. Many of the towns' inhabitants he encounters along the way are either down-to-earth farmers who still retain their sense of community through events like Saturday pig roasts, or alcoholic wealthier individuals whose lives continue to focus on their children, even though they have grown up and fled the nest in their desire to escape their small decaying hometowns.
He experiences a series of misadventures on the river itself, having to fortify himself with slugs of Jack Daniel's straight from the bottle. The worst occurs when the keeper of Lock 17 advises him to drive his boat at night and he is nearly run down by the wake of a tow, which catches his skiff broadside. Once the Missouri River joins the Mississippi, the river's character becomes more venomous; Raban now has to avoid the huge whirlpools, boils and shoaling created by the force of the two rivers' powerful struggle to become one. The author also has two romantic adventures during the first half of his often very lonely voyage—one with Judith, a teacher in Muscatine, and the other with Sally, a neurotically disorganized but highly affectionate American Jewish woman, with whom he lives for a short time in a suburb of St Louis. Over their final dinner together at the most expensive restaurant in Clayton, she calls him a 'coward' for leaving her to continue his voyage downstream. St Louis itself is a great disappointment for the author who remains unimpressed by efforts to revive the city through its convention center. He goes to the top of the Gateway Arch but all he can see ahead of him is a giant wasteland and the Mississippi itself looks like 'an open drain which had taken on the St Louis colours of rust, soot and rotting brick'.
It is now Halloween. On the strong advice of a more experienced sailor, a construction engineer from Chicago, Raban buys a $380 marine radio for communicating directly with the larger and much more powerful tugs ploughing up and down the river as well as for emergency use, admitting to his own naivety at not having obtained one earlier. Raban meets Ted and his family traveling on their 30-something-foot sloop, Morning Star out of Chicago, who, like him, are hooked on traveling, making a similar journey that also arouses the same feeling of envy in people when they hear about it.
Now that he is in the lower river, the atmosphere changes and before he reaches Memphis, Raban admits to being depressed by the river, giving a strong insight into the nature of the beast:
On Brandywine Chute I was depressed by the Mississippi in a way I hadn't been before. I feared its emptiness and loathed its enormous cargo of dead matter, the jungly shore, the purulent, inflamed water.
He feels cheered up on reaching Memphis and tracks the local mayoral election between a new hope, the black reverend judge, Otis Higgs, against the white incumbent. Becoming a part of Higgs's campaign team, the author encounters the strong race divisions in the city and his charismatic candidate's efforts ultimately end in failure. Raban leaves Memphis on board a tow, the Frank Stegbauer, pushing nine barges loaded with twelve million dollars' worth of ammonia. After sharing his Thanksgiving dinner with the crew and being congratulated by its Cap on his novice piloting skills, he is eventually offloaded above Vicksburg. After a short trip to Natchez, he is taken on another tow, the Jimmie L., to New Orleans, whose garish tourist-focused vitality proves a huge disappointment.
Wanting to escape the false 'magic of the city', he looks for the end of his journey in the old floodways south of New Orleans. Traveling along the Intracoastal Waterway, he is struck by the lusciousness of the vegetation around him, and the slow, meandering lifestyle of its Cajun inhabitants. After a final stop-over in deadbeat Morgan City and its fly-bitten motel, he reaches his journey's end in the seaward neck of Bayou Shaffer:
It was rich water. Dark with peat, thickened with salt, it was like warm soup. When the first things crawled out of the water, they must have come from swamp like this one, gingerly testing the mud with their new legs. I trailed my hand over the gunwale and licked my wet forefinger. It tasted of salt.
Barge often refers to a flat-bottomed inland waterway vessel which does not have its own means of mechanical propulsion. The first modern barges were pulled by tugs, but on inland waterways, most are pushed by pusher boats, or other vessels. The term barge has a rich history, and therefore there are many other types of barges.
The Mississippi River is the primary river and second-longest river of the largest drainage basin in the United States. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it flows generally south for 2,340 miles (3,766 km) to the Mississippi River Delta in the Gulf of Mexico. With its many tributaries, the Mississippi's watershed drains all or parts of 32 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces between the Rocky and Appalachian mountains. The main stem is entirely within the United States; the total drainage basin is 1,151,000 sq mi (2,980,000 km2), of which only about one percent is in Canada. The Mississippi ranks as the thirteenth-largest river by discharge in the world. The river either borders or passes through the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
A steamboat is a boat that is propelled primarily by steam power, typically driving propellers or paddlewheels. Steamboats sometimes use the prefix designation SS, S.S. or S/S or PS ; however, these designations are most often used for steamships.
Sultana was a commercial side-wheel steamboat which exploded and sank on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865, killing 1,167 people in what remains the worst maritime disaster in United States history.
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous novel by English writer Jerome K. Jerome describing a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers – the jokes have been praised as fresh and witty.
Canoe camping, also known as touring, tripping or expedition canoeing, is a combination of canoeing and camping. Canoe campers typically carry enough supplies with them to travel and camp for several days via a canoe.
Jonathan Mark Hamilton Priaulx Raban was a British award-winning travel writer, playwright, critic, and novelist.
Timothy Severin was a British explorer, historian, and writer. Severin was noted for his work in retracing the legendary journeys of historical figures. Severin was awarded both the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. He received the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for his 1982 book The Sindbad Voyage.
USS Mound City was a City-class ironclad gunboat built for service on the Mississippi River and its tributaries in the American Civil War. Originally commissioned as part of the Union Army's Western Gunboat Flotilla, she remained in that service until October 1862. Then the flotilla was transferred to the Navy and she became part of the Mississippi River Squadron, where she remained until the end of the war.
A sneakbox is a small boat that can be sailed, rowed, poled or sculled. It is predominantly associated with the Barnegat Bay in New Jersey, just as the canoe-like Delaware Ducker is associated with the New Jersey marshes along the Delaware River near Philadelphia.
The Thomas Cook Travel Book Award originated as an initiative of Thomas Cook AG in 1980, with the aim of encouraging and rewarding the art of literary travel writing. The awards stopped in 2005. One year later, the only other travel book award in Britain, the Dolman Best Travel Book Award, began in 2006.
Coasting is a travel book by Jonathan Raban. It has received a positive review by Beryl Bainbridge.
For Love & Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling, 1968 - 1987 is a book by Jonathan Raban. As the author states in the opening chapter, it is partly a collection of case-histories of his writing career over twenty years as a professional writer.
Bouker No. 2, originally Robert Rogers, was a tugboat built in 1904 for merchant service in and around the waters of New York City. During World War I, the tug was commissioned into the United States Navy as USS Bouker No. 2 (SP-1275), and continued in naval service until 1921. Briefly considered for service as a fireboat in Norfolk, Virginia, she was instead returned to merchant service in 1922 as a tugboat, under the name New York Marine Co. No. 6. She was sunk in collision with a passenger steamer in 1926.
Foreign Land (1985) is the first novel of the author Jonathan Raban.
The Advance was a composite schooner built in 1874 at Auckland, New Zealand, that was wrecked when she drifted onto rocks at Henrys Head, Botany Bay, New South Wales, Australia, on 12 June 1902, whilst carrying ballast between Wollongong and Newcastle, New South Wales.
Richard Holyoke was a seagoing steam tug boat built in 1877 in Seattle, Washington and which was in service on Puget Sound and other areas of the northwest Pacific coast until 1935. The vessel was considered to be one of the most powerful tugs of its time.
The Nimbin was a steel screw steamer built in 1927 at Copenhagen, that was the first motor vessel placed into the New South Wales coastal trade. It was owned and operated by the North Coast Steam Navigation Company and was the first Australian registered merchant ship to be lost during World War II when it struck a mine laid by the German auxiliary cruiser Pinguin. The Nimbin was on its way from Coffs Harbour to its home port, Sydney, with a cargo of bundled three-ply timber and a cargo of pigs. One third of the ship was blown away and it sank in three minutes. Seven men were killed. The remaining thirteen clung to bundles of plywood. Some hours later an air force plane from RAAF Base Rathmines saw the survivors and directed the coastal ship SS Bonalbo to the scene to retrieve them.
SS Kate was a wooden carvel screw steamer built in 1883 at Balmain that was twice struck and sunk by Port Jackson & Manly Steamship Company ferries.
Horace Ezra Bixby was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio river system from the late 1840s until his death in 1912. Bixby is notable in his own right for his high standing in his profession, for his technical contributions to it, and for his service in the American Civil War. However, he is best known for having had as his "cub pilot" the young man known to him as Sam Clemens, later to become famous under his pen name as American author Mark Twain. Twain's descriptions of Bixby's character and pedagogic style form a good part of his memoir Life on the Mississippi, and it was through this medium that Bixby—much to his annoyance—became well-known beyond the circles of his family, friends and profession.