Chapter 13

Chapter 13
A Pilot's Needs

BUT I am wandering from what I was intending to do, that is,
make plainer than perhaps appears in the previous chapters,
some of the peculiar requirements of the science of piloting.
First of all, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly
cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection.
Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory.
He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so;
he must know it; for this is eminently one of the 'exact' sciences.
With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times,
if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase 'I think,'
instead of the vigorous one 'I know!' One cannot easily realize
what a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelve
hundred miles of river and know it with absolute exactness.
If you will take the longest street in New York, and travel up
and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every
house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign
by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly
name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random
in that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will then
have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a
pilot's knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head.
And then if you will go on until you know every street crossing,
the character, size, and position of the crossing-stones,
and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places,
you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in order
to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if you
will take half of the signs in that long street, and CHANGE THEIR
PLACES once a month, and still manage to know their new positions
accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes
without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required
of a pilot's peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi.

I think a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thing
in the world. To know the Old and New Testaments by heart,
and be able to recite them glibly, forward or backward,
or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite both ways
and never trip or make a mistake, is no extravagant mass
of knowledge, and no marvelous facility, compared to a pilot's
massed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvelous facility
in the handling of it. I make this comparison deliberately,
and believe I am not expanding the truth when I do it.
Many will think my figure too strong, but pilots will not.

And how easily and comfortably the pilot's memory does its work;
how placidly effortless is its way; how UNCONSCIOUSLY it lays up
its vast stores,