He seemed to think this would spite Captain
Sproule very much. I expected him to leave the boat when we reached
Syracuse; but he never did, and I think he kept on driving after I quit.
Our wages cost the boat twenty dollars a month--ten dollars each--and
the two hands we carried must have brought the pay-roll up to about
seventy a month besides our board. We always had four horses, two in the
stable forward, and two pulling the boat. We plied through to Buffalo,
and back to Albany, carrying farm products, hides, wool, wheat, other
grain, and such things as potash, pearlash, staves, shingles, and salt
from Syracuse, and sometimes a good deal of meat; and what the railway
people call "way-freight" between all the places along the route. Our
boat was much slower than the packets and the passenger boats which had
relays of horses at stations and went pretty fast, and had good cabins
for the passengers, too, and cooks and stewards, serving fine meals;
while all our cooking was done by the captain or one of our hands,
though sometimes we carried a cook.
Bill, the man who answered "Ay, ay, sir!" when the captain asked him to
witness that he had refused me passage on the boat, was a salt-water
sailor who had signed on with the boat while drunk at Albany and now
said he was going to Buffalo to try sailing on the Lakes. The other man
was a green Irishman called Paddy, though I suppose that was not his
name. He was good only as a human derrick or crane.
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