The Hudson
The Rivers of America Series
by: Carl Carmer   Illustrated by: Stow Wengenroth

CHAPTER 20

The Marriage of the Waters

"Who comes there?" shouted the captain of Young Lion of the West, waiting beside the stone aqueduct at Rochester.
"Your brothers from the West on the waters of the Great Lakes."
"By what means have they been diverted so far from their natural course?"
"Through the channel of the great Erie Canal."
"By whose authority and by whom was a work of such magnitude accomplished?" called the catechizer.
"By the authority and by the enterprise of the people of the State of New York."

With that the whole valley of the Genesee shook with the cheering of crowds and the salute of guns and the explosion of fireworks.

Then the Young Lion of the West, with its cargo of two eagles and two wolves, a fawn and a fox and four raccoons, swung in behind the Seneca Chief of Buffalo, the Niagara of Black Rock, and the Noah’s Ark, whose passengers included two Seneca Indian boys and a black bear, and moved on eastward. At Weedsport the next day two gunners enthusiastically ramming home a second charge to express their emotions at the sight of the flotilla were blown to small bits--but their coincidental deaths were not allowed to dull the spirits of the voyagers.

The after-midnight stars were paling as the boats approached the big lock which would set the procession down on the surface of the Hudson. There they waited through the night hours, and in the morning of November second they sank slowly to the river level. "At 10 o’clock," said the Albany Advertiser, "the Seneca Chief with the governor, lieutenant governor, the Buffalo, Western and New York Committees on board came down in fine style and the thunder of cannon proclaimed that the work was done! and the assembled multitude made the welkin ring with shouts of gladness." As they floated free from the lock the Seneca Chief and the Young Lion of the West were each taken in tow by ten yawls, manned by crews of four rowers, with sloop captains as coxswains. Though a double line of canalboats they moved down the Albany basin and through the stoop lock into the Hudson. They were towed up to the east side of the pier beside the steamboat Swiftsure. Then the ceremonies began. All day the Albany militia marched and countermarched in their fancy uniforms, bonfires lighted the city hilltop, there was feasting and singing on the Hudson’s wharves.

At ten on Friday morning, November third, the banner-hung steamer Chancellor Livingston, a hundred and fifty feet of gleaming white paint and gilded tracery, led off the greatest procession the surface of the river had ever borne. In her tow plowed the Seneca Chief, repository of western produce and culture. The brand-new Constitution, fastest of river packets, was next, bringing the Young Lion of the West in her wake. The Chief Justice Marshall towed the Niagara. Then came the swift Constellation and, on the towropes of the Olive Branch and the Swiftsure, the safety barges Richmond and Matilda, bearing precious ladies at a discreet distance from the danger of exploding boilers. The little Saratoga, "sporting like a dolphin," sped from ship to ship. Beneath the colored streamers and fluttering banners of each vessel a brass band poured out its collective heart in patriotic airs. The artillery companies at Albany fired one great volley as the fleet moved away and the people on the crowded wharves and piers yelled and waved.

As the river widened, the procession assumed a squadron formation and there was much calling of messages and offering of toasts between passengers of different vessels. Soon Hudson was in sight and the long single file was resumed. Engines were ordered stopped and the big boats drifted slowly downstream while salvos from Prospect Hill sounded out above the heads of thousands massed upon the riverbank, and the salty sea dogs of Hudson looked curiously at the Seneca Chief, freighter from fresh-water oceans to the northwest. The guns of Athens answered the fusillade from the east bank and the Young Lion of the West answered both with a single shot from the little brass cannon at her prow. At Catskill a military company was paraded at the wharf, firing volley after volley into the clear warm air of early afternoon. Signal guns along the banks warned the smaller towns of the passing of the "fleet from the dominion of fairies." Cheered by imported wines and "sumptuous fare," the passengers hailed Germantown and Saugerties, Barrytown and Kingston. One of them wrote a few days later: "After Alexander of Macedon had carried his arms into India he did not descend the Indus with greater triumph or make a prouder display."

The light grew softer on the green water and the hills began to turn blue. As darkness settled, the Chancellor Livingston suddenly became a great triangle of burning lanterns. The other vessels were atwinkle. Staatsburg was a dark splotch of trees and white houses but just beyond it, at Hyde Park, James Livingston’s big colonial mansion stood in light. Down by the water tar barrels burned fiercely, throwing out tongues of red flame. Rockets from the Chief Justice Marshall ascended in streaks of fire and burst into showers of stars drifting down to meet their own reflections in the water. Poughkeepsie was one red glare and a thunder of many cannon.

Midnight had come when the fleet reached West Point but a salute of twenty-four guns greeted its arrival, setting strong echoes playing among the mountains. Stiff and fresh as on morning parade the cadet band marched aboard the Chancellor Livingston, bass drums pounding, brasses blaring to the stars. The twenty-four guns gave them a rousing farewell as their music faded downriver. After that ‘there was a long silence while the night shifts went on duty and the passengers slept and the big steamers chugged along toward New York and its great day.

"The face of Nature was illuminated with a smile from Heaven," as the steamboat Washington, moving up the Hudson at sunrise, met the fleet "between the State Prison and Weehawken" (off West 10th Street, Greenwich Village).

"From whence came ye?"
"An escort from Lake Erie."
"Whither bound?"
"To the Atlantic--what vessel is that?"

"The Yacht of the City of New York having on board a Deputation from the Honourable the Corporation to welcome you into our waters, congratulate you on the great event, and offer the hospitalities of the City."

"We highly appreciate this mark of civility on the part of the City and request the Deputation from the Honourable Corporation to come on board."

After the deputation was safely delivered to the Chancellor Livingston, the Washington came about to join the procession. As it did so, from the towers of the shore hundreds of bells began a clamorous pealing and all over the city bands began to play. Cannon roared salutes "and their reverberations from the rocky shores and romantic cliffs of New Jersey, added, if possible, new glories." The Hudson was so crowded with small boats that there was scarcely room for the parade to move downstream. At the foot of Whitehall Street the shining steamer Commerce towed into line the safety barge Lady Clinton, a floating island of green boughs, brilliant blossoms, and distinguished ladies. The steamer Fulton moved up beside the Chancellor Livingston to share with her the honor of towing out to the ocean the first canalboat ever to make the voyage from the Great Lakes to New York. Behind the trio the pretty boats of the Watermen of Whitehall, the Sylph and the Lady of the Lake, gleamed in sunlight, moving slowly over placid, windless waters. There were fourteen steamboats in line now. The sailing packet Hamlet, strung with pennants, had been taken in tow by two steamers because no air filled her canvas.

Just within Sandy Hook the United States schooner Porpoise and her crew, "a Deputation from Neptune," awaited the procession. As the vessels approached they veered about her into a great circle three miles in circumference.

On the Seneca Chief two bright green kegs ringed with gilded hoops were brought to the deck and the commodore of the fleet, Mr. Rhind, had an idea, apparently sudden. He asked that a portion of the Lake Erie waters which they contained might be saved and sent to General Lafayette in "bottles of American fabrick" made by Mummer and Company to be conveyed in a box made by Duncan Phyfe from a cedar log brought by the Seneca Chief from her home port. The request having been granted, tall, majestic Governor De Witt Clinton lifted one of the kegs and poured water from Lake Erie into the Atlantic, saying,

"May the God of the heavens and the earth smile most propitiously on this work, accomplished by the wisdom, public spirit, and energy of the people of the State of New York and may He render it subservient to the best interests of the human race."

Then that champion speechmaker of the era, "Nestor of American Science," Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, continued the formalities of the marriage of the waters with a speech so eloquent, so learned, so full of symbolic meaning that all were satisfied though few understood. As he spoke, the great man opened phial after phial of rare waters, sent to him by admirers from all over the world, and emptied them into the waves off Sandy Hook. The pure flood of the Elbe fell from his hands in a glinting stream; the "sacred waters of the Ganges, overflowings of the Nile," dippings from the Amazon, the Neva, the Plate, Columbia, Tagus, Onnoco, Seine, and Thames, all united with the ocean as an emblem of our commercial intercourse with all ports of the world."

In conclusion Dr. Mitchill said: "Sir! He who now accosts you has no contrivance to conjure up new associations of ideas nor to utter them in phrases novel or unheard before; yet if he did possess that power he would tell you how recently imparted influence of republicanization would henceforward cooperate with the sea’s phosphorescence to render it luminous, and with its salinity to continue it wholesome; be would portray freedom pervading the billows and rolling with every wave to the shores, and trace its workings upon the compacted continents and scattered islands comprehended within its embrace. Had he the ability be would observe that this renovating and regenerating would rise, by exhalation into the atmosphere, and impart some of its qualities; that it would impregnate the clouds and descend in rains and dews; that it would enter the vegetables and animals which constitute the food of the human race; and that finally, the frame of man himself would be gradually so modified and mended by it, that at length even the sable and savage tribes dwelling in the tracts bordering on Senegal, the Gambia, and the Congo, shall lay aside their ferocity and enjoy, as we ourselves do, Liberty, under the guidance of the Law."

After that speech the procession moved off again, returning from the deep to the festivities ashore. As the Porpoise passed the English sloops of war Kingfisher and Swallow in the harbor she manned her yards and gave the Bnitishers three cheers. His Majesty’s men heartily responded and the British band struck up "Yankee Doodle." The West Point musicians answered with "God Save the King." International amity was further encouraged by a breakfast party on the Swallow, at which Lieutenant Baldock, in command, showed his American guests his own water colors picturing the Eagle and the Lion--Columbia and Bnitannia--in affectionate embrace.

Meanwhile, the landlubbers of the city had not been idle. At the Battery bugles were calling the five-mile parade into formation before eleven in the morning. Four mounted trumpeters rode out in front and a band marched briskly after, playing a march "composed expressly for the occasion." The grand marshal rode in advance of his aides, all wearing white satin collars with colored rosettes and carrying short white batons tipped with gold. Sturdy foresters followed on foot bearing on their shoulders axes, symbolic of their conquest of the thick western woods, and after them farmers and gardeners with spades and hoes. Then came the almost endless line of social and trade groups headed by the Horticultural Society.

The tailors marched proudly, carrying out the bridal idea of the occasion with two large banners, one depicting Adam and Eve under a tree in the Garden of Eden, with the inscription "United We Are," and the other reading "I was naked and ye clothed me." Tiny white-clad Master Hatfield led the men of his father’s trade, the hatters, bearing in his youthful arms a flag on which was printed a couplet:

Rocks and hills can’t now restrain
Erie’s waters from the Main.

The journeymen coopers, on a large-wheeled stage, manufactured as they rode a sixty-gallon cask and knocked together a forty-gallon job as an encore. The combmakers, as their car moved along, cut, manufactured, and finished fifty dozen shell and horn combs which they tossed to pretty lady spectators. Many fire companies were in line and the silver trumpets of the captains caught the sun, the horses stepped proudly, the engines shone, the uniforms were brilliant and romantically cut. The stage of the Typographical Society was drawn by four horses. On each side of it, operating at full speed, was a newly invented gilded printing press and between them, in Dr. Benjamin Franklin’s old armchair, sat James Cram, most venerable printer of the city. Two men costumed as heralds and two as Mercury helped him fold and toss to the crowds broadsides on which the busy presses had printed an ode composed for the occasion by printer Samuel Woodworth. It ended with symbolic stanzas that were nevertheless realistic enough to bring blushes to the cheeks of female readers along the way:

‘Tis Done! the monarch of the briny tide
Whose giant arm encircles earth
To virgin Erie is allied
A bright-eyed nymph of mountain birth

Today the Sire of Ocean takes
A sylvan maiden to his arms
The goddess of the crystal lakes
In all her native charms

She comes attended by a sparkling train;
The Naiads of the West her nuptials grace
She meets the sceptred father of the main
And in his heaving bosom hides her virgin face.

The great parade lasted until late in the afternoon. The sea procession landed at Pier Number One on the East River and all the men participants joined the marchers. Throngs lined Greenwich Street, Canal, Broadway, and Broome, cheering the bakers and butchers, the brewers and booksellers, the millers and music dealers, the tallow chandlers, the students of Columbia College, the soapmakers, the tin-plate workers.

The thousands who crowded about City Hall that night soon realized that the spectacles of the day were only a preliminary to the glories after sundown. Though City Hall was lighted "by twenty-three hundred and two brilliant lights--1,542 wax candles, 450 lamps, and 310 variegated lamps," making fireworks difficult, Richard Wilcox, pyrotechnic artist, succeeded in completely overwhelming this flood of illumination by the use of thirteen gerbes, or sheaves, "each six inches in calibre and containing fifty pounds of composition, alternately changing into Chinese, Diamond and other fires." Auxiliary works placed behind these were fired simultaneously to give background. At the same moment fifteen hundred large fireballs rose, crossing and, recrossing in intersecting arcs of concentric circles. A gleaming willow tree, decorated with yellow stars, hung for a moment in the night sky and then a poplar lifted boughs of flame. A shower of golden rain descended, and suddenly the rain was silver. Three hundred and twenty rockets of four pounds each, thirty of nine pounds, twenty-four of twenty pounds, hurtled upward from both wings of the composition and, as their arcs crossed, burst into fiery serpents, scrolls of light, the delicate tracery of snails. The largest rockets, fired at a 40-degree angle so as to fall into the Hudson, left behind them wide peacock spreads of colored lights that drifted slowly down to meet the water.

Everybody went home then, happy that after eight years of waiting, Clinton’s Ditch was finished and that, through its confluence with the Hudson, the West and the East were one.