“Mr. Bolt made no mention of that. Indeed, he had very little to say. With the help of Sa-Ku-Nah, he fixed hemp rope to the leather lashings of the raft. The two conferred briefly, then he announced that they would let the rope play out across the width of the river. We were to follow with the raft after they had made it across, and only upon their signal.”
“So it went. Mir. Bolt and Sa-Ku-Nah, more experienced than the rest of us, made it to the far riverbank without mishap. Yet, as we watched, we noted that the river, at its deepest, covered Mir. Bolt up to his shoulders and Sa-Ku-Nah all the way to his neck. They wound the rope around a birch tree of a reasonable thickness, then signaled us to push the raft into the water and follow them across. Thus, we were in this way able to march along behind the raft, holding it steady and on a straight course. At the deepest part of the ford, young Coley, who was quite the shortest of us, found it necessary to float behind, mouth and nose raised out of the water, that he might not drown.”
“In this way we came across without more serious difficulty. Mr. Bolt, with the help of the Indian guide, had managed it with his strength; and with it, too, he had saved the raft. Had he not intervened successfully on our first attempt and the raft had been lost, there would have been no point in continuing the expedition; my scales, my weights and measures, were the very reason for enduring these hardships. Without them I would have been quite unable to do that for which I had come.”
“Having reached the farther bank, we could do little more than rest through the remainder of the day. We made an early camp and dried our clothes by the heat of the fire. I took the opportunity to write this long account of the day and draw this picture of the raft which bore our ‘possibles’.”
And below the account Lawrence Paltrow had written of the fording of the Cumberland River, he had indeed sketched the raft on which their belongings and necessities (‘possibles’) had been piled. There was even a detail drawing which showed just how the logs had been bound together. He had a wide-ranging interest in many matters and an unlimited curiosity regarding details of every sort. Reading through the ‘Journal of Exploration and Discovery’ I was struck again and again by the excitement engendered in the reader (in this reader, in any case) by the tale he told. In truth, reader, I believe that I must have reread the passage just quoted three times or more in the preparation of my report to Sir John, so taken was I by the thrill of that dangerous crossing.
He had asked me to read and report to him on all the material I had taken from the Widow Paltrow’s rooms. He wished me to treat Journal, letters, and all in the same way we had done the Elison/Mudge papers — questioning, searching for inconsistencies or coincidences, and above all, giving attention to details.
The letters had not much to yield. They did, however, fix the time of Mr. Paltrow’s departure from England quite specifically. He made a hellish and frightening voyage from Bristol on the good ship Hesperian, which sailed January third and did not put in to Baltimore until the second of April. Though he wrote a good account of it in the letter which he mailed to his mother upon his arrival, there was naught in it that would explain why he had made the voyage, nor why it could not have waited until a more convenient and less violent time of the year. And again, the letter written upon his arrival by coach in Frenchman’s Bend had little to say about such matters. Only the last of the three gave some hint to her of the purpose of his long journey, when he wrote, “I am confident, Mama, that this great gamble shall prove worthwhile. I could return to England a wealthy man; then would we be poor relations no longer. We deserve better.”
Yet all through his ‘Journal of Exploration and Discovery’ were scattered such optimistic musings as that. And each time I read that entry of May twelfth, I found myself wondering what sort of instruments Mr. Paltrow had taken with him. Scales, weights and measures? Only these? For what purpose? And why were they so necessary to the expedition that, had they been lost, all would have been lost with them? Still, no matter how he tempted speculation, he would not say specifically why he had come, nor what it was they sought on this expedition into the ‘back lands’, as he called them. It was as if he had been given specific orders to make no mention of these essential details; and while he might follow these orders to the letter, he was not above dropping hints to whomever might read the Journal.
One more matter caught me as I gathered my material for the report: There were implications in a number of the entries that when their party reached its mysterious destination, he would be unable to write more — whether for lack of time, or because matters would then become so grandly secret that he would have to stop writing altogether for fear that he might divulge some important bit of information quite unawares. Perhaps it might be best to illustrate what I mean by quoting the rather short final entry.
“May 18,1763.”
“We have arrived at our destination — or so I am told. There is naught to distinguish this place from any one of a hundred similar places I have seen along the way here, except perhaps for that one oak tree. I recall we had emerged from a deep forest of such darkness that when we at last left it and came out into the natural meadow, it was as if we had gone from night to day in a single step. The open meadow, more or less round in shape and no more than a hundred rods in diameter, was covered by a grass that in most places seemed already to have reached half a foot in height. A stream (called a ‘creek’ in these parts) twisted its way through the grass and led past the oak tree which stood more or less in the middle of the meadow. It was probably no older than the many oaks in the forest from which we had just emerged; nevertheless, standing alone by the stream, it seemed utterly ancient, its trunk immense and its boughs and branches overhanging a territory of rods and acres — if I may be allowed a bit of poetic exaggeration. Mr. Bolt pointed at the tree and said that we would camp under it that night, and in the morning build a permanent shelter. Mr. Coley says he believes we have entered the colony of Georgia.”
“I am pleased that we have arrived at last, though it seems likely that this will mean the end of these comments and descriptions, this record of exploration and discovery. I did, after all, make a solemn vow, and Mr. Bolt is determined to see that I keep that promise. I fear I have deceived him shamefully.”
“Work — my true reason for having come this long way — begins on the morrow. And so below, my last drawing no doubt for some time to come. Let it be a sketch of the oak tree which I sought vainly to describe in words.”