Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
RICH COHEN
Pirate City
FROM The Paris Review
L ONG BEFORE THE foundations of New Orleans were laid, the river existed as a legend and a
rumor.Itwasthe monster tothe west, just beyondthe next hill, stand oftrees, prairie, horizon.
It was the mother of all waters, the torrent that flowed out of the garden to touch the desolate
earth.ItflowedthroughtheIndianimaginationasitflowsthroughtheAmericanmind,through
music and literature, carrying the shipwreck and the bloated body of the fool who went miss-
ingafterapartyonthelevee.TheriverstartsasastreaminMinnesotaandpicksupvolumeas
itheadssouth,meandering throughthecountry—“It seems safetosaythat itisalsothecrook-
edest river in the world,” Mark Twain writes in Life on the Mississippi , “since in one part of
itsjourneyitusesuponethousandthreehundredmilestocoverthesamegroundthatthecrow
would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five”—before shattering into a network of bayous,
swamps, and estuaries below New Orleans. This is the delta, and it's a mess. For generations,
sailorscouldnotfindareliablechanneltofollowintotheriver,asthemouthoftheMississippi
constantly silted up with debris from the north. “The river annually empties four hundred and
six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico,” writes Twain. “This mud, solidified, would
make a mass a mile square and two hundred and forty-one feet high.” Simply put, the country
is vomiting its innards into the Gulf.
The mouth of the Mississippi appeared on Spanish maps years before it had been seen by
a white man. I'm thinking of a particular map: Tabula Terra Nova , drawn in the early 1500s.
This is one of the first renderings of the world as it would come to be known: two hemi-
spheres—Occident, Orient. America is a shapeless mass, the Tropic of Capricorn cleaving the
New World in two. Due west of Ethiopia, adrift in Oceanus Occidentalis, the Southern Hemi-
sphere is crowded with the names of settlements. But a generation after Columbus, North
America is punctuated by few landmarks, the river among them. It emerges from beyond the
left border of the map and branches as it touches the sea. It was drawn before the voyages of
Ponce de León, meaning it had not been seen by the mapmaker, or by anyone who might have
spoken to the mapmaker.
The Mississippi was navigated by white men in 1519. So here's the first tall ship, with its
sailsandsteel-platedmen,cruisingthearchipelagoofgrassislands.Theshipwascaptainedby
AlonsoÁlvarezdePineda,famousinSeville,anexplorerwhoreturnedhomewithmiraculous
tales of the New World. He traveled 20 miles up the Mississippi that first trip. He said he had
seen a city on a hill beside the river, and in that city little men, pygmies, covered in golden
ornament. Pineda, killed by Indians on a later voyage, left behind the first accurate map of
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