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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 83

New Orleans

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New Orleans.

When in Melbourne with the show I promised you to write when we struck any place of particular interest at the moment. We decided to try New Orleans for the Exhibition season.

The city can now be reached by three routes—seaward, up the Mississippi; landward, down the Mississippi; or again across Continent from San Francisco, the lines being open right through. We sent our traps down river, from Vicksburg. I joined from New York, by sea.

As our mammoth paddle steamer, with the beam engine, beat up the Gulf of Mexico, I was thinking of the stagnation of times in old Spain. The Spaniards were settled on the shore of the Gulf for two centuries without discovering that the Mississippi existed, though its mouths poured out with the volume and diversity of those of the Ganges and Nile. The Mississippi was discovered from the land.

Passing a multitude of steamers and ships, we steamed up the embouchure for New Orleans, a distance of 103 miles from the ocean. The country is almost as flat as a pancake, with cotton plantations, sugar plantations, jute plantations, swamps, and tangle, a realisation of the Atchafalaya River in the "Octoroon." The Monarch of Waters, the mighty Mississippi, slops along languidly and muddily, with sludge from the flood freshes tinging it yellow. Any quantity of driftwood races and eddies on the current.

After a rich red sunset we had a majestic night scene, under the stars, while the plashing of the paddles indicated that we were making headway for the Crescent City, as New Orleans is termed, from its occupying the outside of a great scimitar bend of the river, its Brooklyn or Shoreditch being on the inner side. The lights of other steamers were like fire-flies on the river.

We approached New Orleans at sunrise. The immense city, which occupies more space than any on earth, I believe, is not impressive. It is not altogether unlike Calcutta, and yet more resembles Yeddo. There are no eminences to relieve the vision, as in Melbourne. A square twelve miles each way will not embrace the whole of New Orleans. This straggling city spreads over 150 square miles. Its population is about 220,000.

We hawsered into our place in the wharf line, which presents its seven miles of shipping and steamers on both sides. Here the ocean traffic mingles with the fleet of superb Palace steamers from down the river. New Orleans is protected by dykes from its river, like Holland from the sea. The city is mostly below high water level of the Mississippi. The dyke is called the Levee. It extends all along, like the Thames embankment, with a breadth page 66 of 100 yards. This is the shipping line of business, livelier, in the export season, than London Docks.

The city slopes away from the Levee. There is nothing to correspond to Broadway or Bourke-street. The life of the city is spread out more than anywhere. The consequence is a general air of languor; the climate resembles Sydney, with a close heat, clammy and sticky. Romance pervades New Orleans. The American, French, and Spanish elements predominate, with an infusion of all other's from under the sun. The state of Louisiana and City of New Orleans were settled by the French. Afterwards this territory was handed over to the Spaniards. The French then obtained it again. A few years subsequent Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States. Thus General Jackson obtained his chance for whipping the English.

The Exhibition Building is much on the ground lines of that in Melbourne, but not so substantial. The opening ceremony was very like the Melbourne, under a similar transept, with a multifarious band of music massed on the tiers behind the stage. New Orleans is enthusiastically musical. The performance was glorious. As regards the Exhibition itself, the cotton is, of course, the main feature, but the tremendous and unprecedented floods have wrought such destruction within the last three years, that the cotton display would have been far excelled before their occurrence. Sugar did not suffer to anything like such an extent, and has been the prime paying industry of Louisiana of late. The jute factories bring up Indian reminiscences, and are going ahead famously in consequence of the fibre processes invented here. There ought to have been Australians looking up the sugar and jute.

Melbourne, the Paris of the South, will have its carnival in future years. We remarked that over our Mardi Gras processions there, which made such a sensation. The New Orleanists are getting up a dazzling street phantasmagoria for the Exhibition. It will be at night, by torchlight, with a bewildering succession of triumphal cars, pulled by a host of gaily-caparisoned mules. The pageant is to embody mythological subjects on a gigantic scale, with tableaux of living figures, men and women, on the cars, brilliantly illuminated with the portable electric light.

Statistics show that it took nearly fifteen years after the end of the Civil War for New Orleans to recover the financial position which it held in 1860. That is to say in 1879 its revenue had only mounted again up to the pitch it had reached in 1860. The war made a radical change in New Orleans. Every Southerner was ruined. The city is now like Ninon de l'Enclos at the age of sixty. Traces abound of the sumptuous luxury of this Paradise in the last generation.