THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 24, 1995 TAG: 9506230042
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 154 lines
THE PRIDE OF CAMPBELL County was whispering beneath the sagging boughs of riverbank oaks when the hiss reached the boat.
Up ahead, still invisible on the seemingly placid James River, trouble waited: a chain of rocks jutting from the water, green-slimed and eons old, splitting the slow water into dozens of fast, foaming braids.
David Haney, the captain, spun to face the crew from his station on the bow. ``We need some poling here,'' he barked over the growing voice of the rapids. ``Let's get to work!''
Crewmen in calf-length britches, balanced on boards fastened with square-headed nails to the boat's floor, grabbed 10-foot poles of poplar and plunged them into the quickening river. And away from the bank and into the maw swung the Pride of Campbell County.
In a 20th century craft, the rapids interrupting the James as it loops through the Virginia Piedmont hardly count as challenges.
Haney's was not such a craft, however: It was a bateau - a replica of a flatbottomed, wood-plank freighter used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to ferry tobacco, iron ore, wheat and coal from the state's uplands to the sea.
It was a faithful reproduction. It was powered only by current and poles. It was steered only by massive sweep oars at bow and stern. Six inches of brown water had seeped between its planks to slosh around the ankles of the crew.
And, like the batteaux of old, the Pride of Campbell County and 20 other replicas floating from Lynchburg to Richmond this week required a keen-eyed captain and hard poling to bull through the river's falls and shallows.
Now the boat creaked as the current accelerated beneath it. The hissing built. The rocks swung into view downstream, glistening in the mid-morning sun.
``We need to get over to the right!'' Haney yelled, scowling from beneath a green tam-o-shanter. ``Let's pole on the left!''
Jeff Taylor, bearded, bare-chested and barrel-shaped, stepped to the port side and jammed his pole into the pebbly riverbed. Haney slashed at the water with his sweep oar. Glen Shrewsbury, wiry and gray-moustached, pulled hard on a cigar as he pulled hard on the stern sweep.
The boat sidled to the right. The rocks loomed. A narrow opening between them - very narrow - suddenly materialized far across the fast-moving water, seemingly much too far away to reach before the current became overpowering.
Fifty-one weeks a year Haney is a train conductor. Taylor is a button-down economic development rep in Lynchburg. Haney's stepson, 16-year-old Nathan Funderburk, is a standout high school athlete.
But each June they discard uniforms and schedules to join the James River Batteau Festival, a decade-old celebration of Virginia's great river and the pioneers who built its towns and trade.
For eight days they retrace the 120-mile journey taken by batteaux from Lynchburg to Richmond in the republic's infancy, when hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these boats plied the James.
They wear the blousy wool and muslin of their forebears, camp in period tents, cook in iron skillets over open fires, stop in once-bustling riverside settlements that have faded into historical footnotes: Riverville. Norwood and Howardsville. Scottsville. Columbia.
``There's nothing that will explain a culture or period like handling articles from that period or culture,'' explained Thomas Patrick Hay of Williamsburg, a crewman aboard the Richmond Rockett.
``When you're going down the James River, and there's nothing modern at all in view, and everybody in your boat is dressed in period costume, and somebody pulls out a tin whistle and starts playing `MacPherson's Lament' - well, there really isn't anything that compares with that.''
Most of the journey is restful, a quiet passage on flat water, just as it was 200 years ago. But the festival's authenticity means that where the James turns mean, today's bateau replicas are no better off than the genuine articles.
And it does turn mean. Nineteenth-century river guidebooks are rife with warnings about rapids, of boating disasters, of hidden rocks and killer stumps. ``It was with extreme difficulty that our boat could be got through with seven hands,'' one 1818 account read of Goosby Island Falls, near Warren Ferry in Albermarle County. ``Several boats have been lost on this fall.''
``It was the kind of work that could bust a man up really easily,'' said Jim Loba of Richmond, another crewman on the Rockett. ``It was very dangerous. A lot of people were badly injured or killed doing this.''
This was not lost on those aboard the Pride of Campbell County on Tuesday, the 1995 festival's fourth day, as their batteau - more than 8 feet wide and 50 feet long - barreled toward the rocks.
Two days, before the Fluvanna had snagged a boulder while shooting a small rapids at Pettyjohn Island Falls, just upstream from Galt's Mill. The batteau had whipped sideways, filled with water, and almost instantly splintered.
Such accidents eventually prompted 19th century shippers to demand a safer means of transporting goods into Richmond, and the result was the James River and Kanawha Canal, a channel and towpath built parallel to the river. The canal - of which vestiges remain along much of the festival's course - spelled the end of Virginia's reliance on the batteau.
Their passing wasn't viewed with much romance, at the time, for canal boats were faster, as well as safer: A batteau traveled from Lynchburg to Richmond in seven days, and made the return trip in 10; a canalboat did it in two and two. By the late 19th century, few batteaux survived. By the 20th, they'd disappeared so completely that the details of their construction were lost.
Or so it seemed. In 1983, construction crews excavating the site of the James Center in downtown Richmond struck history - the remains of the city's old canal turning basin, filled in and paved over long before, but still containing, in the mud that had once covered its bed, a fleet of sunken canalboats and batteaux.
History buffs upriver used the find to construct their own replica, floated it down the James, and invited the tiny river towns along their route to build their own craft. They did, and in the years that followed, the batteau were followed downriver by a ragtag, hundreds-strong army of hangers-on and support personnel.
Today, the festival and its caravan of funnel-cake vendors, T-shirt booths and gypsy jewelers, is the most eagerly anticipated day of the year on this stretch of the James.
Capt. David Haney now ploughed frantically with the sweep oar. ``We need more on the left!'' he yelled. Beyond him, the crew could see the exposed rocks fast approaching, and now realized that in the gaps between them the water rippled over slabs just below the river's surface.
The five hours that they'd floated so far that morning had been without incident: After breaking camp at dawn in Wingina, a map speck built around a bridge crossing in Nelson County, Haney and crew had poled shimmering water straddled by rolling farmland and dense stands of oak, sycamore and poplar.
Grand colonial mansions on far-off hillsides had slid by. The shiny gold dome of the Yogaville ashram had peaked over the bank, prompting Haney to erase the idyllic laze there with a blast from the boat's brass cannon.
That laze was memory now. Taylor and Hart poled hard on the port side, struggling against the current for the south bank. The ungainly vessel's bow yawed to the right, and Haney reversed his sweep to straighten it out as a rock swept past, millimeters from the port gunwhale.
Another rock, this one on the right. ``Pole left!'' Haney cried, and the boat shuddered and flexed as the boulder scraped down the starboard waterline. Then, suddenly, a rock on the left too close and too enormous to avoid.
Haney had just enough time to call ``We need to go right!'' before the Pride of Campbell County hit it hard. The force of the blow tossed Nathan Funderburk off the starboard side, into the rocky water, and the boat wheeled sideways. Time slowed. Rapids slammed into the port side, now facing upstream. The rock held the batteau fast.
Then, on this day merciful, it let go. The boat lurched downstream. Haney screamed for more poling. Funderburk clambered back aboard, dripping and whooping. And the Pride of Campbell County made for Scottsville. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by D. Kevin Elliott, Staff
A batteau works its way down the James River near Howardsvile.
[Howardsville]
Matt Leonard holds his daughter, Olivia, while waiting to board a
batteau.
A batteau pulls away from the campgroud at Wingina during the James
River Batteau Festival, a decade-old celebration held each June.
Map
EARL SWIFT photo
David Haney, captain of the Pride of Campbell County III, mans the
front sweep as the boat heads downriver.
by CNB