Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine

Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine,
Volume 54,
No. 337, November, 1843, by Various This eBook is for the use of
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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337,
November, 1843
Author: Various
Release Date: August 27, 2005 [EBook #16607]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH ***

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BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCXXXVII. NOVEMBER, 1843. VOL. LIV.

CONTENTS.
ADVENTURES IN TEXAS. TRAVELS OF KERIM KHAN. THE
BANKING-HOUSE. THE WRONGS OF WOMEN. MARSTON; OR,
THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN. CEYLON COMMERCIAL
POLICY. A SPECULATION ON THE SENSES. ON THE BEST
MEANS OF ESTABLISHING A COMMERCIAL INTERCOURSE
BETWEEN THE ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC OCEANS. TWO
DREAMS. THE GAME UP WITH REPEAL AGITATION.
* * * * *

ADVENTURES IN TEXAS.
NO. 1.
A SCAMPER IN THE PRAIRIE OF JACINTO.
Reader! Were you ever in a Texian prairie? Probably not. I have been;
and this was how it happened. When a very young man, I found myself
one fine morning possessor of a Texas land-scrip--that is to say, a
certificate of the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company, in which it
was stated, that in consideration of the sum of one thousand dollars,
duly paid and delivered by Mr Edward Rivers into the hands of the
cashier of the aforesaid company, he, the said Edward Rivers, was
become entitled to ten thousand acres of Texian land, to be selected by
himself, or those he should appoint, under the sole condition of not
infringing on the property or rights of the holders of previously given
certificates.

Ten thousand acres of the finest land in the world, and under a heaven
compared to which, our Maryland sky, bright as it is, appears dull and
foggy! It was a tempting bait; too good a one not to be caught at by
many in those times of speculation; and accordingly, our free and
enlightened citizens bought and sold their millions of Texian acres just
as readily as they did their thousands of towns and villages in Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, and their tens of thousands of shares in
banks and railways. It was a speculative fever, which has since, we may
hope, been in some degree cured. At any rate, the remedies applied
have been tolerably severe.
I had not escaped the contagion, and, having got the land on paper, I
thought I should like to see it in dirty acres; so, in company with a
friend who had a similar venture, I embarked at Baltimore on board the
Catcher schooner, and, after a three weeks' voyage, arrived in
Galveston Bay.
The grassy shores of this bay, into which the river Brazos empties itself,
rise so little above the surface of the water, to which they bear a strong
resemblance in colour, that it would be difficult to discover them, were
it not for three stunted trees growing on the western extremity of a long
lizard-shaped island that stretches nearly sixty miles across the bay, and
conceals the mouth of the river. These trees are the only landmark for
the mariner; and, with their exception, not a single object--not a hill, a
house, nor so much as a bush, relieves the level sameness of the island
and adjacent continent.
After we had, with some difficulty, got on the inner side of the island, a
pilot came on board and took charge of the vessel. The first thing he
did was to run us on a sandbank, off which we got with no small labour,
and by the united exertions of sailors and passengers, and at length
entered the river. In our impatience to land, I and my friend left the
schooner in a cockleshell of a boat, which upset in the surge, and we
found ourselves floundering in the water. Luckily it was not very deep,
and we escaped with a thorough drenching.
When we had scrambled on shore, we gazed about us for some time
before we could persuade ourselves that we were actually upon land. It

was, without exception, the strangest coast we had ever seen, and there
was scarcely a possibility of distinguishing the boundary between earth
and water. The green grass grew down to the edge of the green sea, and
there was only the streak of white foam left by the latter upon the
former to serve as a line of demarcation. Before us was a plain, a
hundred