The Daily Union

The Lachine Rapids.—A correspondent of the Savannah News gives the following interesting description of the Lachine rapids, in the St. Lawrence river, above Montreal:

I was astonished at their taking a pilot for these particular rapids, but the captain told me the insurance offices demanded it. He said it was extremely dangerous, and he never would go over it himself, but was compelled to do it to gratify the curiosity of travellers, though he seldom found one that would do it twice. We came to an immense rock, by the side of which the channel passed at the rate of thirty miles an hour, and at the foot of which an eddy returned, boiling up at an equal rate with the current downwards. We had to steer upon the very edge of this eddy; and the captain told me that a steamboat of forty feet beam, last year, 'took a sheer' into the eddy, and in two minutes after she struck her bow upon the rock and sunk in three hundred feet of water. They have four men at the wheel, and four more at the tiller, aft; and the tiller chain is an inch and a half thick; for if, from any defect in the machinery or rigging, the boat should release herself for an instant from control, certain destruction awaits her, and perhaps all on board. It is the most dangerous position I ever saw.

Steaming at from ten to forty miles an hour, between rocks almost or quite appearing upon the surface, following an intricate channel, deep enough, but ever tortuous, and certain that if any oversight is committed by the pilots or engineer, or any delay occurs in any of their movements, the boat will be twisted like a reed, out of the channel into one of the eddies, and absolutely boiled under in—those bubbling, foaming whirlpools—it is bad enough, even when going down safely, to feel the uncertain twist of the boat as she touches the corner of the eddy, and I saw a dozen men grasp insensibly at something, as they felt the boat sinking under them, settling into a lower place in the water. The Indian pilot watches the boiling stream ahead, with eyes like a cat, and his three assistants watch him with equal intensity; while the passengers (who have by this time ceased to admire and applaud the water) look at the pilots, at the foaming current at each other inquiringly. Each holds on to something; though that is not necessary: no, that is impulse.