Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/118

 boats may possibly be considered a mere pleasure-trip; but much experience convinces me that it is full of risk both to person and property. The rate of insurance for a four month's voyage on the Ganges is about the same as that from Calcutta to London. Indeed, the management of a boat dining such a voyage, and with the appliances in use, is more precarious than that of a fine ship to England. One might imagine that nothing more was necessary than to continue to ascend and descend the stream,and he cannot go wrong; but the whole country is for three or four months of the year covered in a great measure with water and is more like an inland sea than a river without current or permanent landmark, where old channels are filled up every year, and new ones are formed; where the banks that resist the sapping of the river appear under so many different shapes; where at one time a large thriving town is created, and a month thereafter not a stick of it remains; in two or three months more an extensive tract is found covered with slime and alluvial deposit, and a month thereafter the villagers return and reconstruct their city of fresh reeds and bamboos as before. Even in the dry season, the Ganges is divided into so many channels and islands that it resembles a net, and renders it very difficult to determine the navigable channel. Then the voyager meets with rapids,