Zadok Cramer-The Navigator

and a new book about Flatboats

The Jolly Flatboatmen by George Caleb Bingham, 1846.

The Navigator, a guidebook published from 1801 to 1824, reported that a typical flatboat launched around Rockport, Indiana, took four or five days to float down the Ohio and three to four weeks down the Mississippi to New Orleans, a thirteen-hundred-mile total trek covered at forty to fifty-two miles per day, or three to five miles per hour.

Flatboat River Guides - 1801-1824

Zadok Cramer was a Pittsburgh printer and bookbinder who in 1801 began publishing the best known of the early river guides, The Navigator.¹ It became the bible for early flatboatmen and keelboatmen, many of whom went on to become steamboat pilots.

The Navigator was a compilation of travelers’ journals and reports which gave “directions for navigating the Monongahela, Alleghany, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers” with descriptions of villages, settlements, harbors, and distances between points. Beginning with the fifth edition in 1806, this important river guide contained woodcut river charts showing islands, channels, and obstructions to navigation. In all, twelve editions were published between 1801 and 1824.

You can read The Navigator here: The navigator (1814 edition) | Open Library

Floating brothels, “smithy boats” for blacksmiths, even “whiskey boats”

Buck Rinker’s book, Life on the Mississippi: an epic American adventure (2022), tells the history of the flatboat. Between 1800 and 1840, millions of farmers, merchants, and teenage adventurers embarked on flatboats. Like the Nile, the Thames, or the Seine the western rivers in America became a floating supply chain that fueled national growth. Joining the river traffic were floating brothels, called “gun boats”; “smithy boats” for blacksmiths; even “whiskey boats” with taverns mounted on jaunty rafts.

Buck builds a flatboat and casts off down the river. Over the course of his voyage, Buck steers his fragile wooden craft through narrow channels dominated by massive cargo barges, rescues his first mate gone overboard, sails blindly through fog, breaks his ribs not once but twice, and camps every night on sandbars, remote islands, and steep levees. As he charts his own journey, he delivers the history of a lost era.²

1. National Rivers Hall of Fame Inductees. Zadok Cramer. 1988.

2. Buck Rinker. 2022. Life on the Mississippi: an epic American adventure. First Avid Reader Press.