The Steamboat Game
Take the wheel of each of Ross’s twenty-nine steamboats in turn, from the Vermont of 1809 to the Ticonderoga of 1930, on the lake as it is, at her speed. Make the landings she made; race a boat of her own years over the same course, landing for landing; carry the passengers Ross records her carrying. Each boat is a level of a few minutes. The picture is the fleet animation’s: the same outline, the same landings, the same runs.
The twenty-nine boats’ levels come from Ogden Ross, The Steamboats of Lake Champlain, 1809 to 1930, at his pages; a speed or a length he does not give is marked as an estimate, and where Ralph Nading Hill’s Sidewheeler Saga carries something Ross does not, the card states it and names him. Where you do better than history, the card after the run states what happened. Below the fleet are ten levels from Hill’s novel The Voyages of Brian Seaworthy, which are fiction and are marked so.
The boat is heavy: she takes a while to gather way and a long way to stop, and she answers the wheel only with way on. Come up to a wharf slowly, from a distance: a boat that crosses into the ring above six miles an hour cannot land there. The wheel is A and D for the left hand or ← and → for the right, and the throttle W and S or ↑ and ↓; the keys are listed in the corner of the picture, and + and − or the wheel of a mouse close in and draw back. The clock runs faster than life, by a factor set for each boat so that she moves at a playable pace on the screen; the clock and the speed on the dial are her true ones, and a fast boat moves faster on the screen than a slow one, though not in proportion.
The fleet
18091930
The voyages of Brian Seaworthy
Ralph Nading Hill’s novel of 1872 to 1874, in which a boy of fifteen inherits a steamboat company at Shelburne Harbor and an opposition boat is built against it at Mark’s Bay. Ten of its chapters are levels here, run on the real lake in the boats the novel gives them. The boats and the people are Hill’s invention; the lake, the landings and the working of the boats are the same ones the rest of the game uses.
Where this comes from
The boats, their years, their runs and their landings are the fleet animation’s data, from Ross; the lake is OpenStreetMap’s outline of it, as the animation draws it. The speeds Ross gives are his; where he gives none the game uses an estimate from the boat’s size and decade and marks it so. The races Ross records, the Saranac and the Francis Saltus in 1845, the United States and the Saltus in 1847, the Canada and the America for the Port Henry landing, carry his account; any other two boats of the same years may be put to the same course. The passengers are the ones his paragraphs name, taken from and to the landings he gives; where he gives no landing the passenger is aboard for the stretch.
Three books stand behind the game, and the cards state which is which. Ogden Ross, The Steamboats of Lake Champlain, 1809 to 1930, is the fleet’s own record and the source of everything in the twenty-nine boats’ levels. Ralph Nading Hill, Sidewheeler Saga: A Chronicle of Steamboating (Rinehart & Company, 1953), gives the lake three chapters and carries some things Ross does not: the Phoenix’s dimensions and the night she burned, and the wreck of the Champlain at Steam Mill Point in the words of the pilot’s watchmate. Where the two give the same thing differently the game keeps Ross’s, whose subject is this fleet alone. Ralph Nading Hill, The Voyages of Brian Seaworthy (Vermont Life Magazine and the Vermont Historical Society, 1971), is a novel: its chapters are the levels in the section above, and its boats, its shipyard company and its people are Hill’s invention, not the lake’s record. None of the three is quoted here; the cards state what each book reports, in the game’s own words.
The novel’s places are the lake’s. Mark’s Bay, where the opposition boat is built and launched, is the cove at Oakledge across the harbor from Shelburne Point, where an opposition yard built the railroad’s car ferry Oakes Ames in 1868; that boat became the Champlain, and in July 1875 a pilot ran her at full speed into the mountain at Steam Mill Point, which is where the novel’s blizzard chapter ends. Both are in Hill’s own history, and the Champlain is one of the twenty-nine.
The weather and the wildlife are the game’s own: the wind shifts and gusts at random and raises the sea that runs across the water, fog comes up and goes off again, clouds pass, fish break the surface, and gulls, ospreys, eagles, hawks, cormorants and great blue herons cross the picture. They are the lake as it looks from a wheelhouse, not a record of any day. Where a chapter states its own weather — the wind on the beam at Cliff Haven, the snow off Split Rock — that one holds instead.
Nothing in the game is a record of how a boat was handled. The wheel, the throttle and the wharves are a game’s; the losses of the real fleet are on the steamboats page.