then gone around to the bridge and gotten acquainted with the place?  Pilot Parker has shown here that he does not understand the draw.  I heard him say that the fall from the head to the foot of the pier was four feet; he needs information.  He could have gone there that day and seen there was no such fall.  He should have discarded passion and the chances are that he would have had no disaster at all.  He was bound to make himself acquainted with the place.

“McCammon says that the current and the swell coming from the long pier drove her against the long pier.  In other words drove her toward the very pier from which the current came!  It is an absurdity, an impossibility.  The only recollection I can find for this contradiction is in a current which White says strikes out from the long pier and then like a ram’s horn turns back, and this might have acted somehow in this manner.

“It is agreed by all that the plaintiff’s boat was destroyed and that it was destroyed upon the head of the short pier; that she moved from the channel where she was with her bow above the head of the long pier, till she struck the short one, swung around under the bridge and there was crowded and destroyed.

“I shall try to prove that the average velocity of the current through the draw with the boat in it should be five and a half miles an hour; that it is slowest at the head of the pier and swiftest at the foot of the pier.  Their lowest estimate in evidence is six miles an hour, their highest twelve miles.  This was the testimony of men who had made no experiment, only conjecture.  We have adopted the most exact means.  The water runs swiftest in high water and we have taken the point of nine feet above low water.  The water when the Afton was lost was seven feet above low water, or at least a foot lower than our time.  Brayton and his assistants timed the instruments, the best instruments known in measuring currents.  They timed them under various circumstances and they found the current five miles an hour and no more.  They found that the water at the upper end ran slower than five miles; that below it was swifter than five miles, but that the average was five miles.  Shall men who have taken no care, who conjecture, some of whom speak of twenty miles an hour, be believed against those who have had such a favorable and well improved opportunity?  They should not even qualify the result.  Several men have given their opinion as to the distance of the steamboat Carson, and I suppose if one should go and measure that distance you would believe him in preference to all of them.