"We shall endeavor to instruct the unexperienced navigator how to avoid them. The instability of the banks proceeds from their being composed of a loose sandy soil, and the impetuosity of the current against their prominent parts, which, by undermining them unceasingly, causes them to tumble into the river, taking with them everything that may be above. And if when the event happens boats should be moored there, they must necessarily be buried in the common ruin, which unfortunately has been sometimes the case. For which reason, navigators have made it an invariable rule never to land at or near a point, but always in the sinuosity or cove below it, which is generally lined with
them, will not move them, but they frequently injure the boat.
"Sawyers, are likewise bodies of trees fixed less perpendicularly in the river, and rather of a less size, yielding to the pressure of the current, disappearing and appearing by turns above water, similar to the motion of a saw-mill saw, from which they have taken their name."Wooden-Islands, are places where by some cause or other, large quantities of drift wood, has through time, been arrested and matted together in different parts of the river."
