Tug Tug Lots Of Spots

Captivate readers with illustrated stories about a kind alien and a giant carrot! The carefully leveled text and playful characters make reading enjoyable for young children.

Follow two hungry mice as they search for snacks! Emergent readers will love these fun, accessible tales.

Originally published in Horsham, West Sussex, by Maverick Arts Publishing Ltd in 2018.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * “Audacious…Life on the Mississippi sparkles.” —The Wall Street Journal * “A rich mix of history, reporting, and personal introspection.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch * “Both a travelogue and an engaging history lesson about America’s westward expansion.” —The Christian Science Monitor The eagerly awaited return of master American storyteller Rinker Buck, Life on the Mississippi is an epic, enchanting blend of history and adventure in which Buck builds a wooden flatboat from the grand “flatboat era” of the 1800s and sails it down the Mississippi River, illuminating the forgotten past of America’s first western frontier. Seven years ago, readers around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious curiosity about history launched him across the West in a covered wagon pulled by mules and propelled his book about the trip, The Oregon Trail, to ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, Buck returns to chronicle his latest incredible adventure: building a wooden flatboat from the bygone era of the early 1800s and journeying down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat Patience accompanied by an eccentric crew of daring shipmates. 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 also delivers a richly satisfying work of history that brings to life a lost era. The role of the flatboat in our country’s evolution is far more significant than most Americans realize. Between 1800 and 1840, millions of farmers, merchants, and teenage adventurers embarked from states like Pennsylvania and Virginia on flatboats headed beyond the Appalachians to Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Settler families repurposed the wood from their boats to build their first cabins in the wilderness; cargo boats were broken apart and sold to build the boomtowns along the water route. Joining the river traffic were floating brothels, called “gun boats”; “smithy boats” for blacksmiths; even “whiskey boats” for alcohol. In the present day, America’s inland rivers are a superhighway dominated by leviathan barges—carrying $80 billion of cargo annually—all descended from flatboats like the ramshackle Patience. As a historian, Buck resurrects the era’s adventurous spirit, but he also challenges familiar myths about American expansion, confronting the bloody truth behind settlers’ push for land and wealth. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced more than 125,000 members of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and several other tribes to travel the Mississippi on a brutal journey en route to the barrens of Oklahoma. Simultaneously, almost a million enslaved African Americans were carried in flatboats and marched by foot 1,000 miles over the Appalachians to the cotton and cane fields of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, birthing the term “sold down the river.” Buck portrays this watershed era of American expansion as it was really lived. With a rare narrative power that blends stirring adventure with absorbing untold history, Life on the Mississippi is a mus­cular and majestic feat of storytelling from a writer who may be the closest that we have today to Mark Twain.

The investigations described in this report represent a second in a series of investigations planned at CAORF to study the effectiveness of tugs in restricted waterways and the variability in pilot operating procedures. One part of the previous study was concerned with the effectiveness of tugs in assisting an 80,000 DWT and a 250,000 DWT tanker following a complete failure with rudder amidships and a loss of engine power simultaneously, and just before entering a 45 degrees turn. Because such a combined failure is extremely severe and has a low probability of occurring, the present study aimed at more realistic failure conditions on a rudder failure (amidships), or no failure at all could occur at any of the four locations prior to the turn, or four locations in the turn. In addition, the failure could be followed by a recovery in a realistic time period, or no recovery at all. Twelve subjects took part in the experiment; six had tugs available and six had no tugs. They performed a total of 12 runs apiece, and experienced engine and rudder failures with and without recovery and at various locations in an order consistent with the statistical experiment design. The data from the experiment were examined qualitatively and selected performance measures were subjected to statistical analyses. Based on these practically useful observations, conclusions were drawn from both the non-failure and failure runs regarding pilot procedures with helm, engine and tug power in relationship to the type and location of the failure. (Author).