I have always loved boats and life on the water. Perhaps it stems from growing up on the West Coast, or my infant travels on the Alaska Marine Highway. There’s a certain freedom that comes with being on a boat. As the great Jack Sparrow once said, “That’s what a ship is, you know. It’s not just a keel and hull and a deck and sails. That’s what a ship needs. But what a ship is… what the Black Pearl really is… is freedom.” Of course, that brings us to the other allure of life on a boat: the prospect of becoming a pirate. As Mark Twain once said, I have always harbored the hope that, “if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.”Stepping aboard the Liberty Belle feels a bit like stepping back in time. The boat is a colonial-era paddle boat, which carries passengers around the Rivers of America that circle Tom Sawyer Island. Remarkably, the boat uses an actual steam engine. converting river water into steam to propel it along.
To board the Liberty Belle, you must travel to Liberty Square. It sits near the Haunted Mansion and Columbia Harbor House. You may hear its whistle as you draw near, like a siren song calling you to board, to step away from the hustle and bustle of the crowds and let the river carry you along on its steady current (well, that and a steel track which actually guides the boat on its route).
The first boat to travel the Rivers of America was the Admiral Joe Fowler. It took its first voyage when the park opened in 1971. Sadly, the boat wrecked in 1980, not while travelling the mighty Mississippi, but while being transported by crane to dry dock. The boat was dropped and the hull broke.
Fortunately, a second ship (known as the Richard F. Irvine) had begun travelling the Rivers of America in 1973. It carried on after the loss of the Admiral Joe Fowler. In 1996, the Richard F. Irvine was re-named the Liberty Belle, the name it carries to this day.
A trip on the Liberty Belle is a leisurely experience. There are no thrills per se, except the thrill of discovery. As you travel around Tom Sawyer Island, the boat affords you a glimpse of sights only available to those who grace the Liberty Belle’s decks. The boat travels a half mile all told, and your journey is narrated by Mark Twain. It’s hard to imagine a better guide for your journey.
While Twain spins yarns about his life on the water, you’ll catch sight of things like settlements, a Native American village, Fort Langhorn, and a variety of woodland animals. You’ll also pass by a location known as “Wilson’s Inn.” This is one of my favorite moments on the journey. The location is based off the real life Cave-In Rock, which sits on the Ohio River in Illinois. Cave-In Rock was a longtime haven for river pirates and other unsavory folks. For a time, the location was known as “Wilson’s Liquor Vault and House of Entertainment” which should give you a fair idea of what it was like. Cave-In Rock was also the inspiration for Disney film, “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates” released in 1955 and starring Fess Parker.
A trip on the Liberty Belle takes 17 minutes all told. That’s longer than most attractions found in Walt Disney World, but more than worth the time spent.
In his book, “Life On The Mississippi” Twain wrote how, “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book–a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.” What could be more alluring than that?
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