10
Modern Business Geography
eral, to transport by water than by land. With water transporta-
tion there is no track to be built and kept in repair and there are no
heavy grades to climb.
At the seaports huge storage warehouses line the water front; one
such warehouse has been built by the city of New Orleans at a
cost of $3,500,000. Here the cotton may remain for months, waiting
for the call from the mills. When the call comes, stevedores load the
bales on trucks and take them to the wharves, whence they are
lifted by powerful derricks and deposited in the holds of the
waiting ocean steamships. Then begins the longest part of the
journey. It is not the most costly part, however, if we consider
the rate per mile. From the Gulf ports to Liverpool, for instance,
cotton is carried nearly five thousand miles for not much more than
two dollars a bale. So cheaply can vessels be propelled on the free
level highway of the sea, that even at so low a rate the steamship
companies make good profits.
Delivery to the factory. Let us imagine that the particular bales
of cotton that we have been following are carried by water from
Galveston, the port that ships most of the cotton crop, to Fall River,
our leading cotton manufacturing city. The steamship delivers the
cotton at a wharf in the city, and from the wharf it is taken to the
mill by motor truck. On the well-paved city streets a truck speedily
transfers a score of bales at a load. More than thirteen hundred
bales are carried daily to the numerous mills, where they are put into
storehouses.
When the time comes for the cotton to be used, each bale is taken
out of storage and carried to the cleaning room of the factory on a
hand truck, similar to that used for trunks at railway stations. Thus
there is transportation by man during the later stages as well as at
the beginning, when the fiber is carried in baskets by cotton pickers.
Why methods of transportation differ. The movement of cotton
from field to factory is an example of the complicated journey that
most commodities take in reaching the place where they are needed.
Think of the different means of transportation used in the journey
and consider why each was used. Take, for instance, the mule team.
Why are mules used in the first part of the journey, instead of horses
or motor trucks? It seems that the mule, although his first cost is
considerably more than that of the horse, is better for the heavy work
of the South because he can thrive on coarse and scanty food and
can live longer with less care. He is used partly because the roads
in most parts of the South are merely wagon roads, quite unfit