the last book I ever read (Herbert Asbury's The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld, excerpt two)

from The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld by Herbert Asbury:

Bienville sent to the directors of the Mississippi Company in Paris glowing descriptions of the salubrity of the climate at New Orleans, the fertility of the soil, and the many other advantages of the area which he had chosen for the new town. Other French officials, however, viewed the location with less optimistic eyes. The Commandant of the Nachitoches district wrote that the settlement was “situated in flat and swampy ground fit only for growing rice; river water filters through under the soil, and crayfish abound, so that tobacco and vegetables are hard to raise. There are frequent fogs, and, the land being thickly wooded and covered with cane-brakes, the air is fever-laden, and an infinity of mosquitoes cause further inconvenience in summer.” The climate, and the persistent infiltration of water from the Mississippi, have always been among New Orleans’ greatest drawbacks. All of the early visitors who recorded their impressions of the city complained of the penetrating cold and dampness of the winter months, and of the heat and mugginess of the summers. And neither time nor the installation of modern drainage systems have brough much relief; New Orleans is still perhaps the dampest spot on the North American continent, and certainly one of the hottest; shoes and other articles of clothing commonly mildew if left overnight on ground floors of buildings in the old quarter of the city; it is difficult to make plaster adhere to the walls, and cellars are almost unknown. In early days water was encountered from twelve to eighteen inches below the surface of the ground, and even today it is seldom necessary to dig more than three feet to find it, except in the comparatively high land of the newer parts of the city. As late as the 18040’s New Orleans was known throughout the United States as the “Wet Grave,” because of the difficulties encountered in burying corpses. “In digging ‘the narrow house’ water rises to within eighteen inches of the surface,’” wrote an English traveler who visited the city in 1832. “Coffins are therefore sunk three or four feet by having holes bored in them, and two black men stand on them till they fill with water, and reach the bottom of the moist tomb. Some people are particular and dislike this immersion after death; and, therefore, those who can afford it have a sort of brick oven built on the surface of the ground, at one end of which, the coffin is introduced, and the door hermetically closed, but the heat of the southern sun on this ‘whited sepulchre’ must bake the body inside, so that there is but a choice of disagreeables after all.” All burials in modern New Orleans, excepting those of Jews and the poorer classes of both whites and Negroes, are made above the ground in small ovens, or in tombs of varying degrees of beauty and elaborateness.