The steamer I came here in sails tomorrow, and as soon as she is gone I shall sail for the other islands of the group and visit the great volcano the grand wonder of the world. Be gone two months.
Yrs.
Sam.
To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:
Wailuku sugar Plantation,
Island of Maui, H. I., May 4,1866.
My dear mother and sister, 11 Oclock at night. This is the infernalist darkest country, when the moon dont shine; I stumbled and fell over my horses lariat a minute ago and hurt my leg, so I must stay here tonight.
I got the same leg hurt last week; I said I hadnt got hold of a spirited horse since I had been on the island, and one of the proprietors loaned me a big vicious colt; he was altogether too spirited; I went to tighten the cinch before mounting him, when he let out with his left leg (?) and kicked me across a ten-acre lot. A native rubbed and doctored me so well that I was able to stand on my feet in half an hour. It was then half after four and I had an appointment to go seven miles and get a girl and take her to a card party at five.
I have been clattering around among the plantations for three weeks, now, and next week I am going to visit the extinct crater of Mount Haleakala the largest in the world; it is ten miles to the foot of the mountain; it rises 10,000 feet above the valley; the crater is 29 miles in circumference and 1,000 feet deep. Seen from the summit, the city of St. Louis would look like a picture in the bottom of it.
As soon as I get back from Haleakala (pronounced Hally-ekka-lah) I will sail for Honolulu again and thence to the Island of Hawaii (pronounced Hah-wy-ye,) to see the greatest active volcano in the world that of Kilauea (pronounced Kee-low-way-ah) and from thence back to San Francisco and then, doubtless, to the States. I have been on this trip two months, and it will probably be two more before I get back to California.
Yrs affy,
Sam.
He was having a glorious time one of the most happy, carefree adventures of his career. No form of travel or undertaking could discountenance Mark Twain at thirty.
To Mrs. Orion Clemens, in Carson City:
Honolulu, May 22, 1866.
My dear sister, I have just got back from a sea voyage from the beautiful island of Maui, I have spent five weeks there, riding backwards and forwards among the sugar plantations looking up the splendid scenery and visiting the lofty crater of Haleakala. It has been a perfect jubilee to me in the way of pleasure.
I have not written a single line, and have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness. Few such months come in a lifetime.
I set sail again, a week hence, for the island of Hawaii, to see the great active volcano of Kilauea. I shall not get back here for four or five weeks, and shall not reach San Francisco before the latter part of July.
So it is no use to wait for me to go home. Go on yourselves.
If I were in the east now, I could stop the publication of a piratical book which has stolen some of my sketches.
It is late-good-bye, Mollie,
Yr Bro,
Sam.
To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:
Honolulu, Sandwich islands, June 21,1866.
My dear mother and sister, I have just got back from a hard trip through the Island of Hawaii, begun on the 26th of May and finished on the 18th of June only six or seven days at sea all the balance horse-back, and the hardest mountain road in the world. I staid at the volcano about a week and witnessed the greatest eruption that has occurred for years. I lived well there. They charge $4 a day for board, and a dollar or two extra for guides and horses. I had a pretty good time. They didnt charge me anything. I have got back sick went to bed as soon as I arrived here shall not be strong again for several days yet. I rushed too fast. I ought to have taken five or six weeks on that trip.
A week hence I start for the Island of Kauai, to be gone three weeks and then I go back to California.
The Crown Princess is dead and thousands of natives cry and wail and dance and dance for the dead, around the Kings Palace all night and every night. They will keep it up for a month and then she will be buried.
Hon. Anson Burlingame, U. S. Minister to China, and Gen. Van Valkenburgh, Minister to Japan, with their families and suites, have just arrived here en route. They were going to do me the honor to call on me this morning, and that accounts for my being out of bed now. You know what condition my room is always in when you are not around so I climbed out of bed and dressed and shaved pretty quick and went up to the residence of the American Minister and called on them. Mr. Burlingame told me a good deal about Hon. Jere Clemens and that Virginia Clemens who was wounded in a duel. He was in Congress years with both of them. Mr. B. sent for his son, to introduce him said he could tell that frog story of mine as well as anybody. I told him I was glad to hear it for I never tried to tell it myself without making a botch of it. At his request I have loaned Mr. Burlingame pretty much everything I ever wrote. I guess he will be an almighty wise man by the time he wades through that lot.
If the New United States Minister to the Sandwich Islands (Hon. Edwin McCook,) were only here now, so that I could get his views on this new condition of Sandwich Island politics, I would sail for California at once. But he will not arrive for two weeks yet and so I am going to spend that interval on the island of Kauai.
I stopped three days with Hon. Mr. Cony, Deputy Marshal of the Kingdom, at Hilo, Hawaii, last week and by a funny circumstance he knew everybody that I ever knew in Hannibal and Palmyra. We used to sit up all night talking and then sleep all day. He lives like a Prince. Confound that Island! I had a streak of fat and a streak of lean all over it got lost several times and had to sleep in huts with the natives and live like a dog.
Of course I couldnt speak fifty words of the language. Take it altogether, though, it was a mighty hard trip.
Yours Affect.
Sam.
Burlingame and Van Valkenburgh were on their way to their posts, and their coming to the islands just at this time proved a most important circumstance to Mark Twain. We shall come to this presently, in a summary of the newspaper letters written to the Union. June 27th he wrote to his mother and sister a letter, only a fragment of which survives, in which he tells of the arrival in Honolulu of the survivors of the ship Hornet, burned on the line, and of his securing the first news report of the lost vessel.
Part of a letter to Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:Honolulu, June 27, 1866
with a gill of water a day to each man. I got the whole story from the third mate and two of the sailors. If my account gets to the Sacramento Union first, it will be published first all over the United States, France, England, Russia and Germany all over the world; I may say. You will see it. Mr. Burlingame went with me all the time, and helped me question the men throwing away invitations to dinner with the princes and foreign dignitaries, and neglecting all sorts of things to accommodate me. You know how I appreciate that kind of thing especially from such a man, who is acknowledged to have no superior in the diplomatic circles of the world, and obtained from China concessions in favor of America which were refused to Sir Frederick Bruce and Envoys of France and Russia until procured for them by Burlingame himself which service was duly acknowledged by those dignitaries. He hunted me up as soon as he came here, and has done me a hundred favors since, and says if I will come to China in the first trip of the great mail steamer next January and make his house in Pekin my home, he will afford me facilities that few men can have there for seeing and learning. He will give me letters to the chiefs of the great Mail Steamship Company which will be of service to me in this matter. I expect to do all this, but I expect to go to the States first and from China to the Paris Worlds Fair.
Dont show this letter.
Yours affly,
Sam.
P. S. The crown Princess of this Kingdom will be buried tomorrow with great ceremony after that I sail in two weeks for California.
This concludes Mark Twains personal letters from the islands. Of his descriptive news letters there were about twenty, and they were regarded by the readers of the Union as distinctly notable. Re-reading those old letters to-day it is not altogether easy to understand why. They were set in fine nonpareil type, for one thing, which present-day eyes simply refuse at any price, and the reward, by present-day standards, is not especially tempting.
The letters began in the Union with the issue of April the 16th, 1866. The first of date March 18th tells of the writers arrival at Honolulu. The humor in it is not always of a high order; it would hardly pass for humor today at all. That the same man who wrote the Hawaiian letters in 1866 (he was then over thirty years old) could, two years later, have written that marvelous book, the Innocents Abroad, is a phenomenon in literary development.
The Hawaiian letters, however, do show the transition stage between the rough elemental humor of the Comstock and the refined and subtle style which flowered in the Innocents Abroad. Certainly Mark Twains genius was finding itself, and his association with the refined and cultured personality of Anson Burlingame undoubtedly aided in that discovery. Burlingame pointed out his faults to him, and directed him to a better way. No more than that was needed at such a time to bring about a transformation.
The Sandwich Islands letters, however, must have been precisely adapted to their audience a little more refined than the log Comstock, a little less subtle than the Atlantic public and they added materially to his Coast prestige. But let us consider a sample extract from the first Sandwich Islands letter:
Our little band of passengers were as well and thoughtfully cared for by the friends they left weeping upon the wharf, as ever were any similar body of pilgrims. The traveling outfit conferred upon me began with a naval uniform, continued with a case of wine, a small assortment of medicinal liquors and brandy, several boxes of cigars, a bunch of matches, a fine-toothed comb, and a cake of soap, and ended with a pair of socks. (N. B. I gave the soap to Brown, who bit into it, and then shook his head and said that, as a general thing, he liked to prospect curious, foreign dishes, and find out what they were made of, but he couldnt go that, and threw it overboard.)
It is nearly impossible to imagine humor in this extract, yet it is a fair sample of the entire letter.
He improves in his next, at least, in description, and gives us a picture of the crater. In this letter, also, he writes well and seriously, in a prophetic strain, of the great trade that is to be established between San Francisco and Hawaii, and argues for a line of steamers between the ports, in order that the islands might be populated by Americans, by which course European trade in that direction could be superseded. But the humor in this letter, such as it is, would scarcely provoke a smile to-day.
As the letters continue, he still urges the fostering of the island trade by the United States, finds himself impressed by the work of the missionaries, who have converted cannibals to Christians, and gives picturesque bits of the life and scenery.
Hawaii was then dominated chiefly by French and English; though the American interests were by no means small.
Extract from letter No. 4:
Cap. Fitch said Theres the king. Thats him in the buggy. I know him as far as I can see him.
I had never seen a king, and I naturally took out a note-book and put him down: Tall, slender, dark, full-bearded; green frock-coat, with lapels and collar bordered with gold band an inch wide; plug hat, broad gold band around it; royal costume looks too much like livery; this man is not as fleshy as I thought he was.
I had just got these notes when Cap. Fitch discovered that hed got hold of the wrong king, or rather, that hed got hold of the kings driver, or a carriage driver of one of the nobility. The king wasnt present at all. It was a great disappointment to me. I heard afterwards that the comfortable, easy-going king, Kamehameha V., had been seen sitting on a barrel on the wharf, the day before, fishing. But there was no consolation in that. That did not restore me my lost king.
This has something of the flavor of the man we were to know later; the quaint, gentle resignation to disappointment which is one of the finest touches in his humor.
Further on he says: I had not shaved since I left San Francisco. As soon as I got ashore I hunted up a striped pole, and shortly found one. I always had a yearning to be a king. This may never be, I suppose, but, at any rate, it will always be a satisfaction to me to know that, if I am not a king, I am the next thing to it. I have been shaved by the kings barber.
Honolulu was a place of cats. He saw cats of every shade and variety. He says: I saw cats tomcats, Mary-Ann cats, bobtailed cats, blind cats, one-eyed cats, wall-eyed cats, cross-eyed cats, gray cats, black cats, white cats, yellow cats, striped cats, spotted cats, tame cats, wild cats, singed cats, individual cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, and lazy, and sound asleep. Which illustrates another characteristic of the humor we were to know later the humor of grotesque exaggeration, in which he was always strong.
He found the islands during his periods of inaction conducive to indolence. If I were not so fond of looking into the rich mass of green leaves, he says, that swathe the stately tamarind right before my door, I would idle less, and write more, I think.
The Union made good use of his letters. Sometimes it printed them on the front page. Evidently they were popular from the beginning. The Union was a fine, handsome paper beautiful in its minute typography, and in its press-work; more beautiful than most papers of to-day, with their machine-set type, their vulgar illustrations, and their chain-lightning presses. A few more extracts:
The only cigars here are those trifling, insipid, tasteless, flavorless things they call Manilas ten for twenty-five cents and it would take a thousand of them to be worth half the money. After you have smoked about thirty-five dollars worth of them in the forenoon, you feel nothing but a desperate yearning to go out somewhere and take a smoke.
Captains and ministers form about half the population. The third fourth is composed of Kanakas and mercantile foreigners and their families. The final fourth is made up of high officers of the Hawaiian government, and there are just about enough cats to go round.
In No. 6, April the 2d, he says: An excursion to Diamond Head, and the kings cocoanut grove, was planned to-day, at 4.30 P. M., the party to consist of half a dozen gentlemen and three ladies. They all started at the appointed hour except myself. Somebody remarkd that it was twenty minutes past five oclock, and that woke me up. It was a fortunate circumstance that Cap. Phillips was there with his turn-out, as he calls his top buggy that Cap. Cook brought here in 1778, and a horse that was here when Cap. Cook came.
This bit has something the savor of his subsequent work, but, as a rule, the humor compares poorly with that which was to come later.
In No. 7 he speaks of the natives singing American songs not always to his comfort. Marching Through Georgia was one of their favorite airs. He says: If it had been all the same to Gen. Sherman, I wish he had gone around by the way of the Gulf of Mexico, instead of marching through Georgia.