by Mark Twain
The ladies of the Sandwich Islands have a great many pleasant customs which I don't know but we might practice with profit here. The women all ride like men. I wish to introduce that reform in this country. Our ladies ought, by all means to ride like men, these sidesaddles are so dangerous. When women meet each other in the road, they ran and kiss and hug each other, and they don't blackguard each other behind each other's backs. I would like to introduce that reform, also. I don't suppose our ladies do it. But they might. But I believe I am getting on dangerous ground. I won't pursue that any further.
These people do nearly everything wrong end first. They buckle the saddle on the right side which is the wrong side; they mount a horse from the wrong side; they turn out on the wrong side to let you go by; they use the same word to say "good-by" and "good morning"; they use "yes" when they mean "no"; the women smoke more than the men do; when they beckon to you to come toward them they always motion in the opposite direction; the only native bird that has handsome feathers has only two, and they are under its wings instead of on top of its head; frequently a native cat has a tail only two inches long and has got a knot tied in the end of it; the native duck lives on the dry tops of mountains 5,000 feet high; the natives always stew chickens instead of baking them; they dance at funerals and sing a dismal heartbroken dirge when they are happy; and with atrocious perverseness they wash your shirts with a club and iron them with a brickbat. In their playing of the noble American game of "seven-up," that's a game, well, I'll explain that by and by. Some of you, perhaps, know all about it, and the rest must guess--but, in their playing of that really noble and intellectual game the dealer deals to his right instead of to his left, and what is insufferably worse--the ten always takes the ace! Now, such abject ignorance as that is reprehensible, and, for one, I am glad the missionaries have gone there.
Now, you see what kind of voters you will have if you take those islands away from these people as we are pretty sure to do some day. They will do everything wrong end first. They will make a deal of trouble here too. Instead of fostering and encouraging a judicious system of railway speculation, and all that sort of thing, they will elect the most incorruptible men to Congress. Yes, they will turn everything upside down.
In Honolulu they are the most easy-going people in the world. Some of our people are not acquainted with their customs. They started a gas company once, and put the gas at $13 a thousand feet. They only took in $16 the first month. They all went to bed at dark. They are an excellent people. I speak earnestly. They do not even know the name of some of the vices in this country. A lady called on a doctor. She wanted something for general debility. He ordered her to drink porter. She called him again. The porter had done her no good. He asked her how much porter she had taken. She said a tablespoonful in a tumbler of water. I wish we could import such blessed ignorance into this country. They don't do much drinking there. When they have paid the tax for importing the liquor they have got nothing left to purchase the liquor with. They are very innocent and drink anything that is liquid--kerosene, turpentine, hair oil. In one town, on a Fourth of July, an entire community got drunk on a barrel of Mrs. Winslow's soothing syrup.
The chief glory of the Sandwich Islands is their great volcano. The volcano of Kee-law-ay-oh is 17,000 feet in diameter, and from 700 to 800 feet deep. Vesuvius is nowhere. It is the largest volcano in the world; shoots up flames tremendously high. You witness a scene of unrivaled sublimity, and witness the most astonishing sights. When the volcano of Kee-law-ay-oh broke through a few years ago, lava flowed out of it for twenty days and twenty nights, and made a stream forty miles in length, till it reached the sea, tearing up forests in its awful fiery path, swallowing up huts, destroying all vegetation, rioting through shady dells and sinuous canyons. Amidst this carnival of destruction, majestic columns of smoke ascended and formed a cloudy murky pall overhead. Sheets of green, blue, lambent flames were shot upward, and pierced the vast gloom, making all sublimely grand.
The natives are indifferent to volcanic terrors. During the progress of an eruption they ate, drank, bought, sold, planted, builded, apparently indifferent to the roar of consuming forests, the startling detonations, the hissing of escaping steam, the rending of the earth, the shivering and melting of gigantic rocks, the raging and dashing of the fiery waves, the bellowings and unearthly mutterings coming up from a burning deep. They went carelessly on, amid the rain of ashes, sand, and fiery scintillations, gazing vacantly at the ever-varying appearance of the atmosphere, murky, black, livid, blazing, the sudden rising of lofty pillars of flame, the upward curling of ten thousand columns of smoke, and their majestic roll in dense and lurid clouds. All these moving phenomena were regarded by them as the fall of a shower or the running of a brook; while to others they were as the tokens of a burning world, the departing heavens, and a coming judge. There! I'm glad I've got that volcano off my mind.
I once knew a great, tall gawky country editor, near Sacramento, to whom I sent an ode on the sea, starting it with "The long, green swell of the Pacific." The country editor sent back a letter and stated I couldn't fool him, and he didn't want any base insinuations from me. He knew who I meant when I wrote the "long, green swell of the Pacific."
There is one thing characteristic of the tropics that a stranger must have, whether he likes it or not, and that is the boo-hoo fever. Its symptoms are nausea of the stomach, severe headache, backache and bellyache, and a general utter indifference whether school keeps or not. You can't be a full citizen of the Sandwich Islands unless you have had the boo-hoo fever. You will never forget it. I remember a little boy who had it once there. A New Yorker asked him if he was afraid to die. He said, "No; I am not afraid to die of anything, except the boo-hoo fever."
The climate of these islands is delightful, it is beautiful. In Honolulu the thermometer stands at about 80 or 82 degrees pretty much all the year round--don't change more than 12 degrees in twelve months. In the sugar districts the thermometer stands at 70 and does not change at all. Any kind of thermometer will do--one without any quicksilver is just as good. Eighty degrees by the seashore, and 70 degrees farther inland, and 60 degrees as you ascend the slope of the mountain, and as you go higher 50 degrees, 40, 30, and ever decreasing in temperature, till you get to the top, where it's so cold that you can't speak the truth. I know, for I've been there! The climate is wonderfully healthy, for white people in particular, so healthy that white people venture on the most reckless imprudence. They get up too early: you can see them as early as half-past seven in the morning, and they attend to all their business, and keep it up till sundown. It don't hurt 'em, don't kill 'em, and yet it ought to do so. I have seen it so hot in California that greenbacks went up to 142 in the shade.
These Sandwichers believe in a superstition that the biggest liars in the world have got to visit the islands some time before they die. They believe that because it is a fact--you misunderstand--I mean that when liars get there they stay there. They have several specimens they boast of. They treasure up their little perfections, and they allude to them as if the man was inspired--from below. They had a man among them named Morgan. He never allowed anyone to tell a bigger lie than himself, and he always told the last one too. When someone was telling about the natural bridge in Virginia, he said he knew all about it, as his father had helped to build it. Someone was bragging of a wonderful horse he had. Morgan told them of one he had once. While out riding one day a thundershower came on and chased him for eighteen miles, and never caught him. Not a single drop of rain dropped onto his horse, but his dog was swimming behind the wagon the whole of the way.
Once, when the subject of mean men was being discussed, Morgan told them of an incorporated company of mean men. They hired a poor fellow to blast rock for them. He drilled a hole four feet deep, put in the powder, and began to tamp it down around the fuse. I know all about tamping, as I have worked in a mine myself. The crowbar struck a spark and caused a premature explosion and that man and his crowbar shot
up into the air, and he went higher and higher, till he didn't look bigger than a boy, and he kept on going higher and higher, until he didn't look bigger than a dog, and he kept on going higher and higher, until he didn't look bigger than a bee, and then he went out of sight; and presently he came in sight again, looking no bigger than a bee, and he came further and further, until he was as big as a dog, and further and further and further, until he was as big as a boy, and he came further and further, until he assumed the full size and shape of a man, and he came down and fell right into the same old spot and went to tamping again. And would you believe it--concluded Morgan--although that poor fellow was not gone more than fifteen minutes, yet that mean company docked him for loss of time.
The land that I have tried to tell you about lies out there in the midst of the watery wilderness, in the very heart of the almost soilless solitudes of the Pacific. It is a dreamy, beautiful, charming land. I wish I could make you comprehend how beautiful it is. It is a land that seems ever so vague and fairy-like when one reads about it in books, peopled with a gentle, indolent, careless race.
It is Sunday land. The land of indolence and dreams, where the air is drowsy and things tend to repose and peace, and to emancipation from the labor, and turmoil, and weariness, and anxiety of life.
Text / Composite, based upon: "Mark Twain at the Mercantile Library Hall," St. Louis Democrat, March 28, 1867; "Mark Twain's Lecture," Providence, Rhode Island, Press, November 10, 1869; "Mark Twain's Lecture," Courant, November 24 1869; "Mark Twain's Lecture," New Haven, Connecticut, Morning Journal, December 28, 1869; "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands," Portland, Maine, Transcript, January 1, 1870; "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands," Troy, New York, Times, January 12, 1870; "Mark Twain, What He Know About the Sandwich Islands," Brooklyn Eagle, February 8, 1873; "Cracking Jokes," London Once a Week, n.s., no. 306 (November 8, 1873):402-5; "The Sandwich Islands," Eloquence(R), 4:253-59, and Eloquence(T), 13:133-39; "From Mark Twain's First Lecture," MTB, 4:1601-3.
introduction / To circumvent local chairmen who introduced him with lavish praise and labored jokes, Mark Twain adopted the practice of introducing himself with an extravagant eulogy of his own accomplishments. One reporter, attempting to capture in print the inflated substance and slow delivery, represented them thus: "Ladies and gentlemen: I--have--lectured--many--years--and--in--many--towns--large--and--small. I have traveled--north--south--east--and--west. I--have--met--many--great--men: very--great--men. But--I--have--never--yet--in--all--ny--travels--met--the--president--of--a--country--lyceum--who--could--introduce--me--to--an--audience--with--that--distinguished--consideration--which--my merits deserve." See Joel Benton, "Reminiscences of Eminent Lecturers," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 96, no. 574 (March 1898):610.
Captain Cook / James Cook (1728-79). British navigator and explorer. On a voyage in search of the Northwest Passage he came upon the islands in 1778. He named them Sandwich Islands after the earl of Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty.
Kanaka / A Polynesian word meaning "man," formerly applied to Hawaiian natives and to other South Pacific islanders.
poi / A favorite Hawaiian food made of taro root mixed into a paste and allowed to ferment. Mark Twain said, St. Louis Democrat, March 28, 1867: "Eating poi will cure a drunkard. In order to like poi you must get used to it. It smells a good deal worse than it tastes, and it tastes a good deal worse than it looks."
Kee-law-ay-oh / Kilauea, an active volcano on the slope of Mauna Loa. An altitude of 4,000 feet and a circumference of eight miles make it one of the largest and most spectacular craters in the world.
