At 4:00 p.m. on March 7, Sam embarked on the Ajax for Honolulu on his first trip outside the U.S. The Dramatic Chronicle enjoined the ship’s captain “to take especial care” of “the funniest man now on top of the earth” for “he is worth more than all the ship’s cargo. In these dismal days who shall put an estimate upon the value of a man who can make you laugh as ‘Mark’ can?” In his first letter to the Sacramento Union, Sam detailed his departure:
Leaving all care and trouble and business behind in the city, now swinging gently around the hills and passing house by house and street by street out of view, we swept down through the Golden Gate and stretched away toward the shoreless horizon. It was a pleasant, breezy afternoon, and the strange new sense of entire and perfect emancipation from labor and responsibility coming strong upon me, I went up on the hurricane deck so that I could have room to enjoy it. I sat down on a bench, and for an hour I took a tranquil delight in that kind of labor which is such a luxury to the enlightened Christian—to wit, the labor of other people.
Rather than tour the islands for only a month as he originally planned, Sam lingered there until July and mailed twenty-five letters to the Sacramento Union totaling about ninety thousand words—his first extended narrative and a rehearsal for his travel correspondence from Europe and the Holy Land during his Quaker City voyage the following year.101
CHAPTER 11
The Sandwich Islands
I spent several months in the Sandwich Islands . . . and, if I could have my way about it, I would go back there and remain the rest of my days. It is paradise for an indolent man.
—“Views of Mark Twain,” January 6, 1873
THE TURBULENT TEN-DAY voyage to the Sandwich Islands prompted Sam Clemens to lament the name given the Pacific Ocean by Vasco Núñez de “Balboa-constrictor.” The Ajax traveled on average about two hundred miles a day, but on March 10, 1866, “with the wind exactly right and every rag of canvass set and drawing,” it sailed over three hundred miles. Sam jotted in his journal that the first whites brought “a curse” to the Polynesians; or as he declared later in his Sandwich Islands lecture, when “the white men came” to Hawaii they “brought trade, and commerce, and education, and complicated diseases, and civilization, and all sorts of calamities” and in consequence “the poor natives began to die off with wonderful rapidity.” Over two or three generations the indigenous population had been halved from four hundred thousand to two hundred thousand, and Sam predicted that only “a few more missionaries” would “finish them.” The Hawaiians “will be extinct within fifty years, without a doubt”—and when they had vanished, he expected that the Americans “will take possession as lawful heirs.” The three thousand white residents mostly ran the islands already. They “handle all the money and carry on all the commerce and agriculture—and superintend the religion,” he reported.1
During the cruise he caught up on correspondence. At sea on March 9 Sam perused several letters “which should have been read before leaving San Francisco,” including one from “that
to attend to that land, & after shutting me out of my attempt to sell it (for which I shall never entirely forgive him,) if he lets it be sold for taxes, all his religion will not wipe out the sin. It is no use to quote Scripture to me, Mollie,—I am in poverty & exile now because of Orion’s religious scruples. . . . He has got a duty to perform by us—will he perform it? I have crept into the old subject again, & opened the old sore afresh that cankers within me. . . . But it is no use disguising it—I always feel bitter & malignant when I think of Ma & Pamela grieving at our absence & the land going to the dogs when I could have sold it & been at home now, instead of drifting about the outskirts of the world, battling for bread.
“I expect I have made Orion mad, but I don’t care a cent,” Sam wrote his family. “I tried to sell it once & he broke up the trade.” He was furious that his older brother tried to palm off on him the task of disposing of the property “when he knows I abhor everything in the nature of business & don’t even attend to my own.” Orion got the message, and he was probably as business savvy as Sam—and each of the sons was more adept than his father, for that matter.2
Orion lingered in Tennessee from December 1866 until August 1867, attending to the family property, though he had little or no success in selling any of it. In fact, he seems to have only paid the back taxes that had accrued over the previous seven years. He was disgusted, moreover, by the moral condition of the people of the Cumberland after the war. In one of his occasional letters to the St. Louis Times, written to earn a few dollars while he was out of work, he belittled the “wretched reptiles who slunk” through the conflict “trailing their slimy tracks in crooked lines through the edges of both parties—at first giving hearty assistance to the rebel side, then deserting it to render lukewarm aid to the Government, and now cursing Yankees and praising rebel soldiers, and rebel Generals, and everything rebel, with hearts pouring out vitriol on all Union soldiers and Union Generals who were not Copperheads.”3 Clearly he harbored no desire to settle on the land that was his birthright.
By early September 1867 Orion had returned to St. Louis, where he vainly sought work as a typesetter. “I asked McKee for a situation anywhere about his office,” he notified Mollie, who was still living with her parents in Keokuk, Iowa.
He said he would let me know if there was a vacancy, but job printing was very dull. He had discharged half a dozen hands last week. I went to the Republican office, but there were only a few men in the job office, and half of them seemed to be idle. I went to Lewisons. Two men were at work, but seemed to have little to do. I asked Ustick for work in his job office. He said they were full. Business may pick up in ten days, but there is little prospect sooner.
By late September he had returned to Tennessee to supervise a survey of the family land. He was still there two months later, when he notified Mollie about his lack of progress. “It will take many months yet, it may take years, to straighten up all these titles,” he groused. “It comes so near being impossible that I do not know whether or not I can get an agent to take hold for an interest.” Meanwhile, he bartered land for the costs of surveying, filing certificates, and other expenses. He expected to return to Keokuk no earlier than January; meanwhile, he forbade Mollie from working outside the home, though he permitted her to take in boarders. He or his agents eventually disposed piecemeal of most of the land in nineteen deals, mostly during the 1870s and 1880s, for ten to fifty cents per acre, considerably less than the fortune Marshall Clemens had expected the land would be worth to his heirs.4
On a balmy Sunday morning, March 18, 1866, the Ajax docked at Pearl Harbor, the deep port at Honolulu, the largest city in the islands, population about fifteen thousand. “After two thousand miles of watery solitude,” Sam observed in Roughing It (1872), the sight of land, even these piles of volcanic rock in the mid-Pacific, “was a welcome one.” His first sight upon landing, however, was “repulsive”—a case of leprosy, as he declared later in his Sandwich Islands lecture, “of so dreadful a nature that I have never been able to get it out of my mind since.”5 He registered at the American Hotel in Honolulu, where for seventeen dollars a week he occupied a furnished white cottage “buried in noble shade trees and enchanting tropical flowers and shrubbery” and took his meals. He soon was introduced to Henry Whitney, son of missionaries and the owner and editor of the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, with offices on Merchant Street where Sam set up camp. He later extolled Whitney as “one of the fairest-minded and best-hearted cannibals I ever knew,” deeming him “the best judge of a human being I ever saw go through a market. Many a time I have seen natives try to palm off part of an old person on him for the fragment of a yo
uth, but I never saw it succeed. Ah, no, there was no deceiving H. M. Whitney. He could tell the very family a roast came from, if he had ever tried the family before.” On his part, Whitney welcomed Sam to the islands and publicly praised him in his paper; Sam’s letters to the Virginia Daily Union “abound in genuine good humor and fun, though if he would stick a little closer to facts, they would be more reliable. In conversation he is courteous and inquisitive, but a peculiar manner that he possesses gives one the idea that he has just got up from the anxious seat—an idea which is very soon dissipated on hearing one of his ‘dry jokes,’ or reading a paragraph in his letters. Our readers, who may meet him, will enjoy his acquaintance.” Whitney remembered later that Sam “was not only an inveterate joker but also smoker, at least one box of cigars disappearing every week on an average. He made himself perfectly at home in my office, but would seldom leave without a parting joke. I became quite attached [to him].”6 Sam relied on the Pacific Commercial Advertiser for many of the details of events in Hawaii that he included in his Sacramento Union letters, and in turn Whitney reprinted many of Sam’s Union pieces in the paper—to be sure, two months after they were written.
Within days of his arrival in Honolulu, Sam also crossed paths again with a pair of old friends: James J. Ayers, one of the former owners of the San Francisco Morning Call, who founded the short-lived Daily Hawaiian Herald, published for four months in late 1866; and Franklin Rising, the former Episcopal rector in Virginia City, visiting Hawaii for his health. He also met Samuel Damon, pastor of the Oahu Bethel Church and chaplain of the Honolulu American Seaman’s Friend Society. Sam may have briefly rented a room near the Damon home at the corner of Chaplain Lane and Fort Street. In any case, he borrowed from Damon a copy of James Jackson Jarves’s History of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands, and “Mr. Jarves’ excellent history,” as he called it, became one of the key sources Sam cited in his Union letters, usually without attribution. For example, Sam appropriated his account of Captain James Cook’s death from Jarves’s book. According to Jarves, Cook’s “heart was eaten by some children, who had mistaken it for that of a dog.” Sam reported to his Union readers that Cook’s “heart was hung up in a native hut, where it was found and eaten by three children, who mistook it for the heart of a dog.” Sam slightly edited the passages he “borrowed” from Jarves—usually changes to punctuation but sometimes inadvertently omitting a word.7
For a few weeks Sam meandered around Oahu on horseback, with stops at Diamond Head, the King’s Cocoanut Grove, the Kalihi Valley, the ruins near Waikiki, and the ancient battlefields. He followed the Pathway of the Great Hog God and spent a week at the Kualoa sugar plantation, owned by the American expatriates Samuel Gardner Wilder and his wife Elizabeth Wilder, on the east coast of the island. He “visited all the principal wonders,” he assured his readers, and he even toured the leper hospital in Honolulu, remarking in his journal on the “disgusting victims” he encountered there. But he cursed “the man who invented the American saddle. There is no seat to speak of about it—one might as well sit in a shovel—and the stirrups are nothing but an ornamental nuisance.” By his own admission, Sam was “one of the poorest horsemen in the world, and I never mount a horse without experiencing a sort of dread that I may be setting out on that last mysterious journey which all of us must take sooner or later, and I never come back in safety from a horseback trip without thinking of my latter end for two or three days afterward.”8
He was particularly enchanted with exotic Honolulu, which was mostly laid out in a plat and meticulously maintained. “In place of the grand mud-colored brownstone fronts of San Francisco,” he reported in the Union,
I saw neat white cottages, with green window-shutters; in place of front yards like billiard-tables with iron fences around them, I saw those cottages surrounded by ample yards, . . . thick clad with green grass, and shaded by tall trees, through whose dense foliage the sun could scarcely penetrate; in place of the customary infernal geranium languished in dust and general debility on tin-roofed rear addition or in bedroom windows, I saw luxurious banks and thickets of flowers, fresh as a meadow after a rain, and glowing with the richest dyes; . . . instead of the combined stenches of Sacramento street, Chinadom and Brannon street slaughter-houses, I breathed the balmy fragrance of jessamine, oleander, and the Pride of India.
He reprinted this paean almost verbatim in chapter 63 of Roughing It. In the same letter he added, with ironic understatement, that he “had rather smell Honolulu at sunset than the old Police Courtroom in San Francisco.” As he wrote his mother and sister on April 3, “I have been here two or three weeks, & like the beautiful tropical climate better & better.” He dined that evening with James McBride, the U.S. minister to Hawaii, and David Kalākaua, the king’s grand chamberlain; and the dinner “was as ceremonious as any I ever attended in California—five regular courses, & five kinds of wine and one of brandy.” The next day, Kalākaua escorted Sam through Iolani Palace. His host, Sam reported, was “descended from the ancient Kings of the island of Hawaii,” and Kalākaua in fact would be selected king by the legislature in 1874. Sam was obviously keeping company with a better class of people than he had known on the Barbary Coast in San Francisco. As he informed Will Bowen, he “only got tight once” in Honolulu. “I know better than to get tight oftener than once in 3 months. It sets a man back in the esteem of people whose good opinions are worth having.”9
In his Sacramento Union letters from the islands, Sam shed his bohemian irreverence like a snakeskin. As Henry Nash Smith observes, he became “a spokesman for respectable opinion” in his correspondence with the newspaper. He increasingly identified “with the dominant forces in the society, that is with the business community.” So far as he was concerned, he had been sent by the Union to the islands primarily “to write up sugar” and he honored the terms of his employment. The local economy was in transition from small-scale to plantation farming, mostly sugar cane, and Sam argued fervidly for expanded trade with the islands and, with an assumption of snoblesse oblige, their economic exploitation. He was at the time an unapologetic colonialist and champion of Manifest Destiny, unequivocally favoring annexation of Hawaii by the United States. “When all the cane lands in the islands are under full cultivation,” he predicted, “they will produce over 250,000,000 pounds of sugar annually.” Commercial traffic via steamers “would soon populate these islands with Americans, and loosen that French and English grip which is gradually closing around them.” If Californians enjoyed regularly scheduled shipping access to Hawaiian markets and could “send capitalists down here in seven or eight days’ time and take them back in nine or ten, she can fill these islands full of Americans and regain her lost foothold.” He added, “It is a matter of the utmost importance to the United States that her trade with these islands should be carefully fostered and augmented,” because “it pays.” Sam advocated a reduction in the import duties charged on sugar and the dredging of Pearl Harbor so that it might accommodate more vessels. If the United States “were to annex the islands and do away with that crushing duty of four cents a pound, some of those heavy planters who can hardly keep their heads above water now, would clear $75,000 a year and upward.” The result would be a geopolitical coup:
[W]e would have such a fine half-way house [between North America and Asia] for our Pacific-plying ships; and such a convenient supply depot and such a commanding sentry-box for an armed squadron; and we could raise cotton and coffee there and make it pay pretty well, with the duties off and capital easier to get at. And then we would own the mightiest volcano on earth—Kilauea! . . . Let us annex, by all means. . . . By annexing, we would get all those 50,000 natives cheap as dirt, with their morals and other diseases thrown in. No expense for education—they are already educated; no need to convert them—they are already converted; no expense to clothe them—for obvious reasons. We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. . . . We can give them lecturers! I will go m
yself. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization.10
While this paragraph in particular has sometimes been read ironically,11 in context Sam seems quite sincere in his desire to seize Hawaii. He genuinely believed that by annexing the islands the United States would improve the quality of life there and secure a valuable trading partner and a way station to Asia.
But Sam also bettered the terms of his assignment. He padded his Union letters with “a good deal of extraneous matter that hadn’t anything to do with sugar” and, he bragged, “it was this extraneous matter that . . . made me notorious.” He expressed opinions about most of the major players in the Hawaiian government, including royalty. Sam declared in his Sandwich Islands lecture that the Hawaiians “have a constitutional monarchy but they have no constitution”—that is, they had only a monarch. Normally suspicious of royal privilege, Sam praised the benevolent despot King Kamehameha V for ignoring parliamentary decrees and abolishing universal suffrage. “One of his very first acts” after becoming monarch in 1863 “was to fly into a splendid passion (when his Parliament voted down some measure of his), and tear the beautiful Constitution into shreds, and stamp on them,” Sam reported, and “his next act was to violently prorogue the Parliament and send the members about their business.” The king allowed Parliament to exist only as window dressing on the monarchy, because the authority of the parliamentarian was “more ornamental than real.” Instead, he
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