The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  CHAPTER 13

  New York

  I can’t keep my temper in New York. The cars and carriages always come along and get in the way just as I want to cross a street, and if there is anything that can make a man soar into flights of sublimity in the matter of profanity, it is that thing.

  —“Letter from ‘Mark Twain,’” August 11, 1867

  THE FAIR WEATHER was short-lived. The first evening the ship encountered a “great tempest—the greatest seen on this coast for many years,” Sam Clemens noted. The night was pitch-black and the third-class passengers in steerage were imprisoned after “the hatches were battened down and canvassed over.” Fortunately, Sam occupied a berth on the upper deck, so the sea “did not seem so rough to us as it did to those below.” The problem, he explained, was that the ship was too heavy at “the head & just doggedly fought the seas, instead of climbing over them. Nearly everybody seasick.” Sam escaped mal de mer because he “had something worse”—perhaps the cold he claimed to have contracted on the Divide between Gold Hill and Virginia City, Nevada, or perhaps a recurrence of venereal disease. In any event, the crew moved cargo aft and the lifeboats “on the after-guard were pumped full of water. These precautions eased the ship’s head and saved her.” A wave that

  broke over the ship about midnight carried away twenty feet of the bulwarks forward, & the forward cabin was drenched with water & the steerage fairly flooded. A case of claret floated, in a state room in the forward cabin—then the water must have been 6 inches deep—if a case of claret would float or wash at all. A man’s boots were washed to far end of room. Various things were afloat. Must have been flooded in steerage. They prepared the boats for emergencies.

  The gale was so severe, Sam reported to his San Francisco Alta California readers, that “miners from Washoe and California and ‘web-feet’ from Oregon, who had never prayed in their lives before, perhaps, knelt down and did the best they could at it on short notice.” It “proved the America to be a staunch and reliable vessel” and the captain “a thoroughly competent officer.”1 The ship was commanded by Edgar “Ned” Wakeman, who had delivered the “scoofy oysters” to San Francisco aboard the John L. Stephens in December 1864.

  Sam credited Wakeman with saving the ship from a hurricane and soon befriended him. “I’d rather travel with that old portly, hearty, jolly, boisterous, good-natured old sailor” than “with any other man I ever came across,” he wrote in his journal a week after they left San Francisco. The captain seemed like a character in one of the sea romances by Frederick Marryat he had read as a child. As Sam observed, “He never drinks, & never plays cards; he never swears, except in the privacy of his own quarters, with a friend or so, & then his feats of fancy blasphemy are calculated to fill the hearer with awe & admiration.” He enjoyed the exuberant Wakeman’s

  stunning forecastle yarns, and I will do him the credit to say he knows how to tell them. With his strong, cheery voice, animated countenance, quaint phraseology, defiance of grammar and extraordinary vim in the matter of gesture and emphasis, he makes a most effective story out of very unpromising materials. There is a contagion about his whole-souled jollity that the chief mourner at a funeral could not resist. He is fifty years old, and as rough as a bear in voice and action, and yet as kind-hearted and tender as a woman. He is a burly, hairy, sun burned, stormy-voiced old salt, who mixes strange oaths with incomprehensible sailor phraseology and the gentlest and most touching pathos, and is tattooed from head to foot like a Fejee Islander. His tongue is forever going when he has got no business on his hands, and though he knows nothing of policy or the ways of the world, he can cheer up any company of passengers that ever travelled in a ship, and keep them cheered up.

  Wakeman also figures as Captain Waxman in Sam’s letters about the trip to the Alta California. He modeled characters on the old sea dog under different names for decades to come—for example, Captain Saltmarsh in “About a Remarkable Stranger” (1871); Captain Ned Blakely in Roughing It (1872); Simon Wheeler in the aborted novel Simon Wheeler, Detective (ca. 1877); Hurricane Jones in “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion” (1882); Captain Saltmarsh in The American Claimant (1892); Sim Robinson in Those Extraordinary Twins (1894); Admiral Abner Stormfield in the unfinished “Refuge of the Derelicts” (1905); and Captain Eli Stormfield in Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1907–8). As he described Saltmarsh in The American Claimant, he had “a gait and countenance that were full of command, confidence and decision. His horny hands and wrists were covered with tattoo-marks, and when his lips parted, his teeth showed up white and blemishless. His voice was the effortless deep bass of a church organ, and would disturb the tranquility of a gas flame fifty yards away.”2

  The voyage was marred by the death on Christmas Eve of an infant girl after an illness of only two days. All of the passengers acted as though “they were related by blood” to her, Sam wrote the Alta California, because travelers “on a long voyage become as one family.” At 10:00 a.m. on Christmas Day she was buried at sea after a brief sermon by the Reverend S. M. Fackler, an Episcopal minister from Boise, Idaho.3

  The America landed at San Juan del Sur, on the west coast of Nicaragua, on December 28, and the passengers began their three-day trek across the isthmus the next day. They traveled by stage to Virgin Bay on the shore of Lake Nicaragua, where at 2:00 a.m. they boarded steamers that carried them to San Juan del Norte, or Greytown, by daylight. Charley Webb, who had passed through Greytown in 1862 en route to California, described it as “an insignificant little place” with houses “built chiefly of bamboos and bananas and thatched with palm leaves.” Sam was impressed by its “native thatched houses” where “coffee, eggs, bread, cigars & fruit” were for sale: “delicious—10 cents buy pretty much anything & in great quantity. Californians can’t understand how 10 or 25 cents can buy a sumptuous lunch.” As usual, too, he adored the local women as if they were forbidden fruit: “They are virtuous according to their lights, but I guess their lights are a little dim. . . . Two of these picturesque native girls were exceedingly beautiful—such liquid, languishing eyes! such pouting lips! such glossy, luxuriant hair! such ravishing, incendiary expression! such grace! such voluptuous forms, and such precious little drapery about them!” Amid a downpour on January 1, 1867, Sam and the other passengers finally embarked for New York on the steamer San Francisco.4 The ship had suffered repeated mechanical problems en route to Nicaragua and, unbeknownst to Sam and his peers, was infected with cholera. Rather than quarantine the arriving passengers from the San Francisco for thirty days and await medical clearance to put the ship back into service, the company officials marched the passengers from the America to a death ship for their ten-day voyage to New York.

  The first three cases of cholera in steerage were reported on January 2. The first of these patients died and was buried at sea by the end of the day, Reverend Fackler again officiating. A second victim died the next day and the corpse immediately cast overboard lest the disease spread. By January 5 three people had died and a fourth passenger was fatally ill; he soon died and “was shoved overboard half an hour afterward sowed up in a blanket with 60 pounds of iron.” The “cursed fools” in steerage were reticent to report their illness, fearing they would be charged all the money they possessed for medical help, so they

  let the diarrhea run two or three days & then, getting scared they run to the surgeon & hope to be cured. And they lie like blazes—swear they have just been taken when the doctor of course knows better. He asked a patient the other day if he had any money to get some brandy with—said no—the ship had to furnish it—when the man died they found a $20 piece in his pocket.

  The captain began to inspect the ship every day for cleanliness and had the purser post a sign that no one aboard would be charged for medical care. Still, by the morning of January 5 the disease had infiltrated the second- and first-class cabins and, Sam noted, the passengers began to worry that the ship would be quarantined for thirty days in Key West. The const
ernation among the passengers and crew, including the doctor, was so great that some of them planned to abandon the ship at Key West “if quarantine regulations permit” and travel north by rail instead. Later in the morning Fackler fell ill; another passenger died and was buried at sea without benefit of clergy; by afternoon the minister had “bidden us all good-bye,” and he died before the end of the day. “Verily the ship is fast become a floating hospital,” Sam jotted in his journal, and “not an hour passes but brings its fresh sensation, its new disaster—its melancholy tidings.” He realized, given the gravity of the situation, “that I myself may be dead tomorrow.” “All levity” ceased and “a settled gloom is upon the face of the passengers,” who began to pray for the cool weather that would strike around Cape Hatteras, which would “drive away the sickness.” The ship’s surgeon tried to “allay their fear by telling them he has all the medicines he wants,” when in fact he confided to Sam that he “had no medicines to work with—that he shipped the first time this trip & found the locker empty & no time to make a requisition for more medicines.” He tried to calm anxieties by assuring the passengers that the disease was “only a virulent sort of diarrhea” when it was “cholera & of the most virulent type.” In addition, the ship’s engine broke down three times in midocean. “These things distress the passengers beyond measure,” Sam observed. “They are scared about the epidemic & so impatient to get along—& now they have lost confidence in the ship & fear she may break again in the rough weather that is to come.” They worried, too, that the authorities at Key West would not permit “our pestilence-stricken ship” to “land there—but the Capt. says we are in sore distress, in desperate straits, & we must land, we will land, in spite of orders, cannon or anything else—we cannot go on in this way. If we do land, some of our people are going to leave—the doctor among them.”5

  The ship was allowed to dock in Key West to refuel, though unknown to the port authorities the crew desperately needed to replenish its supply of medicines—and Sam wanted to exploit the opportunity to buy cheap cigars and brandy. He purchased “700 superb cigars at $4 a hundred—greenbacks—better cigars than I could get in Cal[ifornia] for $25 a hundred in gold” and brandy for fifteen dollars a gallon. On the other hand, the local merchants extorted an exorbitant price for coal—two dollars per ton for a hundred tons, eight times the price in New York. After he learned about the sale, Sam did not expect “to find any Key West folks in Heaven.” “We remained at Key West a day and night,” he reported, and the ship raised anchor on the morning of the January 7 “with a thinned complement of people; for twenty-one passengers had quitted the ship on account of the cholera.” But some of the departees gave their “dinner & berth tickets to remaining friends in the steerage! . . . I am glad they are gone, d——n them.” Fortunately, their generosity did not spread the contagion. Of the eighteen passengers “who were sick when we landed” at Key West, “eleven were already well again” by the time the ship departed “and all the fright about the disease was gone,” Sam noted. “The dismal spell was removed.”6

  The danger subsided as soon the ship left Key West and entered the Gulf Stream. On January 10 the water temperature fell seven degrees in a half hour and the next day, with New York Harbor in view, after a total of seven deaths from cholera, the eighth and final passenger to die on the voyage succumbed to dropsy. The past ten days had been, as Fred Kaplan notes, Sam’s “closest brush with death since the explosion of the Pennsylvania” in 1858, though Sam exaggerated the extent of the epidemic in Roughing It, where he claimed that “we buried two or three bodies at sea every day.” The San Francisco anchored in New York on January 12, the first time he had set foot in the city in thirteen years and the same day a cover-up began. The shipping company planted a story in the New York Herald that blamed the passenger deaths not on an outbreak of cholera but on the consumption of unripe tropical fruit by the passengers during the crossing of Nicaragua, “an indiscretion against which the officers of the steamships” always cautioned people. That is, the company refused to assume responsibility for the fatalities.7 Sam apparently failed to challenge the malfeasance and corporate cover-up, though he must have known it was a lie. It was exactly the type of hypocrisy he relished exposing in later years. But on this occasion, as in Esmeralda and Humboldt Counties in Nevada in 1861, he was simply a prospector looking to strike it rich.

  Sam registered at the Metropolitan Hotel on Broadway, a six-story brownstone owned by the Leland family, owners of the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco, and from the Metropolitan he planned his assault on the lyceums. He tried but failed to entice Edward Hingston, Artemus Ward’s manager, from London to supervise his tour. Sam did not suffer the rejection kindly, especially after Hingston helped promote John Camden Hotten’s pirated British edition of Roughing It. Crossing paths with Hingston in London years later, Sam spurned his offer of a handshake.8

  He had planned to speak in New York about California—what would have been a precursor of his “Roughing It” lecture—“& perhaps on other subjects,” and he had already received invitations to lecture in Boston and Philadelphia and before the Mercantile Library Associations of Cincinnati and St. Louis, “but I don’t want to start till I can start on a sure basis & not crucify myself through managerial inefficiency.” As he explained to Mollie Clemens, “The Californians in town have almost induced me to lecture, but I’ll not do it yet. I won’t until I have got my cards stacked to suit me. It is too hazardous a business for a stranger. I am not going to rush headlong in & make a fiasco of the thing when I may possibly make a success of it by going a little slow.” His caution was warranted. George Ripley, the manager of the old Brook Farm community, companion of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller, and book editor of the New York Tribune, wrote two weeks after he arrived in New York that Sam had not yet “done much beyond showing promise.”9

  Sam soon moved to a lodging house on East Sixteenth Street, where room and board cost less than thirty dollars a week. He had hardly unpacked his bags before he visited Webb, his bohemian friend from San Francisco, who had settled in New York the year before. “How that January day in your rooms in Broadway comes back!” he wrote Webb in 1896. There he met Edward H. House, a young reporter for the New York Tribune and yet another member of the Pfaff’s saloon crowd, with whom he often met over the next few months. The New York correspondent of the San Francisco Bulletin reported about this time that he had seen Sam shivering in the cold weather and complaining about the “infernal long distances” he had to travel around the city. “He said he had already frozen two of his teeth, had corns on all his fingers, and a gum-bolt on each heel, and he almost regretted that he had ever wandered away from the clear skies, the balmy atmosphere, and the umbrageous shades of the Washoe country.” In his correspondence with the Alta California, Sam similarly complained about the “overgrown metropolis” with its population of more than a million where “you cannot even pay a friendly call without devoting a whole day to it.” He moved around the city mostly on foot because the horsecars were overcrowded.

  There is never room for another person by the time they get this far down town. The cars do not run in Broadway, anyhow, and I do not like to wander out of that street. I always get lost when I do. The town is all changed since I was here, thirteen years ago, when I was a pure and sinless sprout. The streets wind in and out, and this way and that way, in the most bewildering fashion, and two of them will suddenly come together and clamp the last house between them so close, and whittle the end of it down so sharp, that it looms up like the bow of a steam ship, and you have to shut one eye to see it. The streets are so crooked in the lower end of town that if you take one and follow it faithfully you will eventually fetch up right where you started from.

  His latent racism occasionally surfaced in his letters: “I have seen negroes sitting stuck up comfortably in a car, and lovely young white ladies standing up before them, block after block, clinging to the leather supports that depended from the roof.
And then I wanted a contraband for breakfast.” He even endorsed literacy tests for freed slaves before permitting them to vote.10

  Sam played the tourist for the next several weeks. He attended a performance of the sensational melodrama The Black Crook at Niblo’s Garden, a Bowery theater that catered to working-class audiences, produced by Tom Maguire, his friend from San Francisco and Virginia City. With feigned outrage, Sam reported after he saw the show that, with its cast of women attired in diaphanous costumes, it was “the wickedest show you can think of.” Unlike the girlie play he had seen in New York in 1853 featuring “a pack of painted old harlots, swathed in gauze,” The Black Crook starred “beautiful clipper-built girls” with “barely clothes enough on to be tantalizing.” Their sex appeal was palpable. The box office collected on average twenty-four hundred dollars a night for five months. “The scenery and the legs are everything,” Sam conceded. The speaking parts were irrelevant to the production. Instead, the mostly male audiences were attracted by the “beautiful bare-legged girls hanging in flower baskets” or “stretched in groups on great sea shells” or “clustered around fluted columns.” This “wilderness of girls” dressed “with a meagreness that would make a parasol blush. And they prance around and expose themselves in a way that is scandalous to me.” The evening of January 21 he attended a performance of The White Fawn, a sequel of sorts to The Black Crook, again at Niblo’s on South Broadway. “Everybody agrees that it is much more magnificent than the Crook,” he reported to his Alta California readers. “The fairy scenes are more wonderfully dazzling and beautiful, and the legs of the young women reach higher up.” Unfortunately, from Sam’s oh-so-scandalized middle-class perspective, the play was just as demoralizing as its predecessor. Such musicals “debauched many a pure mind,” he avowed, and