is up to the average of such bodies the world over—and I wish it were a compliment to say it, but it is hardly so. I have seen a number of Legislatures, and there was a comfortable majority in each of them that knew just about enough to come in when it rained, and that was all. Few men of first class ability can afford to let their affairs go to ruin while they fool away their time in Legislatures for months on a stretch. Few such men care a straw for the small-beer distinction one is able to achieve in such a place. But your chattering, one-horse village lawyer likes it, and your solemn ass from the cow counties, who don’t know the Constitution from the Lord’s Prayer, enjoys it, and these you will always find in the Assembly.
A veteran reporter of the Nevada Assembly, Sam believed the Hawaiian version was “like all other Legislatures. A wooden-head gets up and proposes an utterly absurd something or other, and he and half a dozen other wooden-heads discuss it with windy vehemence for an hour, the remainder of the house sitting in silent patience the while, and then a sensible man—a man of weight—a big gun—gets up and shows the foolishness of the matter in five sentences; a vote is taken and the thing is tabled.” Sam conceded, however, that decorum in the Hawaiian council was “a shade superior to that of the early Washoe Legislature,” whose members sometimes rested their feet on their desks.23
Of all the men he met in the Hawaiian Parliament, Sam was most impressed by the mixed-blood Bill Ragsdale, “a brilliant young fellow and very popular,” who worked as a translator and spoke both English and the native language “with a volubility that was calculated to make a slow-spoken man like me distressingly nervous.” Ragsdale “may be said really to have made every speech in that Parliament for years,” Sam joked in 1881. There was
a spice of deviltry in the fellow’s nature and it crops out every now and then when he is translating the speeches of slow old Kanakas who do not understand English. Without departing from the spirit of a member’s remarks, he will, with apparent unconsciousness, drop in a little voluntary contribution occasionally in the way of a word or two that will make the gravest speech utterly ridiculous. He is careful not to venture upon such experiments, though, with the remarks of persons able to detect him.
In January 1884 Sam began a novel about the Sandwich Islands, soon aborted, that was to have featured a hero modeled on Ragsdale. “I have begun a story,” he notified Howells at the time, about “that unimaginably beautiful land & that most strange & fascinating people.” Only seventeen pages of the manuscript survive, however. In 1895, as he contemplated a stop in Honolulu on his round-the-world lecture tour, Sam inquired about Ragsdale among his fellow passengers and learned that he had long since suffered a “loathsome and lingering death” of leprosy on Molokai.24
The political institutions in Hawaii were as divided between U.S. and British interests as the churches. The American faction led by David Kalākaua was opposed by the British sympathizers led by Staley and Queen Emma, the consort of Kamehameha IV and mother of Kamehameha V. So while covering the assembly in Honolulu for the Union, Sam discovered a ready villain among its members: Charles Coffin Harris, the expatriated New Hampshire–born Hawaiian minister of finance, Harvard-educated lawyer, former attorney general, and future minister of foreign affairs. If the government was a wheelbarrow, the saying went, then Harris was the wheel. Sam was unimpressed. Like Bishop Staley, Harris seemed a bumbling autocrat, “an inveterate official barnacle” on the ship of state:
If he had brains in proportion to his legs, he would make Solomon seem a failure; if his modesty equaled his ignorance, he would make a violet seem stuck-up; if his learning equaled his vanity, he would make von Humboldt seem as unlettered as the backside of a tombstone; if his stature were proportioned to his conscience, he would be a gem for the microscope; if his ideas were as large as his words, it would take a man three months to walk around one of them; if an audience were to contract to listen as long as he would talk, that audience would die of old age; and if he were to talk until he said something, he would still be on his hind legs when the last trump sounded.
Harris “was talking pretty much all the time” in Parliament, Sam wrote on May 23, “and all the good sound sense or point there was in his vaporings could have been boiled down into half a page of foolscap. Harris is not a man of first-class abilities—but that is only my opinion, you know—not Harris’. He knows some things, though. He knows that his salary of $4,000 is little enough.” Since his arrival in the West, Sam added, “I have never lost my cheerfulness and wanted to lay me down in some secluded spot and die, and be at rest, until I heard him try to be funny today. If I had had a double-barreled shotgun I would have blown him into a million fragments.” There is no evidence the two men exchanged a word in person; in other words, Sam based his impression of the minister entirely on his public appearances. He deleted most of his comments about Harris in his Sacramento Union letters while revising them for publication in Roughing It, though in chapter 67 of the book he branded him (albeit without name) as a “renegade American from New Hampshire, all jaw, vanity, bombast, and ignorance, a lawyer of ‘shyster’ caliber, a fraud by nature.” From his perspective, Sam had reason enough to despise Harris. The minister of finance was “unworthy of the name of American”—in part, according to Sam, because he had renounced his U.S. citizenship. Instead, Harris belonged “body and soul, and boots, to the King of the Sandwich Islands and the ‘Lord Bishop of Honolulu.’” He was an obsequious “worshipper of the scepter above him, a reptile never tired of sneering at the land of his birth or glorifying the ten-acre kingdom that has adopted him.” Privately Sam was even more blunt: “It riles me to hear an American (that [——]ing Harris) stand up & pay titular adulation.” Thirty years later, in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, he modeled the characters of Georges de la Tremouille, the craven and feckless advisor to the king of France, and the “plotting fox, the Archbishop of Rheims,” on Harris and Staley.25
On May 26 Sam left Honolulu aboard the good ship Emeline (which he rechristened the Boomerang in Roughing It) on a two-day, 150-mile voyage to the Big Island. The schooner, he remembered, was only “about as long as two street cars, and about as wide as one.” His cabin was so small he might have swung a cat in it, “but then it would be fatal to the cat.” As he approached the island, two of its highest mountains, Mauna Loa and Hualalai, loomed into view. He landed at Kailua and for the next three weeks rode two hundred miles counterclockwise around the lotus land—excursions through the orange and coffee region of Kona; to Kealakekua Bay, where Captain Cook had been killed by natives and the location of the ruined temple of the “great god Lono”; to the “Petrified Cataracts,” a “congealed cascade of lava”; and to the ancient ruins at Honaunau. After reboarding the Emeline and sailing to the Kau District, he paused in Waiohinu, where he stayed with Captain Charles N. Spencer, later minister of the interior under King Kalākaua, before continuing to Kapapala Ranch, located at the head of a trail he rode to the summit of Kilauea, the largest active volcano on earth. The ascent took two days, partly “on account of laziness,” and required him to pick his way “through billowy wastes of lava long generations ago stricken dead and cold in the climax of its tossing fury.” The travel writer Isabella Bird, who traveled the same path six years later, described the scenery more evocatively in her book The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875): “an infinity of fantastic shapes arrest and weary the eye, lava in all its forms, from a compact phonolite, to the lightest pumice stone, the mere froth of the volcano, exceeding in wildness and confusion the most extravagant nightmare ever inflicted on man.”26
On June 3 Sam registered at the Volcano House, two miles from the rim of Kilauea, which had recently opened with four guest rooms. “I have seen Vesuvius since,” Sam reflected in Roughing It, “but it was a mere toy, a child’s volcano, a soup-kettle” compared to Kilauea. The Neapolitan volcano was “a shapely cone thirty-six hundred feet high; its crater an inverted cone only three hundred feet deep, and not more than a thousand feet i
n diameter, if as much as that; its fires meagre, modest, and docile,” whereas the Hawaiian volcano was “a vast, perpendicular, walled cellar, nine hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others, level-floored, and ten miles in circumference!” “I staid [sic] at the volcano about a week and witnessed the greatest eruption that has occurred for years,” he wrote his family. “I lived well there. They charge $4 a day for board, and a dollar or two extra for guides and horses.” He was also introduced to Ned Howard, a San Franciscan who became his traveling companion for the next two weeks. Under the nondescript name Brown, perhaps in ironic memory of William Brown, Sam’s old nemesis on the Pennsylvania, Howard became a butt of his wisecracks in the Union much as Clement “the Unreliable” Rice had been his foil in the Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise. After sundown on the day of his arrival, Sam observed an eruption from the rim and the next night he joined Howard in a descent into the crater. “For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated,” Sam reported in the Union. “Over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire!” The smell of sulfur was “strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.”27 In addition to recounting his experience at Kilauea in his Union letters and in chapters 74–75 of Roughing It, Sam recalled it in a celebrated set piece in his Sandwich Islands lecture, which he would deliver in the United States and England dozens of times between 1866 and 1873.
Sam and Howard departed on June 7 for the Half Way House—at the midpoint between the volcanoes Kilauea and Maura Kea—and promptly lost their way. Howard had suggested they hire a guide, but Sam “wouldn’t hear of it, said the trail was so plainly worn on the rocks that we couldn’t miss it,” yet before noon they were “following goat and cattle trails in every direction, riding around great cracks, some of which we nearly fell into.” By nightfall, according to Howard, even Sam
thought we had better not go on for fear of falling into a lava crack. He pulled his saddle off his horse and made a pillow of it after scraping up some leaves, as if he were used to this sort of thing, and put his raincoat over him. . . . This most improvident man had thrown our lunch away that had been given us at the Volcano House early in the day; said we’d be at the Half Way House before noon. Next morning, fortunately, a native came along with a gun, hunting goats, and we persuaded him to lead us to the Half Way House. It was only a few miles away. Here we got something to eat . . . roast pig and boiled taro and some nasty paste . . . called “poi” which Sam seemed to relish.
The next day, June 8, they arrived at the Onomea sugar plantation seven miles from Hilo, founded and co-owned by Samuel L. Austin, another American by birth. His son Franklin recalled their visit sixty years later. Howard was tall and “immaculately dressed” and Sam “of medium height, rather slouchily dressed in a brown linen suit and a native lauhala straw hat pulled over his eyes. He had a flowing silky brown mustache, rather dark tanned complexion and bushy dark brown hair with bright hazel eyes.” Sam presented Austin with a letter of introduction from mutual friends in San Francisco. At dinner that evening he
dominated the conversation, keeping the table in roars of laughter with anecdotes and jokes, so much so, in fact, that father could hardly carve the roast and had to stand up to his job, while mother nearly spilled the vegetables she dished out. He seemed pleased with his seat at the head of the table where he could see all of the faces and note the effect of his jokes. The only one who did not seem to appreciate the fun was Howard . . . who wore a bored expression.
Years later Sam admitted that he did not think much of Howard, “though that’s nothing against him, of course. Tastes differ, & 200 miles muleback in company is the next best thing to a sea-voyage to bring a man’s worst points to the surface. Ned & I like each other, but we don’t love, & we never did.” After leaving Onomea, the traveling companions stayed for three days with John H. Coney, sheriff of the island of Hawaii, whom Sam also knew through mutual friends, before ending their journey at the Port of Kawaihae in the northwest corner of the island.28
On June 16 he and Howard caught the steamer Kilauea for their return to Honolulu. Upon its arrival two days later Sam took to his bed, unable to walk from saddle boils, the same malady he had suffered while riding Paint Brush during his two weeks soldiering with the Marion Rangers. He was bedridden for a fortnight. The only book in the hotel, he later claimed, was a copy of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Songs in Many Keys, and he read it to rags. “I knew every poem, I knew the title page, the dedication, the imprint, the first page, the last, the covers even.” He had planned to travel to Kauai, the fourth-largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago, but he canceled the trip after the bark Swallow from San Francisco landed in Honolulu on June 18 with Anson Burlingame, General Robert B. Van Valkenburgh, and their families aboard. Burlingame and Van Valkenburgh, the newly appointed U.S. ministers to China and Japan, were en route to their posts in Beijing and Tokyo. Burlingame’s teenage son Edward, later the longtime editor of Scribner’s magazine, had read Sam’s jumping frog story and wanted an introduction to the author. Learning that Sam was in town, the elder Burlingame “hunted me up as soon as he came here” and asked to meet him, as Sam wrote his mother and sister. According to Paine, “Sam crawled out of bed, dressed and shaved himself as quickly as possible, and drove to the American minister’s, where the party was staying. They had a hilariously good time.” Sam recalled that “Burlingame told me a good deal about Hon[orable] Jere[miah] Clemens and that Virginia Clemens who was wounded in a duel. He was in Congress years with both of them.” At his request, Sam loaned him “pretty much everything I ever wrote. I guess he will be an almighty wise man by the time he wades through that lot.” The two men became fast friends over the next two weeks, though they never met again after the ministers left for Asia. Burlingame even invited Sam to “come to China” and “make his house in Pekin [sic] my home, he will afford me facilities that few men can have there for seeing & learning.” In Paine’s telling, Burlingame also offered Sam some banal and unsolicited advice: “You have great ability; I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with inferiors; always climb.” The advice rings as hollow as the counsel given Horatio Alger’s juvenile heroes by their adult patrons.29
Still, as Sam wrote in his next Union letter, “Burlingame is a man who would be esteemed, respected, and popular anywhere, no matter whether he were among Christians or cannibals.” On the Fourth of July, Sam attended “a great luau” or “native dinner” at Waikiki hosted by David Kalākaua to welcome Burlingame and Van Valkenburgh, though he referred to it in his journal as a “ball.” After Burlingame’s death in 1870, Sam published a tribute to him:
He was a true man, a brave man, an earnest man, a liberal man, a just man, a generous man, in all his ways and by all his instincts a noble man; he was a man of education and culture, a finished conversationalist, a ready, able, and graceful speaker, a man of great brain, a broad and deep and weighty thinker. He was a great man—a very, very great man. . . . He was a large, handsome man, with such a face as children instinctively trust in, and homeless and friendless creatures appeal to without fear. . . . A chivalrous generosity was his most marked characteristic—a large charity, a noble kindliness that could not comprehend narrowness or meanness. It is this that shows out in his fervent abolitionism, manifested at a time when it was neither very creditable nor very safe to hold such a creed.
As U.S. minister to China, Sam noted, Burlingame had even ruled that “a Chinaman’s oath” was “as good as a foreigner’s.” As late as 1906 he recalled that Burlingame “was not a petty politician, but a great and magnanimous statesman,” a “great citizen and diplomat,” and a “charming man.”30
Coincidentally, Sam was en route from Kawaihae to Honolulu when the sur
vivors of a maritime disaster landed on the Big Island. On May 3, while en route to San Francisco, the clipper ship Hornet burned and sank in the mid-Pacific. After a voyage of forty-three days and four thousand miles, one of its three lifeboats—twenty-one feet long, six feet wide, and three feet deep—finally touched land on June 15 at Laupahoehoe, a fishing village on the north shore of Hawaii.31 The first reports of the fifteen survivors arrived in Honolulu, two hundred miles away, on June 22, and Sam appended the news to his letter to the Union written the same day.
The shipwrecked men were admitted on June 24 to a Honolulu hospital, where they were treated for exposure and malnutrition. Sam was still so saddle sore from riding around the Big Island that Burlingame arranged for him to be carried on a stretcher there to interview them. The ambassador canceled dinner invitations with “princes and foreign dignitaries” and neglected “all sorts of things to accommodate me,” he wrote his family. The sailors, particularly the third mate, John Thomas, told a harrowing tale in some respects similar to reports of the explosion of the Pennsylvania years earlier. Both the Pennsylvania (turpentine) and the Hornet (kerosene) carried barrels of flammable liquids in their cargo holds that fueled the blazes on board. As soon as the Hornet accidentally caught fire, the fifty-three-year-old captain Josiah Mitchell ordered the three lifeboats to be launched. The crew had only forty minutes to stock them with provisions, which were
four hams, seven pieces of salt pork, (each piece weighed about four pounds), one box of raisins, 100 pounds of bread (about one barrel), twelve two-pound cans of oysters, clams and assorted meats; six buckets of raw potatoes (which rotted so fast they got but little benefit from them), a keg with four pounds of butter in it, twelve gallons of water in a forty-gallon tierce or “scuttle-butt,” four one-gallon demijohns full of water, three bottles of brandy, the property of passengers; some pipes, matches and a hundred pounds of tobacco.
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