The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  The thirty-one men, fifteen of them in the longboat commanded by the captain, were all put on short rations immediately. They caught rainwater and an occasional fish or bird to supplement their diet. After nearly three weeks, the remaining stores were divided among the boats and they separated to “follow the dictates of their own judgment.” The longboat sailed away with two-thirds of the ham, one-fourth of a box of raisins, a half bushel of biscuit crumbs, fourteen gallons of water, and three cans of bullion soup. During the third week adrift the mates began to recite evening prayers. By the twenty-eighth day the rations were a “teaspoonful of bread crumbs and about an ounce of ham for the morning meal; a spoonful of bread crumbs alone for the evening meal, and one gill of water three times a day.” By the thirty-eighth day the men were soaking their leather boots in seawater and eating them. In the account of events Sam heard from Thomas in the Honolulu hospital, the men in the longboat eventually contemplated cannibalism, “the shipwrecked mariner’s last dreadful resort,” but did not openly discuss it. They also maintained a professional decorum for over six weeks on the open sea before their rescue: “No disposition was ever shown by the strong to impose upon the weak, and no greediness, no desire on the part of any to get more than his just share of food, was ever evinced. On the contrary, they were thoughtful of each other and always ready to care for and assist each other to the utmost of their ability.” The sailors, Burlingame, and Sam all credited Mitchell with their survival. Sam promised that his next letter from Hawaii would “tell the terrible romance from the first day to the last in faithful detail” by citing the captain’s log and the diaries of the two passengers “if I am permitted to copy them.”32

  According to his version of events, Sam “worked all that night on a dispatch about their ordeal” so that he could send it to the Sacramento Union the next morning aboard the bark Milton Badger. As he explained later,

  I took no dinner, for there was no time to spare if I would beat the other correspondents. I spent four hours arranging the notes in their proper order, then wrote all night and beyond it; with this result: that I had a very long and detailed account of the “Hornet” episode ready at nine in the morning, while the other correspondents of the San Francisco journals had nothing but a brief outline report—for they didn’t sit up. The now-and-then schooner was to sail for San Francisco about nine; when I reached the dock she was free forward and was just casting off her stern-line. My fat envelope was thrown by a strong hand, and fell on board all right, and my victory was a safe thing.

  Writing to his mother and sister a couple of days later, he predicted that if his “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.” And, according to Sam, that was exactly what happened: his report of the catastrophe and the extraordinary endurance of the men, splashed across three columns of nonpareil type on the front page of the Union for July 19 under the title “Burning of the Clipper Ship Hornet at Sea,” made quite a “stir” and “was telegraphed to the New York papers” by the head of “the Pacific bureau of the ‘New York Herald’” and copied around the world.33

  This version of events has been enshrined in legend. As early as 1887 George Barnes, Twain’s former boss at the San Francisco Morning Call, credited him with scooping his rivals by publishing “the first news of the terrible misfortune” of the Hornet, a tale so “graphic” that “the whole reading world thrilled with pity.” In the autobiographical notes he sent his nephew Samuel Moffett in 1899, Sam bragged that his report “was the only full account that went to California.” According to Paine, the young correspondent “gave the public the first detailed history of the terrible Hornet disaster and the rescue of those starving men” and “the telegraph carried it everywhere.” Sam’s modern biographers have hewed the same line. Effie Mona Mack averred that Twain’s “scoop” was “telegraphed everywhere.” Albert E. Stone Jr. asserted that Twain’s dispatch was “picked up by the New York Herald’s West Coast correspondent, telegraphed across the nation, and reprinted everywhere.” Even more recently, Andrew Hoffman contends that Twain’s report was “carried by wire across the country”; Joseph B. McCullough and Janice McIntire-Strasburg assert that it was the first and “most complete reportage” of the disaster; Joe Jackson declares it “was printed in newspapers across the nation” and worked “its way through English-language papers around the globe”; and Ron Powers affirms it “was reprinted throughout a nation conditioned by Civil War reportage to expect personal accounts of peril and high drama from the daily papers. Mark Twain had a worldwide scoop.”34 None of these statements is true.

  In fact, Sam was no more than a bit player in reporting the news of the Hornet disaster and the near-miraculous survival of the men to the nation and the world. To be sure, he appended a barebones account of the catastrophe to his June 22 letter to the Union, but it sailed on June 23, the day he interviewed some of the survivors, for the mainland aboard the Live Yankee. Along with several similar dispatches, it arrived in San Francisco on July 14. The first reports of the survival of the men in the longboat began to appear in such newspapers as the San Francisco Alta California and Morning Call that day, whereas Sam’s letter was two more days in transit to Sacramento. These initial reports, which included a list of survivors sent by Captain Mitchell to the shipping agent, were telegraphed across the country to such papers as the Portland Oregonian and the New York Herald and Evening Post. That is, Sam’s dispatch of June 22, which contained neither a list of the survivors nor even the date the Hornet sank, was old news by the time it appeared in the Union on July 16. His subsequent article “Burning of the Clipper Ship Hornet at Sea,” based on his interviews with the survivors, likewise arrived with a resounding thud. The reason is not hard to discover: John Thomas, whom Sam had interviewed for his story, also sailed aboard the Milton Badger from Honolulu on June 25 and so was personally available to reporters when the ship docked in San Francisco on July 16. Henry Whitney’s comparable account of the survivors’ ordeal in the Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser for June 30 was more widely copied than Sam’s—as in the San Francisco Bulletin for July 28, the Boston Herald for August 24, and the New York Tribune for September 11. No daily newspaper besides the Union paid the slightest attention to Sam’s ostensible scoop for a month. Bret Harte reprinted a brief excerpt from it in the Californian, but no other paper in California or Nevada copied it, not even the Territorial Enterprise, which had copied several of Sam’s earlier travel letters from the islands. As the editors of Sam’s autobiography note, they have been unable to find any information “about republication of the article in New York newspapers.” It was certainly not telegraphed to the New York Herald. But a month later—when the issue of the Sacramento Union containing Sam’s piece arrived by ship and was delivered to the East Coast exchanges—it finally appeared in various abridged or mutilated versions in the hometown newspapers of the two passengers, Samuel and Henry Ferguson, and Captain Mitchell. A near-complete version was finally published, but scarcely as a “scoop,” on the second page of the New York Herald for August 27, nearly two and a half months after the men were rescued.35

  On May 29, while Sam was touring the Big Island, the king’s sister and heiress apparent to the throne, Princess Victoria Kamāmalu Ka’ahumanu IV, died at the age of twenty-seven, allegedly as the result of a botched abortion, her seventh. Publicly her death was attributed to “imprudently bathing while heated.” Sam returned to Oahu during the thirty days of national mourning that preceded her burial. In his public comments at the time Sam repressed whatever reservations he harbored about her character in order to eulogize her as a proper Victorian lady. She was “an accomplished pianist and vocalist,” he reported in the Union, “and for many years sat at the melodeon and led the choir in the great stone church.” Moreover, “to the day of her death she was a staunch, unwavering friend and ally of the missionaries.” Her coffin, “the most elegant
piece of burial furniture I ever saw,” was constructed “of those two superb species of native wood, kou and koa. The former is nearly as dark as ebony; the latter is like fine California laurel, richly grained and clouded with mahogany.” As he described them, the funeral rites, though exotic, were not unorthodox. Every night for a month, he reported, “multitudes of these strange mourners have burned their candle-nut torches in the royal enclosure, and sung their funeral dirges, and danced their hula-hulas, and wailed their harrowing wail for the dead.” Privately he derided the primitive rituals: “thousands of natives cry and wail and dance and dance for the dead” around the grounds of the Iolani Palace “all night and every night,” he wrote his mother and sister. He noted in his journal euphemistically that the princess “kept half a dozen bucks to do her washing.” He lived only three blocks from the palace and “the mourning pow-wow”—he equated the indigenous people of the islands with Indians—“defied sleep. All that time the christianized but morally unclean Princess lay in state in the palace.” On the night of June 21 or 22 he entered the grounds “and saw some hundreds of half-naked savages of both sexes beating their dismal tom-toms, and wailing and caterwauling in the weird glare of innumerable torches; and while a great band of women swayed and jiggered their pliant bodies through the intricate movements” of the hula “they chanted an accompaniment in native words.” He asked Henry Whitney “what the words meant. He said they celebrated certain admired gifts and physical excellencies of the dead princess. I inquired further, but he said the words were too foul for translation; that the bodily excellencies were unmentionable; that the capabilities so lauded and so glorified had better be left to the imagination.” Sam also observed the ceremonies on June 29, the final day of mourning, from the second-story balcony of the home of F. W. Hutchinson, the minister of the interior, which overlooked the palace courtyard. In his Union letter about the funeral procession down Nuuanu Street, in a passage reprinted verbatim six years later in Roughing It, he ridiculed the role played by Minister Harris in the obsequies: “This feeble personage had crape enough around his hat to express the grief of an entire nation, and as usual he neglected no opportunity of making himself conspicuous and exciting the admiration of the simple Kanakas. Oh! noble ambition of this modern Richelieu!” As late as 1909, in a piece that remained unpublished until 1962, Sam reminisced about the “buxom royal princess” who had died in Hawaii in 1866—but no longer with tact or discretion. “Occupying a place of distinguished honor at her funeral,” he recalled, “were thirty-six splendidly built young native men. In a laudatory song which celebrated the various merits, achievements, and accomplishments of the late princess those thirty-six stallions were called her harem, and the song said it had been her pride and boast that she kept the whole of them busy, and that several times it had happened that more than one of them had been able to charge overtime.”36

  CHAPTER 12

  San Francisco Redux

  All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change.

  —Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  THE BURLINGAME AND Van Valkenburgh parties sailed from Honolulu for Asia on July 7, 1866, and, after four months of “luxurious vagrancy” on the islands, Sam Clemens left for his return to San Francisco aboard the Smyrniote twelve days later. At a mere six hundred tons, the ship was smaller than some of the Mississippi steamboats he had piloted. Among the other passengers was Franklin Rising, who had accepted a job in mid-June as financial secretary and general agent of the American Church Missionary Society in New York. On each of the four Sundays they were at sea, Sam remembered, Rising “felt it his duty to preach, but of the 15 passengers, none even pretended to sing, & he was so diffident that he hardly knew how he was to get along without a choir.” Sam volunteered to be his soloist but they “could find only one hymn that I knew. It was ‘Oh, Refresh us’ or John Fawcett’s ‘Lord, Dismiss Us With Thy Blessing’” (1786). Each Sunday they were at sea, Rising “gave out that same hymn twice a day, & I stood up solitary & alone & sang it! And then he went right along, happy & contented, & preached his sermon. We were together all the time—pacing the deck night & day—there was no other congenial company.” Among the other passengers aboard the Smyrniote were three survivors of the sinking of the Hornet: Josiah Mitchell and the Ferguson brothers, Samuel and Henry, ages twenty-eight and eighteen, sons of a New York businessman, the former a graduate of Trinity College and the latter a student there. The steamer Comet, with Ned Howard and the wife and daughters of Sam’s plantation friend Charles Spencer aboard, left Pearl Harbor two hours earlier, and the two ships raced to San Francisco. Sam asked permission to transcribe the journals Mitchell and the Ferguson brothers kept during their forty-three-day ordeal in an open boat adrift on the Pacific. Henry Ferguson agreed to the request on the condition that Sam omit “sensational matter” from any article he might write.1 In apparent retaliation, Sam would give all of his Italian guides the name Ferguson in The Innocents Abroad (1869).

  Sam devoted a couple of hours a day to copying the journals and to completing the final eight Sandwich Islands letters he still owed the Sacramento Union. There was no need to hurry. While the outbound voyage on the Ajax had required only ten days, the trip back to San Francisco required twenty-five days because of sporadic calm seas and adverse winds. It was the longest ocean voyage of Sam’s life. The Smyrniote only sailed 110 miles the first day, and they were “only 10 miles from Oahu, having gone clear around the island,” though the next day the ship “made 179 miles.” By July 25, seven days out, Sam noted in his journal, “we are abreast of San Francisco, but seventeen hundred miles at sea!—when will the wind change?” On July 30 he observed that it was “the fifth day of dead, almost motionless, calm—a man can walk a crack in the deck, the ship lies so still.” At dawn on August 5, Sam spied the Comet on the horizon, and three days later, 800 miles west of San Francisco, he noted that “the calm is over & we have got a strong breeze. This sort of Life on the Ocean Wave will do—the ship is flying like a bird—she tears the sea into seething foam—& yet the ocean is quiet & sunny—so steady is the ship that I could walk a crack.” The passengers aboard the Smyrniote did not see the Comet again until the morning of August 13 as both ships entered the Golden Gate about 300 yards apart. “Home again,” Sam noted in his journal. “No—not home again—in prison again—and all the wild sense of freedom gone. The city seems so cramped, & so dreary with toil & care & business anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!” The editors of the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle welcomed him back by facetiously nominating him for chief of police, “subject to the ratification of the present police force.”2

  Within a week of his return Sam traveled to Sacramento to square his account with the Union. He had contracted to write twenty-five travel letters from the islands for a total of five hundred dollars, though he demanded and received a bonus—he claimed in 1898 that it was three hundred dollars—for his Hornet “scoop.” In any case, as he crowed to his mother and sister, the proprietors (“the best men that ever owned a paper”) “paid me a great deal more than they promised me.” Sam also worked up a second detailed account of the Hornet disaster over the next several weeks under the title “Forty-Three Days in an Open Boat” based on Mitchell’s and the Ferguson brothers’ journals. In fact, the essay mostly consisted of Samuel Ferguson’s journal entries. Sam “looked around for the best magazine to go up to glory in. I selected the most important one in New York,” Harper’s Monthly, and “the contribution was accepted.” The essay was his first substantial article in a prestigious nationally distributed periodical. Bret Harte read it in manuscript form and declared in his San Francisco correspondence with the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican that he knew “of nothing in literature which compares with its simple, graphic earnestness, and unconscious pathos.”3 The piece appeared without signature, as was the custom, in the December 1866 issue of the magazine and was well received. The New York Tribune, for example, praised the “painful
ly exciting narrative.” When the volume index was issued in May 1867, however, it was attributed to “Mark Swain.” “I had not written the ‘Mark Twain’ distinctly,” Sam explained; “it was a fresh name to Eastern printers” and as a result “I was not celebrated. . . . I was a Literary Person, but that was all—a buried one; buried alive.” True enough. But this account requires another correction to the mythology that surrounds Mark Twain and the Hornet. Like Herman Melville’s authorship of “Benito Cereno,” which had appeared without signature in Putnam’s in the fall of 1855, Sam’s authorship of “Forty-Three Days in an Open Boat” was an open secret in at least some quarters, perhaps as a result of his Sacramento Union letter about the Hornet survivors. As a provincial newspaper in Pennsylvania observed upon its publication, “‘Mark Twain’ edits the ‘logs’ of the Captain and two passengers of the clipper-ship Hornet.”4 That is, despite the typographical error, the article earned the author some slight cachet.

  Unfortunately, Sam failed to honor his promise to Henry Ferguson to omit “sensational matter” from the story. Ferguson’s journal revealed a sinister side of the ordeal that John Thomas and the other crewmen obviously wished to hide: that cannibalism was openly discussed on the longboat as early as June 6 and that Captain Mitchell remained awake with a hatchet close at hand the last several days before their rescue because he feared a conspiracy among the hunger-crazed sailors to mutiny, kill, and devour him. The Ferguson brothers had “wanted to ‘doctor’ the diaries a little” during the cruise of the Smyrniote, Sam conceded, “but it did not appear to me that any emendations were necessary.” The brothers “insisted for some time that I should leave out all mention of the conspiracy from their published journals.” In his transcriptions, to be sure, he included no complete names, only such monikers as Peter, Thomas, Joe, Charley, Jack, and Fred. Nevertheless, Henry Ferguson was exercised by Sam’s article because he “did not wish names to appear in any way that could do harm nor did we wish anything purely personal to be made public,” such as the “intended cannibalism.” As a result, Sam’s mention of Fred Clough’s first name as one of the conspirators “trailed him like a doppelganger” for the rest of his life. In 1899 Sam exhumed the events surrounding the Hornet in his self-serving essay “My Debut as a Literary Person” (1899). Henry Ferguson, who had become an Episcopal priest and professor of history and political science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, wrote him to complain: “Perhaps you never knew how unexpected it was to us” that extracts from their journals “should appear in Harper’s magazine 33 years ago without allowing us to edit them previously.” Ferguson allowed that he had “never before mentioned the matter to you, thinking that the harm was done and could not be mended, but now that there seems to be a probability of the extracts being put in permanent form, and given the wide circulation that naturally will come from your literary reputation, I have felt that I should make an attempt to prevent the perpetuation of what has always been a source of . . . annoyance and grief to me, and has caused injury to others.”5