In late May, Sam read “a curious book” he discovered in a local library while browsing for guides to the Holy Land—an English translation of the Apocryphal New Testament, including the Second Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ and the Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians, published in 1820. As a student of the Bible his entire life, Sam was surprised by “this quaint volume of rejected gospels” that had been “used in the churches and considered genuine fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago.” He was not surprised that they had failed to be canonized, however. He noted in his journal that, according to these documents, the adolescent Jesus, a type of demonic Tom Sawyer, repeatedly pranked his schoolmates, “striking boys dead—withering their hands—burning the dyer’s cloth &c.” He elaborated these notes in a letter to the Alta that he subsequently worked into chapter 51 of The Innocents Abroad. Thirty years later, moreover, the Apocryphal Gospel also influenced his characterization of Philip Traum in “The Chronicle of Young Satan.”42
Charles Duncan learned the hard way, like Sam when he discovered mica in the mines, that all that glitters is not gold. Each of the celebrities he had recruited for the voyage had withdrawn. Sherman was sent west by the army to fight Indians. Maggie Mitchell simply changed her mind. The Drummer Boy married and preferred to honeymoon somewhere other than on a ship with a gaggle of evangelical Christians. Beecher protested that he needed to finish his novel Norwood but in fact dropped out because he feared the malarious air in Europe. The novel had already been published and, ironically, a copy would circulate among the Quaker City passengers. After Beecher withdrew, so did forty-five of his parishioners. They had not been required, like other prospective passengers, to deposit money to secure their places. In the end, fewer than seventy passengers—the vast majority of them men—booked passage, less than the break-even point on costs. But Duncan had spent thousands of dollars in refurbishing the ship, so canceling the cruise was not an option. His hands were tied, and while the venture would not enable him to recover from his bankruptcy, he would repeatedly trim expenses in the course of the voyage. According to Mary Mason Fairbanks, wife of Abel Fairbanks, co-owner of the Cleveland Herald, “We go without a General Sherman or a Henry Ward Beecher, but stars of lesser magnitude may come to be planets whose light shall yet dazzle.” As late as June 1, however, Sam was uncertain that the excursion would occur. He advised his family that “if the ship sails I sail on her, but I make no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing—have made no preparations whatever.” Despite his earlier insistence that a selection committee would vet all “applicants,” Duncan refused accommodations to no passenger with money to pay the fare and he continued to advertise the excursion literally until the day of departure. Or, as the New York Times reported, the voyage was “originally designed to embrace a select and somewhat exclusive party, but before the steamer sailed it was found necessary to lower the standard a little, and ordinary persons with $1,200 to spend were enabled to purchase tickets.”43
Among them was Dan Slote, a New York stationer, who was initially assigned to share the same stateroom as Sam. “I have got a nice moral room-mate” who “has got many shirts, and a History of the Holy Land, a cribbage-board and three thousand cigars,” Sam reported to his Alta readers with undisguised delight. “I will not have to carry any baggage at all.” In The Innocents Abroad, he described Slote as “intelligent, cheerful of spirit, unselfish, full of generous impulses, patient, considerate, wonderfully good-natured.” Privately, he was even more candid. “I have got a splendid, immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless room-mate who is as good & true & right-minded a man as ever lived—a man whose blameless conduct and example will always be an eloquent sermon to all who shall come within their influence.” Before embarking, Sam laid in a couple of cases of expensive champagne and, according to the New York correspondent of the St. Louis Times, a sufficient supply of “good liquors—wines, principally—to keep the Union Club for a twelvemonth went on board before sailing.”44
In the end, Sam and Dan Slote did not share accommodations, though they doubtless shared their stores of cigars and alcohol. Sam was upgraded to Sherman’s vacated stateroom, which was “furnished like a palace.” In addition to his travel letters to the Alta, moreover, he had agreed to send occasional correspondence during the trip to the daily and weekly editions of the New York Tribune, with circulations of 190,000 and 43,000, respectively, and unsigned pieces to the New York Herald, with a daily circulation of about 65,000, for a total payment of about four hundred dollars—his walking-around money for the cruise. He contributed over the months a total of sixty-one articles to the three papers. McComb insisted years later that Sam’s letters to the Alta “made him famous. It was my business to prepare one of these letters for the Sunday morning paper, taking the topmost from a goodly pile that was stacked in a pigeonhole on my desk. Clemens was an indefatigable correspondent.” Sam supposed that because the Alta had few eastern exchanges, “scarcely any” of his letters would be copied east of the Rockies. In fact, the opposite was true. Because the Alta copyrighted the letters, they were only occasionally copied west of the Rockies,45 but they were often reprinted in the Boston Post; the Brooklyn Eagle; the Cleveland Plain Dealer; the Cincinnati Enquirer; the Hartford, Connecticut, Courant; the Lowell, Massachusetts, Citizen; the Missouri Republican; the New Orleans Times; the Philadelphia Press; the Portland, Maine, Eastern Argus; the Providence Press; the Springfield Republican; and the Wheeling, West Virginia, Intelligencer.
The evening of Thursday, June 6, two days before their scheduled departure, the entire company met for the first time at the Brooklyn estate of Moses Beach, Beecher’s friend and neighbor and a member of his congregation since 1854. As the New York Sun reported the next day, “Mark Twain was present and enlivened the company with ebullitions of wit.” Beach proclaimed that “never a company of passengers gathered who as heartily and so readily joined in social converse and enjoyment.” At the reception, Sam met Mary Mason Fairbanks, with whom he formed a fast friendship. Mother Fairbanks, though only seven years his senior, soon became his mentor and trusted confidante—the Widow Douglas to his Huck Finn—until her death thirty-one years later. She commended him in one of her first travel letters to the Cleveland Herald as a “versatile and ever genial friend.” Educated at Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York, she “was the most refined, intelligent, & cultivated lady in the ship,” Sam wrote his actual mother, “& altogether the kindest and best. She sewed my buttons on, kept my clothes in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam, (when I behaved,) lectured me awfully on the quarter-deck on moonlit promenading evenings, & cured me of several bad habits”—at least temporarily. He also met Julia Newell, who reported to her hometown Wisconsin paper that Sam was the “only notoriety we have” on the voyage. “He is a rather handsome fellow, but talks to you with an abominable drawl that is exasperating. Whether he intends to be funny for the amusement of the party I have not yet ascertained.” At first Sam was favorably impressed by his cohort, representatives all of the emerging postwar leisure class. He remarked to his mother and sister that the passenger manifest included the names of several “professional preachers” and “there are none I like better to converse with; if they’re not narrow minded and bigoted they make good companions.” As Sam wrote Sam Bowen, “We have got a crowd of tip-top people, and shall have a jolly, sociable, homelike trip of it for the next five or six months.”46 He soon had reason to revise his opinion.
The day after the reception at Beach’s home, he wrote his family to bid them adieu. He was “in a fever to get away,” he explained, and fully expected to relish the months-long holiday. Under his “cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me & gives me freely its contempt. I can get away from that at sea, & be tranquil & satisfied—& so, with my parting love & benediction for Orion & all of you, I say goodbye & God bless you all—& welcome the wind that wafts a weary soul to the sunny lands of the Mediterranean!” The evening bef
ore his departure, Sam enjoyed three lavish dinners with wine, the first from three until six in the afternoon with Charles Graham Halpine and John Russell Young, the managing editor of the New York Tribune, the most prestigious newspaper in the country, who provided him with letters of introduction to several European journalists; the second from six until nine in the evening with John Murphy, the New York business agent for the Alta California; and the third from nine until midnight with Slote. Only afterward did he pack his trunk.47
He arrived at the pier shortly after noon the next day in time to stow his luggage and join the band of passengers “arrayed in unattractive traveling costumes” who “were moping about in a drizzling rain and looking as droopy and woebegone as so many molting chickens.” Unbeknownst to the excursionists, Duncan had filed for bankruptcy—citing debts of twenty-five thousand dollars—a few hours before the ship was scheduled to sail. The Quaker City embarked at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 8. A crowd of well-wishers, among them Beecher, gathered to bid the “innocents” bon voyage. The congregants sang “Homeward Bound” from the Plymouth Collection of Hymns to great fanfare as the ship slipped its moorings. It sailed with the tide but against wind and rain a few miles to Gravesend Bay near Brooklyn in lower New York Harbor where, anticlimactically, it dropped anchor. At least sixteen other vessels, four of them passenger ships, including the luxury liner Arago, sailed from New York Harbor during the weekend and did not delay on account of weather—that is, Duncan seemed to have dallied from an excess of caution.48
The weather cleared the next afternoon, and Dan Leary, one of the owners of the ship and a passenger on the voyage, advised his brother that he expected the ship to “get away” that day. But Duncan chose not to embark on the Sabbath. “All day Sunday at anchor,” Sam wrote in The Innocents Abroad. “We could not properly begin a pleasure excursion on Sunday.” One of the pietists—“a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg that looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity,” as Sam described him—had earlier inquired whether the tour would halt on Sundays, and Duncan had answered “that he hardly expected to anchor the ship in the middle of the Atlantic.” He remained anchored in New York Harbor, however, where the excursionists held services on June 9. Duncan’s twelve-year-old son Henry played the organ. As the cantankerous Leary wrote when the music began, “I hope they will not overdo this kind of thing, because if they do I shall feel as if an accident should happen to that organ.” Beach briefly abandoned ship to hear Beecher’s sermon in Brooklyn. In his private journal, Sam was critical of the decision to dawdle: “we ought to have put to sea in the storm of Saturday. The ship is strong, & could have weathered it easily, & everybody would have had a fearful four-hours’ siege of sea-sickness and then been over and done with it.” On the surface, however, he took the delay in stride. Mrs. Fairbanks reported in her next travel letter to the Cleveland Herald that at dinner Sam’s face was “perfectly mirth-provoking. Sitting lazily at the table, scarcely genteel in his appearance, there is nevertheless a something, I know not what, that interests and attracts. I saw to-day at dinner venerable divines and sage looking men, convulsed with laughter at his drolleries and quaint original manners.” The Quaker City finally cleared the bay and reached open sea early Monday afternoon, June 10. At the eleventh hour, Bloodgood H. Cutter, a Long Island farmer and poetaster whom Sam eventually dismissed as the “poet lariat” of the voyage and a “shameless old idiot,” ferried to the ship to join the party. He celebrated the occasion with one of his characteristically hackneyed rhymes:
One droll person there was on board,
The passengers called him “Mark Twain;”
He’d talk and write all sort of stuff,
In his queer way, would it explain.
If, as the saying goes, Alexander Pope in his translation of The Odyssey in rhymed couplets made Homer ride a hobby horse, then Cutter made nursery rhymes seem the epitome of fine art. His verses routinely gasped for breath in paroxysms of irregular cadence and off rhyme. He gave “copies of his execrable verses” to “any man that comes along, whether he has anything against him or not,” Sam complained, including “consuls, commanders, hotel keepers, Arabs, Dutch, anybody and everybody.” Cutter claimed to be the “successor of the late lamented Lord Byron.”49 Along with a few other excursionists aboard the Quaker City, Cutter proved the truth of Emerson’s apothegm that “traveling is a fool’s paradise.” Though Sam did not yet realize it, the Sabbath layover was a harbinger of things to come.
CHAPTER 14
The Voyage
The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader is not already a consummate ass.
—The Innocents Abroad
SAM CLEMENS CAUGHT the first wave of what became a postwar tsunami in middle-class tourism. In 1849 fewer than three thousand Americans sailed to Europe from the four major East Coast ports, many of them scions of privileged families headed for the traditional Wanderjahr after college or genteel easterners traveling for their health. By 1870, however, with excess capacity on decommissioned and retrofitted military steamers, over twenty-five thousand Americans traveled to Europe annually.1
For the first two or three weeks, Sam tried to be congenial and palliate his fellow passengers’ misgivings about his presence on board. He “carried himself as one who was drifting out to sea, quite indifferent to time, place, or circumstance” and “lolled about the ship as one committed to utter indolence,” Mary Mason Fairbanks remembered.
His drolleries and moderate movements rendered him conspicuous among the passengers, while from his table would come frequent peals of contagious laughter, in the midst of which his own serious and questioning face and air of injured innocence were thoroughly mirth-provoking. Those who had the good fortune to share with him the adventures with which his remarkable and grotesque narratives have made the public familiar, recall with interest the gradual waking up of this man of genius. His keen eyes discerned the incongruities of character around him, into which his susceptibility to absurdities gave him quick insight. Here in this goodly company of pilgrims, embracing men of mind and men of manners and their opposites, he put himself at school.
He played chess with Emeline Beach, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Moses Beach, and he joined the fun of a mock trial of the purser for stealing his coat. “After lengthy proceedings,” Captain Charles C. Duncan wrote in his log, “prisoner was found guilty and sentenced to 10 minutes solitary confinement in room no. 10”—Sam’s luxurious stateroom.2 Emily Severance, wife of a prominent Cleveland banker and one of Mrs. Fairbanks’s close friends, noted in her journal that Sam was “the ruling spirit and a capital person for ocean life.” On June 14 he attended a birthday party for Hannah Duncan, the captain’s wife. Cutter marked the occasion with one of his too frequent verses:
Then came a birthday celebration,
That made quite a jubilation;
It was of Captain Duncan’s wife,
The true companion of his life.
In a “handsome tribute” to her Sam suggested that if her life had been measured by historic milestones rather than the calendar, she would be “older than Methusaleh” because during her forty-six years she had witnessed “more important events than all the years of a dozen Methusalahs.” According to the elder Beach, Sam “dwelt upon the wonderful growth of our country” during that period; and he “concluded by adverting to the really remarkable excursion which the company present had undertaken—the first of its kind in the history of the world.” (Dan Leary groused that during the celebration “bunkum speeches [were] made and the old woman [was] crowned with myrtle. It was too ridiculous.”) Sam was selected one of the three members of the executive committee of the Quaker City Club in charge of onboard entertainment. Mary Fairbanks fondly remembered the evenings when his tenor voice “blended with others in the hymns of the ‘Plymouth Collection,’” and once he even led evenin
g devotions. “Every night, in calm or storm, I always turned up in their synagogue, in the after cabin, at seven bells,” at least initially, Sam insisted. After the first week at sea, Moses Beach assured his readers that “the harmony which prevailed at the outset [of the voyage] still continues, and the tendency is rather to increase than diminish.” Sam even helped Captain Duncan with the Fourth of July speech he delivered aboard ship.3
But the equanimity was not ordained to last. The average age of the excursionists was fifty, Sam estimated, with three-fourths of them between forty and seventy years old. With ample understatement, Louisa Griswold of the Plymouth Church later conceded that “the Quaker City was not loaded with a gay and giddy throng.” Leary quickly concluded Duncan was nothing more than “a psalm singing hypocrite.” He may have been the titular captain of the ship of fools, but Ira Bursley was the chief executive officer and shipmaster, the equivalent of a pilot on a Mississippi steamboat. That is, Duncan had no authority “to interfere with Bursley in the management of the vessel,” Leary wrote his brother. Only weeks later did the passengers discover “much to our surprise & disgust” that Leary had “Cap[tain] Duncan entirely under his command instead of Cap[tain] Duncan being ‘Commander’ as was supposed when we left New York.” Sam in later years referred disparagingly to Duncan as the “headwaiter” of the voyage because the only members of the crew who followed his orders were the kitchen staff. Sam’s fellow passenger William E. James quickly concluded that Duncan played two different roles: the smarmy Sunday school superintendent on shore and the tyrannical cruise director aboard the steamer, particularly after Duncan demanded that James’s dog be cast overboard rather than fed from the ship’s galley.
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