Whereas a “beggar in Naples who can show a foot which has all run into one horrible toe, with one shapeless nail on it, has got a good thing,” such a disfigurement “wouldn’t stand any show in Constantinople” compared to “the three-legged woman” or “the man with his eye in his cheek” or “the man with fingers on his elbow” or “the dwarf with seven fingers on each hand, no upper lip, and his under-jaw gone” or the “man with a prodigious head, an uncommonly long body, legs eight inches long and feet like snow-shoes.” The one-toed beggar in Naples would starve in Constantinople, Sam insisted, because “a beggar has to have exceedingly good points to make a living in Constantinople.”24
Another episode Sam reported from Constantinople illustrates even more obviously his readiness to borrow from Jackson. In The Lands of the Saracen, Bayard Taylor, a popular late-nineteenth-century American travel writer, had lauded the glories of the Turkish bath:
I perspired at all pores for full an hour—a feeling too warm and unpleasant at first, but presently merging into a mood which was wholly rapturous and heavenly. I was like a soft white cloud, that rests all of a summer afternoon on the peak of a distant mountain. I felt the couch on which I lay no more than the cloud might feel the cliffs on which it lingers so airily. I saw nothing but peaceful, glorious sights; spaces of clear blue sky; stretches of quiet lawns; lovely valleys threaded by the gentlest of streams; azure lakes, unruffled by a breath; calms far out on mid-ocean, and Alpine peaks bathed in the flush of an autumnal sunset.
In his letter to the Monroe, Pennsylvania, Democrat on August 19, the same day the Quaker City sailed from Constantinople, Jackson disputed Taylor’s description of the delights of the Turkish bath. One of the doctor’s “great expectations was, on reaching Constantinople, to enjoy the luxurious process. But having gone through it, I pronounce it a vile swindle, and B.T. has lost my confidence. The Turkish Bath is nothing more or less than a system of cookery, and a deeply-laid scheme for killing Christians.” In his letter to the New York Tribune dated August 31, Sam essentially rewrote Jackson’s anecdote, likely with a copy of Jackson’s manuscript at hand, detailing his own gradual disillusionment with the supposedly lavish custom. “When I think how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel,” he wrote, “I want a tourist for breakfast. For years and years I have dreamed of the wonders of the Turkish bath; for years and years I have promised myself that I would yet enjoy one.” From there he followed Jackson’s lead. The verbal echoes are more than mere coincidence:
Whereas Jackson called the Turkish bath “a vile swindle,” Sam described it as “a malignant swindle.”25
In his Quaker City correspondence, Sam occasionally deployed a literary technique he likely learned from Jackson’s experience in the Turkish bath—what James M. Cox calls “the process of illusion followed by disillusion,” a pattern “so recurrent as to be the very mechanism” of the narrative. Sam first illustrated his disillusionment with European custom in his Alta account of his Turkish bath in Constantinople, and he fully exploited the device in revising his letters for publication in The Innocents Abroad. The narrator expects to enjoy a luxurious shave in a Parisian barbershop and instead suffers facial lacerations, for example, and he eagerly anticipates a pleasant game of billiards only to play on a table whose “cushions were a good deal higher than the balls” and the cue sticks “were so crooked that in making a shot you had to allow for the curve.”26
To cite two other examples of Sam’s tendency to borrow from his friends: Mary Fairbanks wrote in a letter to the Cleveland Herald about visiting the crypt of St. Charles in the Milan Cathedral: “the outer coffin gradually descended, and revealed through a case of rock crystal the wasted face and the pontifical robes of him who had for years slept in that gorgeous but gloomy state. A cross of emeralds, diamonds and rubies was suspended in the coffin, and precious jewels glittered amid the folds of the rich embroidered robes.” Sam echoed this passage in The Innocents Abroad: “The sarcophagus separated in two parts, lengthwise, and the lower part sank down and disclosed a coffin of rock crystal as clear as the atmosphere. Within lay the body, robed in costly habiliments covered with gold embroidery and starred with scintillating gems.” Similarly, Fairbanks was disappointed when she first saw a Venetian gondola: “Instead of my rainbow boat, there was a gloomy looking craft . . . looking like a hearse.” Sam paraphrased the line in describing his first impression of a gondola, his “fairy boat” of fantasy: he “entered a hearse belonging to the Grand Hotel d’Europe. At any rate, it was more like a hearse than anything else.” In both cases, Sam appropriated the tone of Fairbanks’s prose as well as certain details and words (“rock crystal,” “hearse”).27
He apparently saw nothing wrong with such “borrowing.” In a note to Mrs. Fairbanks the next year, he reported that he had copies of Jackson’s correspondence and wanted her to send him copies of her Quaker City letters to the Cleveland Herald. After he received the clippings, Sam assured her that he saw “a good many ideas in your letters that I can steal” and that he only wanted “to steal the ideas—I’m not going to steal the language.” Even had he honored this pledge—and he did not—Sam was guilty of plagiarism, at least according to its modern definition. Such “borrowing” may not have been an ethical violation by journalistic standards, but Sam in his midthirties should have long since outgrown the practices of reportage or copying from exchanges that were normal in Missouri and Iowa. Yet he was remarkably consistent on this point throughout his career: he never defined plagiarism in any meaningful sense. Years before, he had cited the guidebook Philadelphia as It Is in 1852 without attribution in travel letters to his brother Orion’s Muscatine Journal. In an interview in 1877 he conceded that “I never plagiarize—unless I can do it successfully.” Years later, under attack for similar literary offenses, he offered a tortured and specious distinction: “a deliberate plagiarism is seldom made by any person who is not an ass; but unconscious & blameless plagiarisms are made by the best of people, every day.” This argument soon became his standard line of defense. A “considerable part of every book is an unconscious plagiarism of some previous book,” he insisted in 1887. “There is no sin about it. If there were, and it were of the deadly sort, it would eventually be necessary to restrict hell to authors—and then enlarge it.” But even if this distinction between conscious and unconscious plagiarism was valid, can there be any doubt that Sam consciously echoed Jackson’s and Fairbanks’s words and ideas? In any case, he observed a very loose or permissive definition of plagiarism. Either he had no clear idea what the term meant or he deliberately fudged the extent to which he was culpable of the crime. He made the same point in an interview in 1890: “I laugh every time I hear the idiots jackassing in a charge of plagiarism against somebody or other. Why, to repeat another man’s thoughts is to pay him the highest compliment you can. It shows what a grip his mind has taken on yours.” In yet another interview, in 1895, he insisted that “we mortals can’t create, we can only copy.” And in 1903 he reassured his friend Helen Keller, who had also been accused of plagiarism, that “the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”28
The Quaker City embarked from Constantinople the evening of September 3 and sailed through the Bosphorus to the Black Sea. Two days later the ship docked in Sebastopol, devastated in 1854–55 by a twelve-month siege during the Crimean War. As Sam quipped, “Ruined Pompeii is in good condition compared to Sevastopol.” Moses Beach was similarly unimpressed: the city was a monument to “the havoc of war! Scarce a blow seems to have been struck for its regeneration.” Only about three thousand residents remained of the prewar population of forty thousand. The passengers soon learned, however, that Aleksandr Nikolaevich Romanov, the Emperor of All the Russias, was vacationing a few miles away at Lavidia, his summer palace near the watering hole of Yalta, famous today as the site where W
inston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Josef Stalin conferred in February 1945. Ignoring the advice of the local American consul but at the urging of the ship’s owner Dan Leary, the excursionists petitioned the czar by telegraph for a royal audience on August 25—the Sabbath, to the dismay of some of the pharisaical pilgrims. After a sixteen-hour layover in Sevastopol, the Quaker City sailed to Odessa, arriving on the afternoon of August 22. Sam noted in his journal that in the Ukrainian port “all ages & sexes bathed together.” He was more explicit in his next letter to the Alta California: the “men don’t wear anything at all, the boys don’t, the little girls don’t”; and the women
wear a single white thin garment. . . . I never was so outraged in my life. At least a hundred times, in the seven hours I stayed there, I would just have got up and gone away from there disgusted, if I had had any place to go. . . . Why, those young ladies thought no more of turning somersaults, when I was not looking, than nothing in the world. Incensed as I was, I was compelled to look, most of the time, during this barbarous exhibition, because it forced them to make a show of modesty, at least.
Sam deleted this passage in revising his dispatches for publication in The Innocents Abroad.29
The ship steamed to Yalta on August 24 even before receiving a reply to their petition from the Russian authorities. Meanwhile, Sam chaired a committee charged with drafting a proclamation to commemorate their reception at the palace, though he wrote the document single-handedly. “As I fully expected, and as they fully intended,” he notified his family, “I had to write the address myself. I didn’t mind it, because I have no modesty and would as soon write to an Emperor as to anybody else—but considering that there were 5 on the committee I thought they might have contributed one paragraph among them, anyway.” In his next Alta letter, Sam explained the reasons he agreed to undertake the task: “I did it partly because I was more familiar with Emperors than the other passengers, and therefore able to write to such people with an easier grace than they, and partly because I thought that if I could spread it around that I had been corresponding with the Emperor of Russia, maybe it would make my photograph sell.” Unfortunately, Sam’s address was utterly forgettable, written in the purplest prose he ever mustered. It opens in a pompous air (“We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply for recreation”) and maintains that tone for several hundred words. Despite their “unofficial state” and modest number, Sam avowed, “we utter the voice of a Nation”—as if the pilgrims were genuine diplomats. When no reply from the czar had been received early on Sunday, August 25, Sam spent the rest of the day cruising on shore with friends while the ship lay at anchor in the bay. He enjoyed “an astonishing sort of dance an hour long, and one I had never heard of before, with the most beautiful girl that ever lived” in the Russian town. They “talked incessantly, and laughed exhaustingly, and neither one [of us] ever knew what the other was driving at.” Smitten by the young Russian with an unpronounceable name, he mentioned in his journal the “beautiful little devil I danced with at the ball. . . . Ah me!—if I had only known how to talk Russian!” The pilgrims learned that evening, after Sam left the ship, that the czar would meet them at his palace promptly at noon on August 26.30
When the pilgrims arrived, Sam’s proclamation was read aloud by the local American consul and the czar welcomed his guests in English. Louisa Griswold was awestruck: “I could not realize that we were being entertained by a ruler of more than seventy-five millions of people.” Dan Leary’s motive in proposing a royal visit was soon apparent: he wanted to sell the Quaker City to His Highness. According to James, Leary with “his mouth wide open, showing his teeth, and putting his hand on his shoulder,” buttonholed Aleksandr like a used-car salesman, “standing square before him with the mouth wide open” to “show his teeth,” thrice inviting him to tour the ship the next day so that he could figuratively kick the tires. As Leary crowed to his brother, “Of course I was king pin, and walked about on the most familiar footing with the Emperor and Empress.” Reeves Jackson, for one, was dismayed. How would the excursionists have returned to the United States had Leary disposed of the Quaker City in Yalta? “It might have become more serious than amusing,” he wrote, if the czar had taken the bait. “In such a case the passengers would have been more effectually sold than the ship.” In Sam’s view, “We were to sell the ship and then walk home, I suppose.” In fact, according to Charley Langdon, in the event he disposed of the vessel Leary planned to land passengers at Genoa, Valencia, or Gibraltar and give each of them “enough money to procure a first class passage ‘home.’” After he was stalked by Leary for fifteen minutes, the czar disappeared; and after two hours, the party moved to the cottage of Grand Duke Constantine, the czar’s oldest son, who was traveling in Denmark, and then to nearby Orlander Palace, the summer home of Grand Duke Michael, the czar’s brother. There they enjoyed “a chatty, sociable tea-party.”31
Sam chronicled the royal reception in great detail in travel letters to the Alta California, New York Tribune, and New York Herald, but the tone of this correspondence is curiously dispassionate and reportorial. Back in Nevada, Joe Goodman noted the contrast in tone. He had been reading the correspondence in the Alta and noted that Sam “seems to have been in a state of exasperation the most of the time, and with the exception of the Emperor of Russia and family, has scarcely written a pleasant word of any one.” The reason for the difference? Sam may not have been present at the royal reception. He may have missed the audience with the czar just as he had missed the meeting with Garibaldi in Italy. Stephen Griswold insisted later that after the Sunday-evening ball Sam and his group lingered overnight in Yalta—“I generally stay on shore when we are in port,” Sam admitted to his mother—and returned to the ship so late the next morning that, according to Griswold, they “altogether missed the visit to the Russian Emperor.” Instead, Griswold alleged, Sam reconstructed incidents after the fact based entirely on hearsay. Sam could not decide, presumably because he did not know, the length of the passengers’ visit to Lavidia. In his Alta and Tribune letters it lasts a half hour, but in a letter to his family he asserts that “we staid [sic] 4 hours.” He also reported in his Tribune letter that he could not “recollect half the places” he was shown in the palace—presumably because he was not actually there. In his private correspondence and his newspaper letters about the event, Sam mentioned no one by name whose hand he shook or with whom he conversed, and none of the reports by the other excursionists explicitly places him there. Years later he began to embellish his reminiscences of the royal audience by claiming, for example, that the czar “took a fancy to me” and “told me to make myself at home.” In 1884 he went so far as to assert—for the first time—that he had been mistaken for nobility at the palace.32
The passengers reciprocated Russian hospitality the next two days by hosting parties of military officers, politicians, and their wives aboard the Quaker City. Among their number was General Franz Ivanovitch Todleben, the so-called defender of Sebastopol, though to Leary’s chagrin the czar was not among them. Sam’s personal observations about the dignitaries in both his newspaper letters and The Innocents Abroad seem to be based entirely on this visit. While awaiting the Russians, James took stereopticon pictures of the passengers.
Mrs. Fairbanks, who spoke reasonably fluent French, the language of the European court, escorted the Russian ladies around the vessel upon their arrival. Fairbanks was a “notable exception” to the obsequious, run-of-the-mill pilgrim and Sam wished that “we had more like her. They all try, but none succeed so well as she.”33
At least the passengers prevented Bloodgood Cutter from reciting any of his rubbish in the presence of the emperor. According to Sam, they demanded that he “either swear a dreadful oath” not to “issue a line of his poetry while he was in the Czar’s dominions, or else remain under guard on board the ship until we were safe at Constantinople again.” Stephen Griswold claimed that Cutter was tricked into misplacing his overc
oat with his poetic tributes to the czar stuffed in its pockets. In either case, Cutter chose the path of least resistance and demurred. The Russians the next day were not so fortunate, however. Cutter apparently treated them to an inimitable ode worthy of Emmeline Grangerford he had written to honor the czar:
While lying at Yalta, with a grateful mind,
I’ll thank you truly for our reception kind;
And done so agreeably in ev’ry way,
Without vain pomp or even grand display. . . .
Your plain appearance did astonish me,
But your true dignity I did plainly see;
You received us plain men in a plain way,
And very pleasant words to us did say.
News of the royal visit was telegraphed back to the United States, and Duncan sent a dispatch about it to Secretary of State William Seward that was widely reprinted. Not to be upstaged, Sam copied his proclamation in his next letters to the Alta, Tribune, and Herald, and it was soon reprinted in the Philadelphia Telegraph, New York Commercial Advertiser, London Times, Littell’s Living Age, Chicago Tribune, Missouri Republican, and other papers. Mrs. Fairbanks copied it in her next letter to the Cleveland Herald. As a result, some editorialists scorned the tourists as nothing more than bootlicking sycophants. The Brooklyn Eagle, Duncan’s hometown paper, questioned why they had been received as foreign dignitaries and asserted that “the name of the Quaker City ought to be changed to the Floating Flunkey.” Sam did not disagree. He later admitted that the declaration he had written became the butt of jokes among the crew of the ship, and he later omitted the text from The Innocents Abroad. “I never was so tired of any one phrase as the sailors made me of the opening sentence of the Address to the Emperor of Russia,” he admitted.34
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