The Quaker City sailed from Yalta the evening of August 28, arrived in Constantinople at daybreak on August 30, and embarked for the Holy Land four days later. The pilgrims paused in Smyrna on September 5, took a day trip by rail to Ephesus before returning to the ship, and reached Beirut early in the morning of September 10. Each of the excursionists was presented with a New Testament in Arabic the day of their arrival. Sam eventually presented his copy to his nephew and namesake Sammy.35
He and seven fellow passengers, including Dr. Birch, Colonel Denny, Julius Moulton, Dan Slote, and Jack Van Nostrand, left on horseback the next afternoon with a retinue of Arab servants for a three-week trip through the thorns and thistles, mud huts and hovels of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. As Sam wrote his family on September 10 from the U.S. consul’s office in Beirut, the eight men planned to journey to the ruins of “Baalbec [the Baal-Gad of scripture], then to Damascus, Nazareth, &c, then to Lake Genassareth (Sea of Tiberias,) then south through all the celebrated Scriptural localities, to Jerusalem—then to the Dead Sea, the Cave of Macpelah & up to Joppa [aka Jaffa, today the port district of Tel Aviv] where the ship will be.” The entourage, as Sam jotted in his notebook, included “26 pack mules[,] Dragoman & 19 serving men,” and the total expense to the party was eight hundred dollars in coin, or about five dollars per day per person. During the jaunt Sam and Slote shared a tent, one of five the group carried.36
While the food and accommodations were satisfactory, even better than expected, on the whole the trip quickly became an ordeal. Sam was not fond of Denny or a couple of the other pilgrims in the party, partly because they refused to break camp during the two Sabbaths they were on the road; the summer heat was oppressive and the near-daily riding exhausted him; and his horse, whom he named Baalbec because it was “such a magnificent ruin,” was blind and lame. In Damascus on Sunday, September 15, as in Honolulu the year before, he indulged his prurient interest in, as he put it, “maimed, malformed, and diseased humanity” by visiting the local leprosy hospital. In his next Alta California letter, he described the effects of the disease “in all its ghastliness. . . . Bones all twisted out of shape, great knots protruding from face and body, joints decaying and dropping away.”37
Ironically, later the same day he fell ill with cholera morbus and was bedridden for the next twenty hours. He declared tongue in cheek that the attack was his “one pleasant reminiscence of this Palestine excursion” because he caught up on his sleep. Colonel Denny considered Sam’s affliction a form of retribution for his godlessness. “Clemens was very sick, purgeing [sic] and vomiting heavily,” he noted in his journal. “The way of transgressors is hard; violate nature and you must suffer.” Fortunately, Dr. Birch was on hand to nurse Sam through the crisis. A few days later, Dan Slote also fell ill with cholera and, as Paine relates the story, most of the men voted “to provide for Dan as well as possible and leave him behind” lest they upset their travel schedule or perhaps even miss the ship at Jaffa. Sam remained by Slote’s side until he recovered and accompanied him to Jerusalem a few days later.38
During his trek through Palestine, Sam discovered that William C. Prime’s Tent Life in the Holy Land, one of the guidebooks on the shelves of the Quaker City, was utterly unreliable. He may have taken his cue from Mother Fairbanks in condemning it. As she wrote in one of her Cleveland Herald columns, Tent Life was “a charming book to read in your library, but when, with your finger upon a certain line of glowing description, you look around in vain for the original of the picture, a feeling of resentment comes over you as when you have been deceived.” Even Charley Langdon disparaged the book in a letter to his mother: “I cannot conceive how a man with any honesty could write as he did.” Or as Sam put it in his Alta correspondence, “No man ever enjoyed a funeral as Prime did his Sentimental Journey through the Holy Land.” As late as 1908, in his autobiographical dictation, Sam dismissed Prime as “a gushing pietist; religion was his daily tipple; he was always under the influence. Seldom actually and solidly drunk with holiness, but always on the verge of it, always dizzy, boozy, twaddlesome.”39
In sharp contrast to Prime, Sam considered most of the “holy” or “sacred” sites he visited in “dismal, desolate, smileless Palestine” to be utter frauds—though he could hardly satirize them in print in good taste. Instead, he simply dismissed them sarcastically. Near Damascus he “passed the spot where they say Saul was so abruptly converted.” In Magdala, “the rattiest, rustiest direst little collection of mud hovels, tattooed women and sore-eyed children” he had yet encountered, he visited “the veritable dwelling of St. Mary Magdalene. . . . The guide believed it and so did I.” He was struck “in Nazareth, in Bethlehem, in imperial Ephesus” that “personages intimately connected with the Holy Family always lived in grottoes” preserved in pristine condition through the centuries. He also mocked the miraculous discoveries of supposed biblical sites, such as the tombs of Adam and Noah. He asserted that they were nothing more than papist superstitions, “imaginary holy places created by the monks.” Sam was not alone in his skepticism, to be sure. Even the devout Moses Beach questioned the authority of the guidebooks and the guides: “I shall not controvert the traditions, but content myself with saying I don’t believe ALL they tell me.” In particular, he failed to understand “how or why it is possible to fix” the precise locale of the nativity, “a spot which had been so long forgotten.”40
Despite his doubts about the authenticity of these sites, Sam had wearied of sightseeing and increasingly relied on guidebooks for information during this phase of his journey. He mentioned in passing William McClure Thomson’s The Land and the Book and, like Jackson, he apparently gleaned some information from Bayard Taylor’s The Lands of the Saracen. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Taylor stated, contains “nineteen chapels, each belonging to a different sect, calling itself Christian.” A Turkish policeman “is always stationed there to prevent the bloody quarrels which often ensue between them,” illustrating “how those who call themselves followers of the Prince of Peace practice the pure faith he sought to establish.” Sam echoed the point in an Alta letter: “All sects of Christians have chapels under the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and each must keep to itself and not venture upon another’s ground. It has been proven conclusively that they cannot worship together around the grave of the Savior of the World without fighting.” More irksomely, Sam blatantly plagiarized Josias Leslie Porter’s Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine. As Dewey Ganzel has demonstrated, Sam quoted Porter “verbatim on several occasions and indirectly many times.” Whereas Porter declares that “the history of Damascus reaches away back into the misty regions of antiquity,” for example, Sam notes without attribution that “[t]he early history of Damascus is shrouded in the mists of a hoary antiquity.” Elsewhere Porter describes in guidebook prose the crypt in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, particularly the “slab of white marble, cracked through the centre, and much worn at the edge by the lips of numerous pilgrims. The slab now serves as an altar, and is garnished with a profusion of tasteless, tawdry ornaments, grim-looking pictures, and a bas-relief of the Resurrection. Over it lamps of gold and silver burn continually.” Sam riffs on the passage, remarking on the “marble slab which has been much worn by the lips of pilgrims. This slab serves as an altar, now. Over it hangs some fifty gold and silver lamps, which are kept always burning, and the place is otherwise scandalized by trumpery gew-gaws and tawdry ornamentation.” In all, Ganzel concludes, many passages in Porter’s guidebook are so similar to passages in Sam’s letters from Palestine that they suggest Sam wrote “with Porter open in front of him,” though he “nowhere mentions Porter or his book by name” either in his Alta letters or The Innocents Abroad. Ironically, Sam lampooned the pilgrims for “smouching” from the guidebooks when he was guilty of plagiarizing them.41
But Sam found nothing to satirize about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—except to ridicule the doubts of guidebook authors who questioned
the authenticity of the site. Sam insisted that it was impossible “there can be any mistake about the locality of the Crucifixion” because oral traditions about the “strange affair” would easily have survived the three centuries before St. Helena, mother of Constantine, built the church there. “Nothing in Jerusalem has any fascination for us now but the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” he announced, and he claimed to have gone there every day he was in Jerusalem. In fact, Sam found precious few targets for his satire in all of the Holy Land. As a measure of respect, while in the Holy City he bought souvenirs for his family, including a Bible in an olive wood case for his mother. Though he ridiculed the pilgrims for defiling supposedly holy sites by stealing pieces of them, Sam was no less culpable. Sam gathered bones, stones, sticks, leaves, vials of water, and other relics and souvenirs. He carried home a branch of cedar from a tree supposedly planted by Godfrey of Bouillon, some “fragments of stone purportedly from Solomon’s temple,” “bits of the wall of the Milk Grotto in Bethlehem,” and “bottles of water from the Pool of Bethesda, the Jordan River, and the Dead Sea.” (He who is without sin may cast the first stone relic.) Whereas he had expressed profound ambivalence about some of the missionaries in Hawaii, he ignored entirely the missionaries in Palestine lest he offend his pious readers. Bayard Taylor had belittled the English mission in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem as “a sort of religious luxury,” with a “very handsome church within the walls,” a charge Moses Beach disputed in his next letter to the New York Sun. Someone “accustomed to American comforts cannot live in such countries as these without surrounding himself with some of them,” according to Beach.42 Sam chose not to join this debate.
Many of Sam’s comments about Palestine were, moreover, far from complimentary. The Good Samaritan, he noted in his journal, was “the only one that ever lived there.” He again drew comic comparisons between the Old World and the New. The region around Capernaum reminded him of Nevada: “Take Washoe Valley, and you have this Valley of the Sources of the Jordan; take Washoe Lake and you have the Waters of Merom exactly; take the swamps that border it and you have the dwell-place of the Bedouin goat herdsmen.” Much as he had compared the Polynesian natives of Hawaii to Native Americans, Sam compared the Bedouins to the so-called Digger Indians. He extended the parallel in revising his columns for The Innocents Abroad. The Bedouins “reminded me much of Indians,” he insisted. “They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched our every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly Indian.” The comparison was not a compliment: “These people about us had other peculiarities, which I have noticed in the noble red man, too: they were infested with vermin, and the dirt had caked on them till it amounted to bark.” Much as James Fenimore Cooper had romanticized Indians, Prime found beauty in the Arabs, and Sam presumed to demythologize both of them.43
He claimed in The Innocents Abroad that travel “is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Such an assertion would be difficult to prove from this xenophobic diatribe in one of his Alta letters: “I never hated a Chinaman as I hate these degraded Turks and Arabs, and when Russia gets ready to exterminate them a little I hope England and France will not find it good breeding or good judgment to interfere in the business.” He elsewhere echoed the prayers of the pious: “the poor pilgrim . . . will ere long—God grant it be soon!—sweep from the face of the earth every vestige of the religion of the camel-driver of Mecca.” In all, Sam was disabused by his pilgrimage through the Holy Land, as Charley Langdon wrote his sister Livy, of the last vestiges of “veneration he ever had for the Prophets & Men of Old.”44
Sam and his companions reboarded the Quaker City in Jaffa at midday on September 30 and the ship embarked the next morning for Alexandria, where it docked on October 2 after a thirty-six-hour voyage. During this leg of the cruise, the ship carried a few dozen additional passengers, refugees from the colony of American religious enthusiasts at Jaffa. Enticed by the self-anointed prophet George J. Adams, the leader of a Mormon sect, a group of 156 men, women, and children, mostly residents of Washington County, Maine, emigrated to Palestine in the summer of 1866 and settled on a small tract of land to farm and prepare for the Second Coming of Christ. (Ironically, Sam noted in his journal that he doubted Christ would ever return to Palestine because he had already been there and knew how inhospitable it was.) But their crops failed, some of the zealots died, and others defected. By the summer of 1867 only 56 settlers remained, 41 of them eager to return to the United States. They hitched a ride “huddled like sheep on the upper deck” of the Quaker City to Alexandria, and from there they planned to sail to Liverpool and thence to America. The remaining millennialists, including Adams and his wife, were still “somewhat in funds and in possession of the colony lands,” according to Moses Beach. Mary Fairbanks reported that “Mrs. Adams entertained us with coarse gossip of the short-comings of the disaffected members of the colony.” Sam devoted his last letter to the New York Tribune to the plight of the “dupes” and their “foolish expedition.” He later scorned the colony in The Innocents Abroad as “a complete fiasco” and Adams as nothing more than a false prophet and rank adventurer. In an act of charity with which he is rarely credited, Moses Beach paid three hundred pounds sterling to cover the cost of the colonists’ passages to Alexandria, where the American consul took them under wing.45
The Quaker City remained in the harbor for five days. One of the passengers, John Greenwood, who had been commissioned by P. T. Barnum to purchase artifacts for his dime museum, negotiated with Egyptian authorities to buy two mummies for fifteen thousand dollars each, prompting Sam, according to Julia Newell, “to wish that all his dead ancestors were mummies and he would sell them all at that price.” In company with many of the pilgrims, Sam entrained on October 4 to Cairo and registered at Shepheard’s Hotel, where most English and American travelers lodged for the exorbitant price of four dollars (gold) per night. The excursionists rode donkeys to Giza the next day to view the pyramids and the Sphinx. As usual, Bloodgood Cutter commemorated the occasion with one of his homespun rhymes:
Then walking slowly through the sand,
Soon near the Pyramid did stand;
And then we gazed with wondering eyes,
At the immensity of its size.
As for the Sphinx, Cutter had this to say:
The face is formed of harder stone,
Time seems to let the face alone;
Some years ago some Vandal foes,
Got on its face and broke its nose.
Both Beach and Fairbanks made much the same point but more felicitously: according to Beach, “the chief attraction” of the Sphinx was “a mutilated nose” and Fairbanks observed that its nose was “demolished.” Nor was Sam much impressed. Charley Langdon quoted him at the time to the effect that “I dont take to ruins & things out of Repair.” Later, Sam invented an incident for The Innocents Abroad in which a relic-hunting pilgrim with a hammer literally tries to vandalize the Sphinx by breaking “a ‘specimen’ from the face of this the most majestic creation the hand of man has wrought.” There is no evidence from either his notebooks or travel letters at the time that such a desecration occurred. But in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) he similarly invented a scene in which Jim lands on the head of the Sphinx. The excursionists returned to Alexandria and the ship on October 7. As in Hawaii, Sam eroticized the exotic or “foreign” women in Egypt. “All day the ladies bathed” au naturel within view of the ship, he remarked in his journal. “They don’t consider it any harm, I suppose.”46
While in Egypt, too, Sam raced to fulfill his obligations to the Alta California. He had stopped writing for the New York Tribune, even though it paid better for his letters, for several reasons: the Alta had paid him in advance, he had been dissatisfied with the quality of his correspondence with the Tribune, and he feared he would betray to the polite Tribune readers his “glaring disrespect for the Holy Land.” He never would complete the balance of the letters he had promised the New
York paper, but he honored his commitment to San Francisco. Dan Slote remembered later that Sam “was the hardest-working man I ever saw. . . . In Egypt, where the fleas were so thick you couldn’t breathe without swallowing a thousand, that man used to sit up and write, write, half the night.” Sam did not yet realize, moreover, that at least twelve and perhaps as many as fourteen of his dispatches to the Alta had miscarried, and he had not kept copies. Most of these columns were written about such cities visited early in the tour as Marseilles, Paris, Venice, Bologna, Pisa, and Leghorn and mailed from Italy. The loss is comparable to the missing columns Sam published in the Territorial Enterprise in 1862–66. The problem in this case was the cholera epidemic. The authorities mistakenly believed that the disease could be transmitted by paper. Sam, Jackson, and Moses Beach all remembered that the dockworkers in Mediterranean ports handled their letters with tongs, dipped them in seawater, punched the envelopes full of holes, fumigated them, then promised to forward them to their destinations. It was easier simply to destroy them.47 After his return to the United States, Beach also discovered that “sundry letters descriptive of the excursion” he had sent the New York Sun had failed to reach the paper, and he hastened “to supply the omission.” While a total of thirty-seven of his columns to the Sun were eventually printed, there is a gap in Beach’s correspondence of nearly a month, between July 20 and August 15, when an unknown number of his dispatches went awry. At least one of Julius Moulton’s letters, written to the St. Louis Missouri Republican from Paris, also failed to be printed, presumably because it failed to arrive.48
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