The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  The epidemic continued to plague the cruise almost to the end. The health authorities refused to permit the ship to land in Sardinia, Algiers, and Málaga, Spain. Newell, for one, was upset by “the absurdity of quarantining a ship with a perfectly ‘clean bill of health,’ and on board of which for five months there has been no disease.” All the while Sam dashed off travel essays that he read aloud each afternoon to his circle of friends. Charley Langdon wrote his mother on October 13 that he was present when Sam declaimed his letters in his stateroom. “I do wish you could hear them, they are characteristic of him[.] I do not like them as a whole but he says some good things. They are going to Cal. Alta, so unless you have sent for that paper you wil[l] not see them.”49

  The long-simmering enmity between Sam and Duncan finally boiled over while the Quaker City was en route to Gibraltar to recoal and resupply for the voyage home. A thorn in Duncan’s side almost from the beginning, Sam had long since concluded that the captain was “a canting hypocrite, filled to the chin with sham godliness”—much as the stranger had filled the jumping frog “pretty near up to his chin” with quail shot—“and forever oozing and dripping false piety and pharisaical prayers.” He was also convinced that Duncan reserved the best food and drink for the captain’s table; Charley Langdon also complained about the short rations of “toast, tea, & cider apple sauce” aboard the ship at this juncture of the cruise. As Moses Beach tells the story, Sam had tolerated “with exemplary patience the infliction of a breakfast decoction erroneously called coffee until forbearance ceased to be a virtue” and he denounced in the dining room “the vile dishwater” served to him. His coffee was no more like the captain’s brew than “watered milk and water fluid is like the pure lacteal of our childhood’s country homes.” The captain tasted Sam’s drink and declared, as Sam tells the story in chapter 60 of The Innocents Abroad, “It is inferior—for coffee—but it is pretty fair tea.” According to Beach, “During the uproar which followed” Sam “disappeared, and since then has not been known to complain of food or drink, nor even of the cook.” Sam agreed: he “had made an egregious ass of himself before the whole ship.” In a speech a decade later, Duncan quoted this line approvingly. In fact, the three recorded versions of the incident—by Beach in his New York Sun letter, by Sam in The Innocents Abroad, and by Duncan in his speech—are all substantially the same. But if Sam was humbled he was not humiliated. In a reply to Duncan, he got the last word: “He charges that I couldn’t tell the Quaker City tea from coffee. Am I a god, that I can solve the impossible?”50

  On October 18, the day after the Quaker City anchored at Gibraltar, Sam, Jackson, Moulton, and Newell fled the ship and hired a guide, Michael Beñunes, to escort them through the Spanish countryside. They traveled for “seven delightful days” by horse, carriage, and train through Algeciras, Seville, Córdova, and “the pleasant rural scenery of Andalusia, the garden of Old Spain,”51 to Cadiz. Sam was “carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the Alhambra & the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar.” Before they reboarded the ship in Cadiz early in the morning of October 25, Sam spent three or four hours playing billiards, one of his favorite pastimes since his Virginia City days. The fancy billiard saloon “was filled with gold-laced bilks with crowns on their hat bands,” he wrote Joe Goodman, because “five men out of every six in Spain wear gorgeous uniforms.” He wished he had been accompanied by two or three Virginia City “roughs” to help him “clean out” the crowd.” Otherwise, unfortunately, Sam recorded almost nothing about this week, his only visit to Spain, nor did he ever mention the sleeping arrangements in the hotels. He omitted from The Innocents Abroad three manuscript pages he had written summarizing the itinerary and replaced them with a statement that the “experiences of that cheery week were too varied and numerous for a short chapter and I have not room for a long one. Therefore I shall leave them all out.” He hinted at a very different reason for his silence in a letter to Mrs. Fairbanks the following June, however: “If I talked much about the week in Spain I should be sure to caricature Miss Newell. It would surely creep in somewhere.” In his single reference to Newell in the manuscript pages omitted from Innocents, Sam referred to her as “our lady with her short traveling dress.”52 In fact, Julia Newell and Reeves Jackson fell in love during the cruise of the Quaker City and would marry four years later, two years after the death of Jackson’s first wife. It was apparently the only romantic relationship that blossomed aboard ship, and Sam preferred discretion to disclosure.

  No doubt Sam relished his holiday ashore and dreaded the return voyage to the United States. On the same day he left to journey through Spain, an accumulation of mail from the States was delivered to the ship, including a copy of the New York Tribune article, printed a month earlier, that Sam had written from Yalta and in which he had criticized the obsequiousness of the pilgrims during their audience with the czar. Predictably, the column won him no friends. Beach immediately fired off a reply to the Sun: “[T]he Tribune correspondent to the contrary notwithstanding,” he observed, “our Quaker City company acquitted themselves well” in Yalta. “As representatives not only of every part of their country, but of almost every shade of society in every part, they so appeared as that the most fastidious need not blush for word or act.” Charley Langdon reassured both his mother and a close friend on the same day he read the Tribune article that the allegations were “ungrounded and false” and were “(I suppose) written by some mean passenger on board.” Ironically, when Sam returned to the ship, Charley—who had since learned the identity of the culprit—gave him a heads-up to lie low in his cabin for a few days until tempers had cooled. That is, Sam had become the target of malicious gossip among the pilgrims, to judge from his objection later to “the atrocious things women, & men too gray-haired & old to have their noses pulled, said about me,” particularly “what they said about me at Gibraltar when I was absent.” As Sam carped in his note to Goodman on October 24, “this pleasure party of ours is composed of the d——d, rustiest, ignorant, vulgar, slimy, psalm-singing cattle that could be scraped up in seventeen States.” To make matters worse, Duncan ignored a petition by the passengers to dock in Lisbon; the ship was denied permission to land at Madeira; and on October 26, two days after leaving Gibraltar, Duncan tried—on behalf of the sober and somber Christians—to enforce the regulations against smoking on board and late-night parties, rules hitherto observed in the breach by the “sinners.” There is no evidence Sam observed the curfew in his cabin. On the contrary, he suggested that Duncan should have issued a rule against “swapping false teeth.” All the while he labored at his travel essays, which he submitted in manuscript to Mrs. Fairbanks for her opinion. At sea for the next two weeks, as he informed John Russell Young of the New York Tribune, “I cramped myself down to at least something like decency of expression, & wrote some twenty letters, which have survived the examination of a most fastidious censor on shipboard and are consequently not incendiary documents.” He once joked during the Atlantic crossing, according to Emma Beach, that “Mrs. Fairbanks has just destroyed another four hours’ work for me.” He also shared his manuscripts with Emily Severance, whom he later thanked “for the training you gave me.” On November 8, Albert Crane of New Orleans, another physician on the voyage, delivered a lecture, “The Philosophy of Man,” which the orthodox Denny considered “wild, aratic [sic] and infidel in the extreme.” When Sam “tried it ridicule it,” however, he “was beaten badly by the Dr, as he deserved to be.”53

  Finally, on November 11, as Sam remarked, “the beautiful Bermudas rose out of the sea.” The Quaker City lay at anchor in the harbor of St. George, its last port of call, for four days, and Sam remembered them fondly. Though he supposed in retrospect that “we only stopped at the Bermudas because they were in the programme,” he discovered to his delight “civilization and intelligence” under the British flag “in place of Spanish and Italian superstition, dirt and dread of cholera.” Moses Beach thought the topography “lit
tle less than bewitching.” Duncan, who had scheduled the layover, was no less pleasantly surprised. “We expected nothing but a sand hill,” he noted in his log, “and found high ground, green foliage and fine scenery” with opportunities for “riding, driving, walking, sailing.” Surveying the islands with what Mary Louise Pratt has termed the “imperial gaze,” Mary Mason Fairbanks concluded that “a few years of energetic American persevering labor, such as clears our Western wilds, would make an Eden of the Bermudas.” On Wednesday evening, November 13, returning from dinner in St. George to the yacht about a mile from shore, she and a group of friends, including Moses and Emma Beach and Solon and Emily Severance, “experienced much difficulty in stemming the current. Our oarsmen tugged manfully” and Sam, the former steamboat pilot at the helm, “held the rudder with a strong hand, while the spray dashed over his Parisian broadcloth and almost extinguished his inevitable cigar.” It is the last reference to him recorded by any of the passengers before the Quaker City docked in New York on November 19, the same day Charles Dickens landed in Boston for his first American speaking tour since 1842. While en route from Bermuda, Sam penned a poem at the request of Emily Severance to mark the return of the excursionists. It included, as Albert Bigelow Paine has remarked, this “prophetic stanza”:

  Lo! other ships of that parted fleet

  Shall suffer this fate or that:

  One shall be wrecked, another shall sink,

  Or ground on treacherous flat.

  Some shall be famed in many lands

  As good ships, fast and fair,

  And some shall strangely disappear,

  Men know not when or where.

  During a voyage of over five months, the ship had sailed about fourteen thousand miles. A quarter century later, Mary Fairbanks underscored its lasting significance: “The Quaker City sailed out of New York harbor with no celebrities on board. She brought back the Great American Humorist.” Ironically, Sam was the first person to disembark from the ship, and he was waved through customs.54

  The ship and its crew suffered a more unflattering fate. Duncan apparently failed either to pay the wages of the seamen or his vendors, according to the New York correspondent of the San Francisco Bulletin, so the Quaker City was seized and held until the Leary brothers paid the bills, totaling over ten thousand dollars. Though the brothers had hoped to sell the steamer for upwards of a quarter million dollars, it was sold at auction in mid-April 1868 for only forty thousand. A year later, it was again seized by federal authorities at the insistence of the Cuban government on the grounds that it had been equipped to sail to Cuba with American filibusters aboard. It was released to sail to Jamaica only after the British consul in New York proved the ship was the property of a British subject and was authorized to travel to the Caribbean on legitimate business. After service in the Haitian Navy and a couple of name changes, the Quaker City finally sank after its boilers exploded near Bermuda in May 1871.55

  CHAPTER 15

  Washington, D.C.

  I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of travel-writing that may be charged against me, for I think I have seen with impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at least honestly, whether wisely or not.

  —The Innocents Abroad

  EVEN AFTER THE end of the voyage of the Quaker City, the ill will among the passengers continued to fester. Whereas Moses Beach declared in a letter printed in the Sun on November 5, 1867, that the “whole excursion has been . . . a remarkable success,” Reeves Jackson asserted in the New York Herald two weeks later that the “great pleasure party . . . has been a failure” and, though Jackson was dismissed as a malcontent, Sam Clemens was allied with him. The evening the Quaker City returned to its dock at the foot of Wall Street, he vented like a ruptured boiler about the cruise in a piece he sold to the Herald. Even his hagiographer Paine admitted that Sam’s article “might better have been left unwritten, for it would seem to have given needless offense to a number of goodly people, whose chief sin was the sedateness of years.” Sam blasted the “venerable fossils” with whom he had sailed. The shipboard routine, he complained, consisted of a regular diet of “solemnity, decorum, dinner, dominoes, prayers, slander.” The “pleasure ship was a synagogue, and the pleasure trip was a funeral excursion without a corpse.” He eventually deleted a few dozen words from the version of this piece reprinted in The Innocents Abroad (1869), including this concluding passage: “a party more ill-fitted, by age and awful solemnity, for skurrying around the world on a giddy picnic, [n]ever went to sea in a ship since the world began.” As he expected, the article made “the Quakers get up and howl,” though he welcomed their abuse: “They can go to the devil, for all I care.” He hoped that his “harmless squib in the Herald” would elicit “bitter replies from some of the Quaker City’s strange menagerie of ignorance, imbecility, bigotry & dotage, & so give me an excuse to go into the secret history of the excursion & tell truthfully how that curious company conducted themselves in foreign lands and on board ship.” The next day, in a dispatch to the San Francisco Alta California, he again averred that “never, never in the world” would the pilgrims “open the sealed book of the secret history of their memorable pilgrimage.” Sam confided to his friend Mary Mason Fairbanks that he harbored “a strong desire, whenever I think of some of the events of that trip with that menagerie, to print the savagest kind of a history of the excursion. I have promised you that I wouldn’t, & so I haven’t the slightest doubt in the world but that I will. I can’t keep a promise.” In any event, “I don’t want their friendship, I don’t want their good opinions, I wouldn’t have their good offices. I don’t want any commerce with people I don’t like. They can hurt me. Let them. I would rather they should hurt me than help me.” Even Fairbanks was offended by his public accusations, Sam admitted, and she was moved to scold him and enter the fray in defense of her fellow passengers. “I have read all the ‘squibs’ and the ‘flings’ at the ‘Pilgrims’ and the ‘Quaker City,’” she wrote in the Cleveland Herald, but she for one had enjoyed the excursion. “‘Mark Twain’ may have ridiculed our prayer-meetings and our psalm-singing—that is his profession—and his newspapers expected it of him,” she added, “but the better man, Samuel L. Clemens, I believe in his heart reverences the sacred mission of prayer.”1

  Through a misunderstanding, the printer who set Sam’s Herald piece in type had omitted his signature, though the paper acknowledged his authorship the next day. In an editorial aside, moreover, the paper proposed that Sam consider writing a book about the pilgrimage, suggesting that such a narrative “from his own peculiar standpoint, giving an account of the characters and events on board ship and of the scenes which the pilgrims witnessed, would command an almost unprecedented sale.” From James Gordon Bennett’s lips to God’s ears. The same day this editorial appeared in the Herald, Elisha Bliss Jr., president of the American Publishing Company, a subscription press headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut, invited Sam to prepare just such a book. “We are desirous of obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your letters from the East, &c., with such interesting additions as may be proper,” Bliss wrote. “If you have any thought of writing a book, or could be induced to do so, we should be pleased to see you.” The company had contracted to publish Across the Continent, a travel book by A. D. Richardson, associate editor of the New York Tribune and a former Civil War correspondent whom Sam had befriended in California two years earlier, and had sold forty-one thousand copies of it in advance of publication. Bliss directed his letter to Sam in care of the New York Tribune bureau on Newspaper Row in Washington, D.C., where he finally received it ten days later. Sam replied to Bliss’s feeler as soon as he read it. He might revise his Quaker City letters and “make a volume that would be more acceptable in many respects than any I could now write,” he thought. “When those letters were written my impressions were fresh,” though he might fill any gaps in the record with new material. Bliss approved the plan: “We thin
k we see clearly that the book would sell; a humorous work, that is to say, a work humorously inclined,” incorporating Sam’s travel letters “revamped and worked over and all the other matter you can command.”2

  In truth Sam needed the work and the money. He was broke, though during the voyage he had accepted offers from William Stewart, now a U.S. senator from Nevada, to serve as his personal secretary and from Joe Goodman to become the Washington correspondent of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Sam had received “other propositions for a book” and wanted to be sure that such a project would be worth the time he devoted to it. “I know Richardson,” he added, “& learned from him, some months ago”—probably in January 1867—something of an idea of the subscription plan of publishing.” Richardson was “making a fortune out of his last book,” he reported to his Alta California readers two weeks later, and was “hard at work on his new book concerning the Far West,” which the American Publishing Company issued in mid-1867 under the title Beyond the Mississippi. The subscription method of publication not only rationalized production and maximized profits by minimizing print overruns but effectively annulled the opinions of critics. Many newspapers and magazine editors refused to commission reviews of subscription books because the reviews were irrelevant. Mass-marketed like soap, brushes, and cosmetics, subscription books were commodities sold door-to-door in advance of publication, often in rural districts where there were few bookstores. As Sam explained, the “harvest is before publication, (not after, when people have discovered how bad one’s book is).” The targeted demographic was “the rural, semi-literate, usually Midwestern customer who had rarely bought a book before.” According to the humorist George Ade, subscription books “were bought by the pound” and the publisher produced “a pound of book for every fifty cents.” Like coffee-table books today, “bigness” was “one of the main conditions” of subscription books, W. D. Howells explained, and as a result they were often padded with extraneous matter. Or as Sam later conceded, God must think of the world “pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad,” that “there is a trifle too much water in both.”3