27 June 1866 • Honolulu, Sandwich Islands (MS: NPV, UCCL 00103)
P. S.—Now please don’t read this to anybody—I am always afraid to write to you—you always show my letters.
I enjoy being in the Sandwich Islands because I don’t rⒶemendation
three-fourths MS page (about 80 words) missing
& Gen. Van Valkenburgh, the United States Ministers to China & Japan say that California is proud of Mark Twain, & that some day America will be too, no doubt.Ⓐemendation
four and three-fourths MS pages (about 530 words) missing
tub, with a gill of water a day to each man. I got the whole story from the third mate & ten of the sailors. If my 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. You will see it. Mr. ⒶemendationBurlingame went with me all the time, & helped me question the men—throwing away invitations to dinner with the princes & foreign dignitaries, & neglecting all sorts of things to accommodate me1explanatory note—& you know I appreciate that kind of thing—especially from such a man, who is acknowledged to have no superior in the diplomatic circles of the world, & obtained from China concessions in favor of America which were refused to Sir Frederick Bruce & the Envoys of France & Russia until procured for them by Burlingame himself—which service was duly acknowledged Ⓐemendationby those dignitaries.2explanatory note He hunted me up as soon as he came here, & has done me a hundred favors since, & says if I will come to China in the great first trip of the great mail steamer next January & make his house in Pekin hi my home, he will afford me facilities that few men can have then there Ⓐemendationfor seeing & learning.3explanatory note He will give me letters to the chiefs of the great Mail Steamship Company which will be of service to me in this matter. I expect to do all this, but I expect to go to the States first.—Ⓐemendation& from China to the Paris World’s Fair.4explanatory note
Don’t show this letter.5explanatory note
P.S. The crown Princess of this Kingdom will be buried tomorrow with great ceremony—after that I sail in 2 weeks for California.
On 3 May 1866 the clipper Hornet, en route from New York to San Francisco with a cargo of candles and kerosene, burned and sank in the Pacific Ocean. The fifteen survivors of the disaster reached the Sandwich Islands on 15 June after a harrowing journey of four thousand miles in a longboat (MTH , 102–5; Brown, 9). Clemens gave a brief, secondhand account of their ordeal in his letter dated 22 June to the Sacramento Union (SLC 1866, 3). The following day Hornet third mate John S. Thomas and ten other survivors arrived in Honolulu, and Clemens, still suffering from saddle boils, managed to obtain an interview. Anson Burlingame, he later recalled,
came and put me on a stretcher and had me carried to the hospital where the shipwrecked men were, and I never needed to ask a question. He attended to all of that himself, and I had nothing to do but make the notes. . . .
We got through with this work at six in the evening. 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 correspondents of the San Francisco journals had nothing but a brief outline report—for they did n’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 the stern-line. My fat envelop was thrown by a strong hand, and fell on board all right, and my victory was a safe thing. All in due time the ship reached San Francisco, but it was my complete report which made the stir and was telegraphed to the New York papers. (SLC 1899, 77)
Clemens’s scoop appeared on the front page of the Sacramento Union on 19 July (SLC 1866, 1). No New York printing of this report has been located, but a condensed version of it did appear in the Stamford (Conn.) Advocate on 17 August (“The Hornet,” 2).
Burlingame had first arrived in Peking as United States minister resident in July 1862. He enlisted the cooperation of the other foreign ministers in the “Burlingame plan” of noninterference and goodwill toward the Chinese government. He also redefined the trade concessions due to foreign powers. “Under his monition the ‘Four B’s,’ as they were called,—Balluzeck [L. de Balluzeck, Russian minister], Berthemy [Jules François Gustave Berthemy, French minister], Bruce [Frederick William Adolphus Bruce, English minister], and Burlingame,—constituted a self-appointed committee of safety for China, and insured her passage into a peaceful period of internal reconstruction which endured for twenty years” (Frederick Wells Williams, 36, 20–37; Morse, 2:50; Cordier, 1:69 n. 1).
The Pacific Mail Steamship Company inaugurated its Japan-China mail route on 1 January 1867 with the sailing of the Colorado from San Francisco (San Francisco Morning Call: “The Grand Banquet,” 1 Jan 67, 1; “For Japan and China,” 1 Jan 67, 3).
The Paris Universal Exposition opened on 1 April 1867. Clemens visited it briefly in July that year, while on the Quaker City excursion, and subsequently gave it passing mention in chapter 13 of The Innocents Abroad (see Ganzel, 102–3, 112–13).
Conceivably Jane Clemens and Pamela Moffett excised “sensitive” passages from this letter—the missing five and one-half manuscript pages—before ignoring Clemens’s admonition.
MS, pages 1–2 (in part), 7–9, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV). The bottom three-fourths of the first leaf has been cut away, truncating the text of MS pages 1 and 2, which were written on the two sides of the leaf. MS pages 3 through 6 are missing.
L1 , 347–349; MTB , 1:285 and 287, brief excerpts and paraphrase; MTL , 1:108–9, with omissions; MTBus , 86, brief excerpt.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61. The cut-away parts were probably already missing when Paine saw the MS, for he printed almost all the surviving text but none of what is missing. In 1912 he quoted ‘California . . . doubt.’ (347.8–9) among the excerpts in MTB , and in 1917, observing that “only a fragment” of the letter then survived, he printed the bulk of the text from ‘with a gill’ (347.11) to the end in MTL . S. C. Webster introduced the fragment ‘Gen. . . . doubt.’ (347.8–10) with the comment, “Another letter to his mother has been largely cut away, probably because a warning postscript says that it must not be shown to anybody. My family, unfortunately, were very conscientious about following Uncle Sam’s instructions” (MTBus , 86).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.