30 July, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 20 August 1866 • Smyrniote en route from Honolulu to San Francisco, and San Francisco, Calif. (MS: NPV, UCCL 00105)
I write, now, because I must go hard at work as soon as I get to San Francisco, & then I shall have no time for other things—though truth to say I have nothing now to write which will be calculated to interest you much. We left the Sandwich Islands 8 or ten days—or 12 days ago—I don’t know which, I have been so hard at work until to-day (at least part of each day,) that the time has slipped away almost unnoticed.) Ⓐemendation At f The Ⓐemendationfirst few days we came at a whooping gait—being in the latitude of the “North-East trades,” but we soon ran out of them. We used them as long as they lasted—hundreds of miles—& came dead straight north until exactly abreast of San Francisco—precisely straight west of the city in a I bee-lineⒶemendation—but a long bee-line, as we are about eighteen hundred miles west two thousand miles it at Ⓐemendationsea—consequently, we are not a hundred yards nearer San Francisco than you are. And here we lie becalmed on a glassy sea—we do not move an inch— y we Ⓐemendation through throw banana & orange peel overboard & it lies still on the water by the vessel’s side. Sometimes the ocean is as dead level as the m Mississippi Ⓐemendationriver, & gla glitters Ⓐemendationglassily like it was possib polishedⒶemendation—but usually, of course, no matter how calm the weather is, we roll & surge over the grand ground-swellⒶemendation. We amuse ourselves catching vast sea-birds with a hook-&-line, & by tying pieces of tin to the ship’s log & sinking them to see how far we can distinguish them under water—86 feet was the deepest we could see a a small piece of tin, but a white plate would show about as far down as the steeple of Dr. Bullard’s church would reach, I guess.1explanatory note The sea is very dark & blue here. I played whist Ⓐemendation& euchre at night until the passengers all tire out & go to bed, & then walk the quarter-deck & smoke with the mates & swap lies with them till 2 oclock Ⓐemendation(as I call it) but “fore “four Ⓐemendationbells in the middle watch[”] (as they call it.) Get up at 8 in the morning—always the last man, & never quick enough for the first table—& breakfast with servants, children & subordinate officers. This is better than I do at hom in San ⒶemendationFrancisco, though—always get up at noon, there.
Ever since we got becalmed— 4 5 Ⓐemendationdays—I have been copying the diary of one of the young Fergusons (the two boys who starved & suffered, with 13 others, in an open boat at sea for 43 days, lately, after their ship, the “Hornet,” was burned on the equator.) Both these boys, & Capt Mitchell, are passengers with us. I am copying the diary to publish in Harper’s Magazine if I have time to fix it up properly when I get to San F.Ⓐemendation 2explanatory note
I suppose, from present appearances,—light winds & calms—that we shall be two weeks or three weeks at sea, yet,—and I hope so—I am in no hurry to go to work.
This is rather slow. We still drift, drift, drift along—at intervals a spanking breeze, & then—drift again—hardly move for half a day. But I enjoy it. We have such snowy moonlight, & such gorgeous sunsets. And the ship is so easy—even in a gale, she rolls very little, compared to other vessels—& in this calm we could dance on deck, if we chose. You can walk a crack, so steady is she. Very different from the Ajax. My trunk used to get loose in the stateroom & rip & tear around the place as if it had life in it, & I always had to take my clothes off in bed because I could not stand up & do it.
There is a ship in sight—the first object we have seen since we left Honolulu. We are still 1300 or 1400 miles from land, & so anything like this that varies the vast solitude of the ocean makes all hands light-hearted & cheerful. We think the ship is the “Comet,” which left Honolulu several hours before we did. She is about twelve miles away, & so we cannot see her hull, but the sailors think its is the Comet because of some peculiarity about her fore-top-gallant-sails. We have watched her all the forenoon.
Afternoon—We had preaching on the quarter-deck by Rev. Mr. Rising, of Virginia City, old friend of mine.3explanatory note Spread a flag on the booby-hatchⒶemendation, which made a very good pulpit, & then ranged the chairs on either side against the bulwarks; last Sunday we had the shadow of the mainsail, but today we were on the opposite tack, close-hauled, & had the sun. I am leader of the choir on this ship, & a sorry lead its is. I hope they will have a better opinion in h of Ⓐemendationthe music in h Heaven Ⓐemendationthan I have down here. If they don’t a thunderbolt will come down & knock the vessel endways.
The other ship is the Comet—she is right abreast, 3 miles away, sailing on our course—both of us in a dead calm. With the glasses we can see what we take to be men & women on her decks. I am ac well Ⓐemendationacquainted with nearly all her passengers, & being so close seems right sociable.
Monday 7—I had just gone to bed a little after midnight when the 2d mate came & roused up the captain & said “The Comet has come round & is standing away on the other tack.” I went up immediately, & so did all our passengers, without waiting to dress—men, women & children. There was a perceptible breeze. Pretty soon the other ship swept down upon us with all her sails set, & made a fine show in the luminous star-lightⒶemendation. She passed within a hundred yards of us, so we could faintly see persons on her decks. We had two minutes Ⓐemendationchat with each other, through the medium of hoarse shouting, & then the gallant vessels she Ⓐemendationbore away to windward.
In the morning she was only a little black peg standing out of the glassy sea in the distant horizon—an almost invisible mark in the bright sky. Dead calm. So the ships have stood, all day long—have not moved 100 yards.
Aug. 9 8Ⓐemendation—The calm continues. Magnificent weather. The gentlemen have all turned boys. They play boyish games on the poop and quarter-deck: For instance: They lay a knife on the fife-rail of the main-mastⒶemendation—stand off 3 steps, shut one eye, walk up & strike at it with the forefinger; (seldom hit it); also they lay a knife on the deck & walk 7 or 8 steps with eyes close Ⓐemendationshut, & try to find it. They kneel—place elbows against knees—extends hands in front along the deck—place knife against end of fingers—then clasp hands behind back & bend forward & try to pick up the knife with their teeth & rise up from knees without rolling over or losing their balance. They tie a string to the shrouds—stand with back against it—walk 3 steps (eyes shut)—turn around 3 times and go & put finger Ⓐemendationon the string; only a military man can do it. If you want to know how perfectly ridiculous a grown man looks performing such absurdities in the presence of ladies, get one to try it.
Afternoon—The calm is no more. There are 3 vessels in sight. It is so sociable to have them hovering about us on this waste of broad Ⓐemendationwaste of waters. It is sunny & pleasant, but blowing hard. Every rag about the ship is spread to the breeze & she is speeding over the sea like a bird. There is a large brig right astern of us with all her canvas set & chasing us at her best. She came up fast while the winds are were light, but now it is hard to tell whether she gains or not. We can see the people on the forecastle with the glass. The race is exciting.4explanatory note I am sorry to know that we shall soon have to quit the vessel & go ashore if she keeps up this speed. Ⓐemendation
Friday
Friday, Aug. 10—We have breezes & calms alternately. The brig is 2 miles to 3 astern, & just stays. there. We sail directly east—this brings the brig, with all her canvas set, almost in the eye of the sun, when it sets—beautiful. She looks sharply cut & black as coal in the midst of a against a background of fire & in the midst of a sea of blood.
We never saw the Comet again till the 13th, in the morning, 3 miles away. At 3 oclock Ⓐemendationthat afternoon, 25 days out from Honolulu, both ships entered the Golden Gate of San Francisco side by side, & 300 yards apart. There was a gale blowing, & both vessels clapped on every stitch of canvas & swept up through the channel & past the fortresses at a magnificent gait.
Under that day’s date I find the following terse & irreverent remark:
“Ashore again, & devilish sorry for it.”5explanatory note
I have been up to Sacramento & squared accounts with the Union. They paid me a great deal more than they promised me. I suppose that means that I gave satisfaction, but they did not say so.6explanatory note
Orion & Mollie are here. They leave for Santa Cruz tomorrow.7explanatory note
I have sent Captain Mitchell’s log overland to the N.Y. Times, but told them not to put my name to it, because if I get time I am going to write the whole story of the Hornet disaster for Harper’s Magazine.Ⓐemendation 8explanatory note
I Looking Ⓐemendationover my note-book, I find the following:
“On board ship EmmelineⒶemendation, off Hawaii, Sandwich Islands: Corn-bread Ⓐemendationbrick-bats for dinner today—I wonder what Margaret would think of such corn-bread?”9explanatory note
That reminds me that I went to reading your letters a while ago at dinner, but there was so little cheerful news in them that I lost my appetite & came away with an empty stomach.10explanatory note
The First Presbyterian Church of St. Louis, on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Lucas Place, “was, at the time of its erection, the finest church edifice in the Mississippi Valley; it cost, for its erection, alone, over $100,000. It was a stately Gothic edifice, surmounted by a beautifully proportioned tower and spire. It was dedicated to the worship of Almighty God, on October 21, 1855” (Conard, 5:212). Construction of this lavish church—which Pamela Moffett and Jane Clemens occasionally attended—came during the “vigorous and efficient ministry” (1838–55) of the Reverend Artemas Bullard (b. 1802), a “wise master builder,” who died in a railroad disaster less than two weeks after the dedication (Conard, 5:212–13, 1:421–22, 3:3; Varble, 226–27).
Clemens identified the Ferguson brothers, of Stamford, Connecticut, in a notebook entry evidently made on 28 July: “Samℓ Ferguson is about 28—a graduate of Trinity College, Hartford—Henry is 18—a student of same college” (N&J1 , 142). Samuel Ferguson, who had sailed on the Hornet to restore his health after “a severe attack of lung fever,” died at Santa Clara, California, on 1 October 1866, of “Consumption” that developed “after his exposure” in the Hornet longboat (Henry Ferguson to SLC, 8 Dec 99, CU-MARK). Henry Ferguson lived until 1917, becoming an Episcopal clergyman, a professor of history and political science at Trinity College, and rector of St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. Captain Josiah A. Mitchell, aged fifty-three, of Freeport, Maine, continued his maritime career until his death in 1876 (Brown, 230–31; MTH , 102–3, 107–8 n. 5). Clemens’s literary use of the Mitchell and Ferguson diaries is discussed in note 8.
The Reverend Franklin S. Rising (1833?–68) was the prototype of the “fragile, gentle, spirituel new fledgling” minister in chapter 47 of Roughing It. He had arrived in Virginia City in mid-April 1862 and had become rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. In February 1866, in ill health and suffering from a badly sprained knee, Rising had sailed for Hawaii. He reached Honolulu on 16 March, just two days before Clemens, who probably in early April made a note of his condition: “Mr. Rising—first sprained & nervous prostration—worn out with study & labor—health not much improved” (N&J1 , 197). In June Rising had accepted the post of financial secretary and general agent of the American Church Missionary Society. He was now returning to San Francisco to embark for New York, where the society had its offices. He died in December 1868 in the collision of the steamers America and United States on the Ohio River. (For a study of Rising’s friendship with and possible influence on Clemens, see Muir, 317–22.)
This paragraph and part of the paragraph beginning “Friday, Aug. 10” appear, with some differences, in the notebook Clemens was using aboard the Smyrniote—evidently copied from this letter (see N&J1 , 162–63).
In fact Clemens’s notebook entry reads: “Aug 13—San Francisco—Home again. No—not home again—in prison again—and all the wild sense of freedom gone. The city seems so cramped, & so dreary with toil & care & business anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!” (N&J1 , 163).
Although he had agreed to spend a month in the Sandwich Islands gathering material for twenty or thirty letters and in fact had stayed four months, Clemens clearly had given satisfaction. By 20 August the Sacramento Union had published eighteen letters, with another seven, at least some of them written by this time, to appear between 24 August and 16 November (see MTH , 256). Years later, in “My Début as a Literary Person,” Clemens recalled:
When I returned to California by and by, I went up to Sacramento and presented a bill for general correspondence at twenty dollars a week. It was paid. Then I presented a bill for “special” service on the Hornet matter of three columns of solid nonpareil at a hundred dollars a column. The cashier did n’t faint, but he came rather near it. He sent for the proprietors, and they came and never uttered a protest. They only laughed in their jolly fashion, and said it was robbery, but no matter; it was a grand “scoop” (the bill or my Hornet report, I did n’t know which); “pay it. It’s all right.” The best men that ever owned a newspaper. (SLC 1899, 77)
James Anthony (1823–76), Henry W. Larkin (1819–78), and Paul Morrill—operating as James Anthony and Co.—were the proprietors and publishers of the Union (masthead, Sacramento Union, 20 Aug 66, 1; “James Anthony,” Sacramento Record-Union, 5 Jan 76, 4; “Death of H. W. Larkin,” Sacramento Record-Union, 12 Nov 78, 3; Willis, 152–53).
Orion and Mollie presumably were sightseeing before leaving for the East on 30 August (see 22 May 66 to MEC, n.1click to open link).
The New York Times did not print Clemens’s submission. He used lengthy extracts from the diaries of Mitchell and the Ferguson brothers to tell the “whole story” of the Hornet disaster in “Forty-three Days in an Open Boat.” That article appeared anonymously in the December 1866 number of Harper’s Monthly (SLC 1866, 104–13) and was credited to “Mark Swain” in the magazine’s annual index. Clemens later reworked the material in “My Début as a Literary Person” (SLC 1899, 79–87). For an account of Henry Ferguson’s objections to both articles, see N&J1 , 149 n. 118. The Ferguson and Mitchell journals are published in Brown, passim.
This entry appears in neither of Clemens’s surviving Hawaiian notebooks, but may have been in a notebook now lost which covered the months of April and May 1866 (see N&J1 , 100–101). The Emeline was the schooner on which Clemens traveled from Honolulu to the island of Hawaii in late May (MTH , 59). Margaret was “the German maid” in the Moffett home in St. Louis (MTBus , 47), not Margaret Sexton, the Clemenses’ former boarder, as previously conjectured (N&J1 , 101).
None of the letters that so disturbed Clemens is known to survive.
Someone, probably not Clemens, drew a single thin line through two passages: ‘I am . . . San F.’ (351.20–21) and ‘Orion . . . Magazine.’ (353.34–37). The lines were drawn so lightly that they leave the passages quite unobscured; their similar appearance indicates they were probably drawn by the same person. They are in a black ink, faded to brown, now indistinguishable from the ink in which Clemens wrote the letter, but they are unlike the marks Clemens normally used for cancellation. When he canceled a passage so as actually to delete it, it was his habit to write heavily with loops and swirls or repeated overscores, making the text hard to read. The purpose of these lines, however, is not clear, and context is of little help in understanding them. The only other mark in the MS not obviously by Clemens is a penciled X before ‘I played whist’ (351.9) marking the first of three places where Paine omitted text in MTL . Paine probably wrote the X, and he may also have drawn the anomalous lines when editing the letter. He published only a brief excerpt not related to either of these passages in MTB , but in MTL he published the whole letter except for three silent omissions: ‘I played . . . there.’ (351.9–15); ‘Under . . . it.”’ (353.28–29); and ‘I suppose . . . stomach.’ (353.31–354.7). The last of these includes the second passage lined through in the MS. Observing that the passages are at least partly redundant, Paine might have marked them while deciding whether to omit one. If Paine was the one who lined through the MS passages, however, the fact cannot be proved and his reasons remain conjectural.
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L1 , 350–355; MTB , 1:289, brief excerpt; MTL , 1:115–19, with omissions.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.