Constantinople, Sept. 1.
1
Dear Folks—
All well. Do the Alta’s
come regularly? I wish I knew whether my letters reach them or not. Look over
the back papers & see. I wrote them as follows:2
1—Letter from Fayal, in the Azores Islands.
1 from Gibraltar, in Spain.
1 from Tangier, in Africa.
2 from Paris & Marseilles, in France.3
1 from Genoa, in Italy.
1 from Milan ——
1 from Lake Como ——
1 from some little place in Switzerland—have forgotten the name.
4 concerning Lecco, Bergamo, Padua, Verona, Battle-field of Marengo, PastachioⒶ, & some other cities in Northern Italy.4
(over)
2 from Venice.
1 about Bologna
1 from Florence.
1 from Pisa.
1 from Leghorn.
1 from Rome & Civita Vecchia.
2 from Naples.
1 about Pozzuoli, where St Paul landed, the Baths of Nero, & the ruins
of Baia, & Virgil’s tomb, the Elysian Fields,
the Sunken Cities & the spot where Ulysses landed.
1 from Herculaneum & Vesuvius.
1 from Pompeii.
1 from the island of Ischia.
1 concerning the Volcano of Stromboli, the city & Straits of Messina,
the island of Sicily, Scylla & Charybdis &c.
1 about the Grecian Archipelago.
1 about a midnight visit to Athens, the Piraeus & the ruins of the
Acropolis.
1 about the Hellespont, the site of ancient Troy, the Sea of Marmora,
&c.
1 2 about Constantinople, the Golden Horn & the beauties
of the Bosphorus.
1 about from Odessa & Sebastopol in Russia, the Black Sea,
&c.
2 from Yalta, Russia, concerning a visit to the Czar.
And yesterday & ◇ I wrote another letter from
Constantinople and
1 to-day about its neighbor in Asia, Scutari. I am not done with Turkey yet.
Shall write 2 or 3 more.
I have written to the New York Herald 2 letters from Naples, (no name signed,)
& 1 Ⓐfrom Yalta. Constantinople in margin:
ov (over)
To the New York Tribune I have written
1 from Fayal.
1 from Civita Vecchia in the Roman States.
And 2 from Yalta, Russia.
And 1 from Constantinople.
I have never seen any of these letters in print except the
one to the Tribune from Fayal, & that was not worth printing.
We sail hence to-morrow, perhaps, & my next
letters will be mailed at Smyrna, in Syria.
, the I hope to write from the Sea of Tiberius, Damascus, Jerusalem,
Joppa, & possibly other points in the h
Holy Land. The letters from Egypt, the Nile & Algiers
(Africa,) I will look out for, myself. I will bring them in my
pocket.
They take the finest photographs in the world here. I have
ordered some. They will be sent to Alexandria, Egypt.5
You cannot conceive of anything so beautiful as
Constantinople, viewed from the Golden Horn or the Bosphorus. I think it must be
the handsomest city in the world. I will go on deck & look at it for
you, directly. I am staying on the ship, to-nightⒶ. I generally stay on shore when we are in port. But yesterday I just ran
myself down. Dan Slote, my room-mate, is on shore. He remained here while we
went up the Black Sea, but it seems he has not got enough of it yet. I thought
Dan had got the stateroom pretty full of rubbish at last, but a while ago his
dragoman arrived with a bran new, ghastly tomb-stone of the Oriental pattern,
with
him- his name Ⓐhandsomely carved & gilded on it in Turkish characters. That
fellow will buy a Circassian slave, next.
I am tired. We are going on a trip, tomorrow.6 I must to bed. Love to all.
I don’t prepay postage. Letters are too
uncertain.
Explanatory Notes
1 The dates of Clemens’s notebook
entries for 28–31 August and 1–2 September are
behind by one day, indicating that he was confused about the date while
in Constantinople (
N&J1,
410–13). His comment below that the ship would
“sail hence to-morrow, perhaps,” together with his
mention that he was also planning a trip
“tomorrow,” imply that the letter may have been
written on 2, rather than 1, September: the
Quaker
City departed Constantinople on the evening of 3 September, the
same day that a party of excursionists, which probably included Clemens,
took a trip to Scutari (see note 6;
Nesbit, entries for 30–31
Aug, 1–3 Sept).
2 Out of the thirty-seven letters to
the
Alta listed below, only twenty-three were
published. Dewey Ganzel has speculated that the fourteen missing letters
were lost in the mails, and that Clemens discovered their loss when he
reached Egypt (
Ganzel 1968, 102, 139, 147–48, 157, 167, 178). But it
is unlikely that mail losses account for even half the missing letters, or
that Clemens knew how many had been lost before he arrived in New York, if
then. By February 1868 he seemed only vaguely aware that some had not
reached San Francisco: see
21 Feb 68 to JLC and family. In 1904, however, he
remembered that “six of them miscarried, and I wrote six new ones
to complete my contract” (
SLC 1904, 75). It therefore seems more likely that in listing
letters here he was reconstructing rather than remembering exactly what he
had done, perhaps because he had lost his own written records, and that in
fact he never wrote any dispatch from some of the places on his list.
Clemens’s notebook for the period 3 July through 10 August has
long been missing and may well have been lost even before he wrote this
letter. Certainly it is suspicious that many of the cities for which no
letter was published are places Clemens did not visit for any significant
length of time. For instance, he passed through the cities of northern Italy
between Lecco and Venice in a single day, stopping only occasionally for a
meal or a short walk. It seems unlikely that he would have written as many
as four letters in close succession, describing places he had not seen;
certainly none of the
surviving letters is about such
a place. Moreover, at the rate of two letters per week (his agreed-upon rate
for the
Alta), the letters he claimed here to have
written would have put him thirteen ahead of schedule only one week after he
complained in his notebook about being behind schedule for both the
Alta and the
Tribune (
26 Aug 67
to JLC and family, n. 7). The notes below give detailed
information about Clemens’s list, which is summarized in the
following chart:
|
Location
|
No. listed
|
No. published
|
SLC citation
|
| Fayal |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Gibraltar |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Tangier |
1 |
2 |
SLC 1867,
SLC 1867 |
| Paris etc. |
2 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Genoa |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Milan |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Lake Como |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Switzerland |
1 |
0 |
|
| Lecco etc. |
4 |
0 |
|
| Venice |
2 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Bologna |
1 |
0 |
|
| Florence |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Pisa |
1 |
0 |
|
| Leghorn |
1 |
0 |
|
| Rome etc. |
1 |
0 |
|
| Naples |
2 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Pozzuoli etc. |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Herculaneum etc. |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Pompeii |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Ischia |
1 |
0 |
|
| Stromboli etc. |
1 |
0 |
|
| Grecian Archipelago |
1 |
0 |
|
| Athens etc. |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Hellespont etc. |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Constantinople etc. |
2 |
2 |
SLC 1867, SLC 1867 |
| Odessa etc. |
1 |
2 |
SLC 1867, SLC 1867 |
| Yalta |
2 |
2 |
SLC 1867, SLC 1867 |
| Constantinople |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Scutari |
1 |
0 |
|
|
alta subtotal
|
37 |
23 |
|
| Naples (Herald) |
2 |
2 |
SLC 1867, SLC 1867 |
| Constantinople (Herald) |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Fayal (Tribune) |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Civitavecchia (Tribune) |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Yalta (Tribune) |
2 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
| Constantinople (Tribune) |
1 |
1 |
SLC 1867 |
|
total
|
45 |
30 |
|
3 Clemens forgot to list a second letter from Tangier,
even though he correctly recorded both in the notebook he kept from the
start of the trip through 2 July (
N&J1,
328). The
Alta published only one letter from Paris
(none from Marseilles), and it is possible that he simply transposed the
correct numbers for this and the previous entry.
4 The
Alta
never published a letter from the “little place in
Switzerland” (possibly Chiasso, just across the border from
Como), nor from Lecco, Bergamo, Padua, or Verona. No town in Italy was named
“Pastachio.” Clemens may have meant Peschiera (on the
railway line he traveled between Bergamo and Venice) or, more likely,
Piteccio or Pistoia (both of which were on the railway line he traveled from
Venice to Florence) (
Baedeker 1879, 147, 171, 312–13). When Clemens wrote
up this part of the trip in
The Innocents Abroad, he
reported traveling by steamer from Como to Bellagio and from Bellagio to
Lecco, then by carriage from Lecco to the train station at Bergamo, and by
train from there to Venice, passing through Verona and Padua along the way.
(Marengo is not in this area, but farther west.) He dismissed this
day’s journey, saying he would “not tarry to speak of
the handsome Lago di Gardi [i.e., Garda] ... nor yet
of ancient Padua or haughty Verona” but would “hurry
straight to the ancient city of the sea,” Venice. And when he
described the trip from Venice to Florence, he reported that “we
rattled through a good deal of country by rail without caring to stop. I
took few notes. I find no mention of Bologna in my memorandum book....
Pistoia awoke but a passing interest” (
SLC 1869, 199, 207, 215–16, 244).
5 Clemens and at least seven other
excursionists—two of whom have been certainly identified, Van
Nostrand and Slote—had their photographs taken in Constantinople
by Abdullah Frères, official photographers to his imperial
majesty the sultan of Turkey, Abdul-Aziz (1830–76).
Clemens’s photograph is reproduced below; for his comments on it
see
8 Jan 68 to
Beach. (The location of Van Nostrand’s is not known,
but its existence is established by Alta California Bookstore, description
of lot 90; Slote’s photograph is privately owned, but is
reproduced in
Ganzel 1968, following page 66; L. H. S. Robson to Cyril
Clemens, 12 Mar 1935, PH in
CU-MARK, mentions the existence of eight photographs of
Quaker City passengers taken in Constantinople,
possibly by Abdullah Frères, among Jackson’s effects.)
Clemens also purchased photographs of public figures which he later used to
illustrate
The Innocents Abroad. Four of these
survive (the first three at
CtY-BR, and the last at
NN-B): Abdul-Aziz
(chapter 13); Aleksandr II (chapter 37); Ismail Pasha (chapter 57); and
Abd-el-Kader (1807?–83), an Arab leader imprisoned by the French
in 1847 and freed in 1852 by Napoleon III (chapter 57).
6 The planned trip was
probably to Scutari on 3 September, the morning of the same day the
Quaker City departed Constantinople at 10:00
p.m. If an
Alta letter
about Scutari was indeed already written and not simply anticipated, Clemens
must have made an earlier visit there, either during his first sojourn in
Constantinople on 17–19 August or sometime after his return there
on 30 August.
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L2 , 87–91; MTB , 1:335, excerpt; MTL , 1:134–36, with omission.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 512–14.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.