18 March 1868 • SS Henry Chauncey en route from New York, N.Y., to Aspinwall, Panama (MS: CSmH, UCCL 00202)
We shall reach the Isthmus tomorrow morning.1explanatory note It is getting very hot. Cuba was such a vision!—a perfect garden!
We have twelve hundred passengers on board—half of them in the cabin. But we are not unpleasantly crowded at all. It would crowd the little Quaker City, though, wouldn’t it? This is a magnificent ship—my stateroom is twice as large as No. 102explanatory note (but the other staterooms ain’t,.) I haven’t anything to write, but nonsense. Ⓐemendation—which I am furnishing you to let you know we haven’t gone down.
Clemens and his fellow passengers left the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall on the morning of 19 March and traveled across the Isthmus in one day, mainly by train (see John P. Vollmer to A. B. Paine, 26 Dec 1911, Davis 1967, 3, for an account of this trip). The travelers boarded the Sacramento at Panama City on the evening of 19 March and arrived in San Francisco on 2 April (“Arrivals” and “Arrival of the Sacramento,” San Francisco Alta California, 3 Apr 68, 1).
The number of the stateroom that Clemens and Slote had shared on the Quaker City.
MS, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call no. HM 14225).
L2 , 204–205; MTMF 24.
see Huntington Library, p. 512.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.