3 December 1872 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: ViU, UCCL 00839)
You must dow Ⓐemendation run down next voyage & see us, if you can.1explanatory note Telegraph me what hour you will arrive & I’ll go to the station & fetch you home. Mr. Wood stayed all night with us & then joined the General2explanatory note in New York & they went o West together. I wanted the General to stop with us, too, but his business made it impossible.
The American papersⒶemendation say the Royal Humane Society ought to give me a medal for “standing around on deck without any umbrella,” &c.3explanatory note I ex suspect they mean a leather one.
My wife is anxious that you should be put in command of the biggest Cunarder afloat, & then she thinks she theⒶemendation sea-sickness will deal less harshly by her. I hope, also, that you’ll have a particularly big ship next m May, for I am afraid my wife is going to have a hard time with sea-sickness.
Cor. Forest & Hawthorne sts.
Hartford.
Capt. Mouland—
(forgot the initials.)—as
usual.)
Mouland responded to this invitation on 21 January 1873 (22 Jan 73 to Mouland, n. 1click to open link).
General Colton Greene of Memphis, Tennessee, had been a passenger on the Batavia in November (20 Nov 72 to the Royal Humane Societyclick to open link). A South Carolinean by birth, he “accumulated a sizable fortune in merchandising” at a young age and eagerly gave “his time, ability, and money to the cause of the South” (Adamson, 4). He was an advisor to Governor Claiborne F. Jackson of Missouri during the pivotal early days of the Civil War, when Jackson attempted to swing the state to the Confederacy, and rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Confederate army. Later he settled in Memphis, where in the 1870s “the elegant General” became a social arbiter by virtue of “his extensive European travel and command of languages. ... Handsome and charming as he was, he never married; he never divulged anything about his origin except that he was born in South Carolina—a mystery still talked about in Memphis” (McIlwaine, 236; Adamson, 1–4; Heitman, 2:177). Clemens included a recollection of C. F. Wood and Greene aboard the Batavia in his November 1881 notebook:
Met gentleman who had been in the Batavia—it reminded me of how Gen Green & I were each refusing the only seat in the fiddle one night when Wood came in & jocularly remarked that while we did the polite he would reap the advantage of a careful coarser training—took the seat & got shot in the back by a sea that nearly broke him in two. (N&J2, 403–4)
Clemens quoted his own published letter of 20 November to the Royal Humane Society: “If I have been of any service toward rescuing these nine shipwrecked human beings by standing around the deck in a furious storm, without any umbrella, . . . I am satisfied. I ask no reward.” Clemens’s claim that the “American papers” recommended a medal for him has not been substantiated. The Cleveland Leader, however, did return to the subject on 30 November:
Mark Twain and Charles Sumner have each had an experience in saving life at sea. Mark says he stood around without an umbrella, and yelled at the proper time. On the strength of this he asks the Royal Humane Society to reward those who were active in the good work. Mr. Sumner, on the steamship, made a speech at the table, and solicited aid for the shipwrecked and those who saved them. The results were most happy. The Senator goes to Washington and Mark to his profitable fancies. (“Passing Events,” 2)
Senator Charles Sumner (1811–74) of Massachusetts arrived in New York from Liverpool on 26 November aboard the steamship Baltic, which had passed through the same Atlantic storms as the Batavia. He had headed a committee of passengers who raised a cash reward for the crewmen involved in rescuing the survivors of another distressed ship, the Assyria (“Marine Disasters,” New York Tribune, 27 Nov 72, 1).
MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).
L5 , 239–240.
deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 16 April 1960.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.