9 April 1873 • Hartford, Conn. (MS and transcript: DLC and New York Tribune,
11 Apr 73, UCCL 00898 and UCCL 00899)
Private.
Thanks for check & also the promised notice.1explanatory note
I wish you would step on board a steamer & refresh your memory as to how a ship’s boats look & how useless such things are in a heavy sea. You know that in such a sea if your ship were going down you would not dream of such folly as taking to a ship’s boat if you could get a life-raft. A few editorials on this subject might draw attention to it & accomplish something, but I can’t do anything with communications. I mean to go & worry Mr. Plimsoll or get somebody else to do it, when I get to England—he can get the life-raft adopted.
P. S. I might not have the cheek, only he gave me a pretty high-toned compliment in one of his London newspaper letters on my Humane Society letter.2explanatory note
enclosure: 3explanatory note
To the Editor of The Tribune.
Sir: When the Mississippi was burned at sea some time ago, & Ⓐemendation nearly all her boats were smashed in the effort to cast them loose, or were swamped the instant they struck the water, I wrote you a private letter (which you published) suggesting that ships be provided with life-rafts instead of these almost useless boats.4explanatory note I did not expect that the Government would jump at the suggestion, & I was not disappointed. The Government had business on hand at the time which would benefit not only our nation but the whole world—I mean the project of paying Congressmen over again for work which they had already been paid to do; that is to say, the labor of receiving Crédit Mobilier donations & forgetting the circumstance.5explanatory note But that shining public benefit being accomplished, why cannot the Government listen to me now?
The Atlantic had eight boats, of course—all steamers have. Not one of the boats saved a human life. The great cumbersome things were shivered to atoms by the seas that swept over the stranded vessel.6explanatory note And suppose they had not been shivered, would the case have been better? Would not the frantic people have plunged pell-mell into each boat as it was launched & instantly swamped it? They always do. But a life-raft is a different thing. All the people you can put on it cannot swamp it. Nobody understands davit-falls but a sailor, & he don’t when he is frightened; but any goose can heave a life-raft overboard, & then some wise man can throw him after it. The sort of life-raft I have in my mind is an American invention, consisting of three inflated horizontal rubber tubes, with a platform lashed on top. These rafts are of all sizes, from a little affair the size of your back door, to a raft 22 feet long & six or eight feet wide. As you remember, no doubt, two men crossed the Atlantic from New-York to London, some years ago, on one of these rafts of the latter size.7explanatory note That raft would carry 120 men. Nine such rafts would have saved the Atlantic’s 1,000 souls, & these rafts (fully inflated & ready for use) would not have occupied as much room on her deck as four of her lubberly boats; hardly more than the room of three of her boats, indeed. Her boats were probably 30 feet long, seven feet deep, & seven or eight feet wide at the gunwales Ⓐemendation.
You could furnish a ship with medium & full-sized rafts—an equal number of each—& pile them up in the space now occupied by four boats, & then you could expect to save all her people, not merely a dozen or two. They would sail away through a storm, sitting high & dry from two to four feet above the tops of the waves. In addition to the rafts, the ship could carry a boat or two, for promiscuous general service, & for the drowning of old fogies who like old established ways. You could attach a raft to a ship with a ten fathom line & heave it overboard on the lee side in the roughest sea (& it can’t fall any way but right side up), & there it will lie & ride the waves like a duck till it receives its freight of food & passengers—& then you can cut the line & let her go. But if you launch a boat, it usually falls upside down; & if it don’t, the people crowd in & swamp it. Boats have sometimes gone away safely with people & taken them to land, but such accidents are rare.
I am not giving you a mere landsman’s views upon this raft business; they are the views of several old sea captains & mates whom I have talked with, & their voice gives them weight & value. Our Government has so many important things to attend to that we cannot reasonably expect it to bother with life-rafts, & we cannot reasonably expect the English Government to bother with them because this admirable contrivance is a Yankee invention, & our mother is not given to adopting our inventions until she has had time to hunt around among her documents & discovered that the crude idea originated with herself in some bygone time—then she adopts it & builds a monument to the crude originator. England has our life-raft on exhibition in a museum over there (the raft that made the wonderful voyage),8explanatory note & heaps of people have gone in every day for several years & paid for the privilege of looking at it. Perhaps many a bereaved poor soul whose idols lie stark & dead under the waves that wash the beach of Nova Scotia may wish, as I do, that it had been on exhibition on board the betrayed Atlantic.
Mark Twain.
Hartford, Conn., April 8, 1873.
letter docketed: I have marked the article minion, must. WCW9explanatory note and in unidentified hand: 1873
Samuel Plimsoll (1824–98), member of Parliament for Derby since 1868, worked tirelessly for legislation to improve safety in the shipping industry. Born in Bristol to parents of limited means, Plimsoll began work as a clerk in a brewery, but rose eventually to become a wealthy London coal merchant. In January 1873 he published Our Seamen: An Appeal (London: Virtue and Co.), a strongly worded but not wholly accurate attack on unscrupulous ship owners and underwriters. The public outcry that resulted led ultimately to the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876, which instituted, among other reforms, the use of the “Plimsoll mark,” the line on a ship’s hull indicating the waterline when it is safely loaded (Masters, 17–18, 36–37, 52–62, 107–9, 121–25, 193, 224, 269). Clemens’s “Humane Society letter” appeared in the Tribune on 27 January (Enclosure with 25 January 1873 to Whitelaw Reidclick to open link). Plimsoll’s “high-toned compliment” has not been found.
As the docket to this letter indicates, Clemens enclosed the manuscript (now lost) of a letter to the Tribune, which published it on 11 April (5) under the title “Life-Rafts. How the Atlantic’s Passengers Might Have Been Saved,” the sole source of the following text. An untitled editorial comment, probably written by William C. Wyckoff, John Hay, or Reid himself, appeared the next day:
It is to be hoped that the admirable appeal for the use of Life-Rafts, which we published yesterday from the pen of Mark Twain, will not be permitted to fall without response. The general apathy is astonishing in relation to a matter so full of vital interest to every one. The questions of ship-building, of the education of officers, of the training and organization of crews, are all highly important in respect to their influence upon the safety of travel by sea. But these are all matters of time, and discussion, and experiment. The adoption of Life-Rafts suggested by our valued correspondent as a portion of the indispensable equipment of every sea-going vessel, is a thing to be tried at once, without the least delay. It would cost little, in expense or in space. It need not necessarily exclude the present provision of life-boats, but every vessel should be forced to carry rafts enough to save all the lives on board, and then, as Mr. Clemens magnanimously observes, “the ship could carry a boat or two for promiscuous general service, and for the drowning of old fogies who like old established ways.” (New York Tribune, 12 Apr 73, 6)
On 20 August 1873, Reid remarked to Charles Henry Webb:
Mark Twain has always been remarkable until of late for the care with which he avoided wearing out his welcome with the public, and it seemed to me one of the elements of his success. I should like to suggest another point in which Twain has made a big success. The best things he has done have seemed to have some definite good end in view. For instance his letter about rafts instead of lifeboats attracted more attention and brought him more praise than any thing he has done of late years. The letter about the Cunarders in the same vein was equally successful. (Correspondence of Charles Henry Webb, DLC, TS in CU-MARK)
See 5 Dec 72 to Reidclick to open link. Clemens meant the Missouri, not the Mississippi.
See 7 Mar 73 to the staff of the New York Tribune, n. 1.
On the morning of 1 April 1873, in what the Tribune described as “the most terrible sea-disaster of the century,” the steamer Atlantic, bound for New York out of Liverpool, struck a submerged rock on the coast of Nova Scotia while making an unscheduled detour to Halifax for refueling (“A Fearful Calamity,” 2 Apr 73, 1). The ship quickly sank, carrying with it the only lifeboat launched. A total of 481 died, out of 931 passengers and crew; the survivors were rescued by lifelines to the shore and by local boats. A court of inquiry censured the captain of the Atlantic and suspended him for two years for miscalculating the ship’s speed, neglecting to obtain soundings, and failing to keep a “proper and vigilant lookout” (Springfield [Mass.] Republican, 19 Apr 73, 5; Adams, 507–11).
Clemens described this raft, named the Nonpareil, in a letter to the San Francisco Alta California dated 6 June 1867:
This raft is a thing made of three cylinders, 25 feet long, each, and 26 inches in diameter, made fast together, side by side. We have all heard of shipwrecked men drifting for days and days together, in mid-ocean, on such contrivances not very dissimilar to this, but why any man should want to start for Europe on one, when he could travel in a ship and still have a reasonable hope of never getting there, is a mystery to me. . . . The Captain rigged five sails on his little hen-coop, and took forty days’ rations of water and provisions for himself and his two men. He expects to reach Havre in twenty-five to thirty days, but somehow the more I looked at that shaky thing the more I felt satisfied that the old tar was on his last voyage. He is going to run in the usual route of the ships, and somebody will run over him some murky gray night, and we shall never hear of the bold Prussian any more. (SLC 1867)
The raft (which was actually 12½ feet wide) first attempted to leave New York on 4 June, but was delayed until 12 June; it made the crossing to Southampton in forty-three days without serious incident (“Arrival of the American Liferaft,” London Times, 26 July 67, 10; “The Voyage of the Life-Saving Raft ‘Nonpareil,’” New York Times, 3 Dec 67, 3).
The Nonpareil was put on display at the Crystal Palace (“The Voyage of the Life-Saving Raft ‘Nonpareil,’” New York Times, 3 Dec 67, 3; see 11 Sept 72 to OLC, n. 6click to open link).
William C. Wyckoff.
MS, Whitelaw Reid Papers, Library of Congress (DLC), is copy-text for the letter. The enclosure does not survive. The source for it is “Life-Rafts. How the Atlantic’s Passengers Might Have Been Saved,” New York Tribune, 11 Apr 73, 5. Copy-text is a microfilm edition of the newspaper in the Newspaper and Microcopy Division, University of California, Berkeley (CU-NEWS).
L5 , 335–339.
The Whitelaw Reid Papers (part of the Papers of the Reid Family) were donated to DLC between 1953 and 1957 by Helen Rogers Reid (Mrs. Ogden Mills Reid).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.