9–12 November 1865
On the afternoon of 7 November 1865 the new tugboat Rescue made its trial trip in San Francisco Bay. Probably on that day or the next Clemens wrote about the bibulous event in his daily letter to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, which published it probably two or three days later. The Enterprise printing has been lost. The present text has been reconstructed from two independent reprintings, one in the San Francisco Golden Era of November 19, and the other in the San Francisco Examiner of December 2.1
A group of merchants and underwriters interested in San Francisco shipping and commerce had commissioned the building of the Rescue at North Point. On November 8 it towed its first ship, the Nonpareil, to sea. But the day before, loaded with baskets of champagne and with flags flying and calliope playing, it left North Point carrying a select company of “high-toned newspaper reporters, numerous military officers, and gentlemen of note.” The Rescue sailed a course around the Bay, touching at all major points before docking at Pacific Street wharf late in the afternoon. Clemens' evident delight in being “at sea,” not to mention in convivial company, probably led him to exaggerate the Rescue's average speed. City newspapers agreed that she averaged ten, not “fifteen miles an hour.”2
We Ⓐemendation lunched, then, and shortly began to drink champagne—by the basket. I saw the tremendous guns frowning from the fort; I saw San Francisco spread out over the sand-hillsⒶemendation like a picture; I saw the huge fortress at Black PointⒺexplanatory note looming hazily in the distance; I saw tall ships sweeping in from the sea through the Golden Gate;Ⓐemendation IⒶemendation saw that it was time to take another drink, and after that I saw no more. All hands fell to singing “When we were Marching Through Georgia,”Ⓐemendation Ⓔexplanatory note and the remainder of the trip was fought out on that line.Ⓐemendation We landed at the steamboat wharf at 5 o'clock, safe and sound. Some of those reporters I spoke of said we had been to Benicia, and the othersⒶemendation said we had been to the Cliff House, but, poor devils, they had been drinking, and they did not really know where we had been. I know,Ⓐemendation but I do not choose to tell. I enjoyed that trip first-rate. I amⒶemendation rather fond of a trip on a fast boat with a jolly crowd. That was a jolly crowd. Sometimes they were all out forward standing on their heads, and then the boat wouldn't steer because her rudder was sticking up in the air like a sail of a wind-millⒶemendation; and sometimes they were all aft turning handspringsⒶemendation and playing “mumble peg,”Ⓐemendation and then the boat wouldn't steer because she stood so straight up in the water that her head caught all the wind that was blowing; and sometimes they were all on the starboard side eating and drinking and singing, and then she wouldn't steer because she was listed worse than any soldier [begin page 328] that ever listed since the war began. Still, even under these trying circumstancesⒶemendation, the boat made fifteen miles an hour, and so I suppose that on an even keel she can make a hundred,Ⓐemendation or thereabouts. I enjoyed that excursion.Ⓐemendation
The first printing in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, sometime between 9 and 12 November 1865, is not extant. The sketch survives in two contemporary reprintings of the Enterprise:
P1 “ ‘Mark Twain's’ Trial Trip,” San Francisco Golden Era 13 (19 November 1865): 5.P2 “Pleasure Excursion,” San Francisco Examiner, 2 December 1865, p. 1.
Copies: PH from Bancroft. The sketch is a radiating text: there is no copy-text. All variants are recorded in a list of emendations and adopted readings, which also records any readings unique to the present edition, identified as I-C.
The independence of P1 and P2 is guaranteed by obviously authorial passages unique to each printing. Neither P1 nor P2 reproduces Mark Twain's entire letter to the Enterprise, or even the whole of this section of the letter: P1 omits most of the opening sentence, which is preserved only in P2, but it includes the second sentence, which is omitted in P2.
The diagram of transmission is as follows: