From pages 334-6: The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871
On May 26 Sam left Honolulu aboard the good ship Emeline (which he rechristened the Boomerang in Roughing It) on a two-day, 150-mile voyage to the Big Island. The schooner, he remembered, was only "about as long as two street cars, and about as wide as one.” His cabin was so small he might have swung a cat in it, “but then it would be fatal to the cat.” As he approached the island, two of its highest mountains, Mauna Loa and Hualalai, loomed into view. He landed at Kailua and for the next three weeks rode two hundred miles counterclockwise around the lotus land—excursions through the orange and coffee region of Kona; to Kealakekua Bay, where Captain Cook had been killed by natives and the location of the ruined temple of the “great god Lono"; to the “Petrified Cataracts,” a “congealed cascade of lava”: and to the ancient ruins at Hénaunau. After reboarding the Emeline and sailing to the Kau District, he paused in Waiohinu, where he stayed with Captain Charles N. Spencer, later minister of the interior under King Kalakaua, before continuing to Kapapala Ranch, located at the head of a trail he rode to the summit of Kilauea, the largest active volcano on earth. The ascent took two days, partly “on account of laziness,” and required him to pick his way "through billowy wastes of lava long generations ago stricken dead and cold in the climax of its tossing fury.”
On June 3 Sam registered at the Volcano House, two miles from the rim of Kilauea, which had recently opened with four guest rooms. “I have seen Vesuvius since, Sam reflected in Roughing It, “but it was a mere toy, a child's volcano, a soup-kettle” compared to Kilauea. The Neapolitan volcano was ‘a shapely cone thirty-six hundred feet high; its crater an inverted cone only three hundred feet deep, and not more than a thousand feet in diameter, if as much as that; its fires meagre, modest, and docile,” whereas the Hawaiian volcano was “a vast, perpendicular, walled cellar, nine hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others, level-floored, and ten miles in circumference!” “I staid [sic] at the volcano about a week and witnessed the greatest eruption that has occurred for years,” he wrote his family. “I lived well there. They charge $4 a day for board, and a dollar or two extra for guides and horses.” He was also introduced to Ned Howard, a San Franciscan who became his traveling companion for the next two weeks. Under the nondescript name Brown, perhaps in ironic memory of William Brown, Sam's old nemesis on the Pennsylvania, Howard became a butt of his wisecracks in the Union much as Clement “the Unreliable” Rice had been his foil in the Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise. After sundown on the day of his arrival, Sam observed an eruption from the rim and the next night he joined Howard in a descent into the crater. “For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated,” Sam reported in the Union. “Over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire!” The smell of sulfur was ‘strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.””’ In addition to recounting his experience at Kilauea in his Union letters and in chapters 74—75 of Roughing It, Sam recalled it in a celebrated set piece in his Sandwich Islands lecture, which he would deliver in the United States and England dozens of times between 1866 and 1873.
Sam and Howard departed on June 7 for the Half Way House—at the midpoint between the volcanoes Kilauea and Mauna Kea—and promptly lost their way. Howard had suggested they hire a guide, but Sam “wouldn't hear of it, said the trail was so plainly worn on the rocks that we couldn't miss it,” yet before noon they were “following goat and cattle trails in every direction, riding around great cracks, some of which we nearly fell into.” By nightfall, according to Howard, even Sam thought we had better not go on for fear of falling into a lava crack. He pulled his saddle off his horse and made a pillow of it after scraping up some leaves, as if he were used to this sort of thing, and put his raincoat over him... . This most improvident man had thrown our lunch away that had been given us at the Volcano House early in the day; said we'd be at the Half Way House before noon. Next morning, fortunately, a native came along with a gun, hunting goats, and we persuaded him to lead us to the Half Way House. It was only a few miles away. Here we got something to eat .. . roast pig and boiled taro and some nasty paste . .. called “poi” which Sam seemed to relish,
The next day, June 8, they arrived at the Onomea sugar plantation seven miles from Hilo, founded and co-owned by Samuel L. Austin, another American by birth. His son Franklin recalled their visit sixty years later. Howard was tall and ‘immaculately dressed” and Sam “of medium height, rather slouchily dressed in a brown linen suit and a native lauhala straw hat pulled over his eyes.
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After leaving Onomea, the traveling companions stayed for three days with John H. Coney, sheriff of the island of Hawaii, whom Sam also knew through mutual friends, before ending their journey at the Port of Kawaihae in the northwest corner of the island.”
Sam returned to Honolulu sometime between June 9 to the 16th. He departed the Sandwich Islands July 7th.
