Page 326-7  The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871:

In mid-April Sam embarked for Maui aboard an interisland schooner, planning to stay a week on the island but remaining for five. He traveled through “the blossomy gorge called the Iao Valley,” which he celebrated thirty-four years later in his sketch “My Platonic Sweetheart,” and “clattered about among the plantations’"—particularly James Makee’s Rose Ranch, one of the largest sugar plantations on the islands with a thousand acres under cultivation. Located on the slopes of the extinct volcano Haleakala some two to three thousand feet above sea level, Makee’s plantation produced an average of some three'tons of cane per acre and his mill processed between four and five tons of sugar daily. Unlike the silver mills of Nevada, moreover, there were no ‘tailings’: the refuse from the sugar mills was fed to hogs, another source of profit to the plantation. One season Makee harvested fifty tons of cane from seven acres of volcanic soil, though it had required three years to mature because “few plantations are stuck up in the air like that.” A loyalist during the Civil War with an annual income of about sixty thousand dollars, Makee had contributed generously to the Union cause by shipping hundreds | of barrels of molasses to San Francisco to be sold at a price of twenty-five to thirty cents per gallon, the proceeds to benefit the U.S. Sanitary Fund, At the time of his visit to the Makee plantation, Sam rhapsodized about the fertility of the region:

A land which produces six, eight, ten, twelve, yea, even thirteen thousand pounds of sugar to the acre on unmanured soil! There are precious few acres of unmanured ground in Louisiana—none at all, perhaps—which will yield two thousand five hundred pounds of sugar; there is not an unmanured acre under cultivation in the Sandwich Islands which yields less. This country is the king of the sugar world, as far as astonishing productiveness is concerned.

Makee was also a gracious host, and his ranch featured a billiard room, tennis court, and bowling alley. Sam probably carried with him a letter of introduction from his friend Charley Stoddard, whose sister Sara was married to Parker Makee, James's son. “I had a pleasant time of it” at the ranch, Sam reported to his mother and sister, in part because there were “two pretty & accomplished girl’s {sic] in the family.’ While in the vicinity he climbed to the crater of the volcano—the vast “vacant stomach of Haleakala”— to enjoy ‘the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed.” He whiled away several days at the Wailuku Plantation in early May, when he admitted to his old friend Will Bowen that he doubted he could complete his assignment for the Union satisfactorily. “I cannot go all over the eight inhabited islands of the group in less than five months & do credit to myself & them,” he explained. He had been in Hawaii for two months “& yet have only ‘done’ the island of Oahu & part of this island of Maui, & it is going to take me two weeks more to finish this one & at least a month to ‘do’ the island of Hawaii & the great volcanoes.” A few days later he wrote Mollie that “few such months” as the one he spent on Maui “come in a lifetime.” He had not written anything for publication in six weeks, but he had “never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place good-bye so regretfully.... I had a jolly time” and “I would not have fooled away any of it writing [travel correspondence] under any consideration whatever.” On May 22 he sailed from the Port of Lahaina, mentioned in passing in chapter 76 of Roughing It, aboard the schooner Ka Moi to return to Honolulu.