From Pages 50-60 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891:
Sam reminisced in his autobiography that in the late summer of 1872, “I took a sudden notion to go to England and get materials for a book about that not-sufficiently known country, It was my purpose to spy out the land in a very private way and complete my visit without making any acquaintances. I had never been in England, I was eager to see it, and I promised myself an interesting time. He landed at Queenstown on August 30, at Liverpool the next day, and he registered at the historic Langham Hotel at Portland Place in London on September 2. He called directly on his English publishers, the Routledges, whom he had never met in person, and they had “never heard any one talk who in the least resembled him,” according to biographer Paine. Sam's “first hour in England was an hour of delight,” he jotted in his journal. “These are the best words I can find, but they are not adequate”; they were ‘Not strong enough to convey” his initial impressions.” At the time he was still considered a minor-league wit in England, a literary comedian inferior to Bret Harte and Artemus Ward, roughly of the same caliber as Josh Billings and Orpheus C. Kerr, though he was soon to burnish his reputation.
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Instead of researching a humorous book during this first trip to England, Sam mostly played the tourist, As early as September 11, in company with Tom Hood, he visited the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, Newgate Prison, the Tower of London, and St. Paul’s Cathedral. With James R. Osgood he spent September 12 “driving about Warwickshire in an open barouche.” They toured the Kenilworth Castle ruins, Warwick Castle, and “the Shakspeare celebrities in & about Stratford-on-Avon.” He traveled to Brighton (“one of the favorite better-class watering places”) to tour the Royal Pavilion and the new Brighton aquarium (“a wonderful place” and “a majestic curiosity to me”) with Hood; Henry Lee, the editor of Land and Water; and Edmund Routledge
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Over the next month he became even more pressed for time. In early October he made a brief excursion to Oxford, including “an hour round about Magdalen College,” and gushed to Livy that “there is nothing even in New England that equals it for pure loveliness, & nothing outside of New England that even remotely approaches it.”
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At last, on November 11 Sam railed to Liverpool and that evening spoke at the Liverpool Institute. The next day he boarded the new Cunard steamship Batavia under the command of Captain John E. Mouland and embarked for America and another adventure in midocean. Among his fellow passengers was Edward Waldo Emerson, son of the Sage of Concord.
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The ship sailed into a hurricane in the North Atlantic fifteen hundred miles from shore. “We encountered a fearful gale,” Sam recalled later, “that is known to have destroyed a great many vessels, and is supposed to have made away with a great many more that have never been heard of up to this day. The storm lasted two days with us; then subsided for a few brief hours; then burst forth again,” During the squall, on the open sea and driven off course, the Batavia “came upon a dismasted vessel, the wooden bark Charles Ward,” wrecked on November 18 while en route from Quebec for Sunderland. Of its original crew of twenty, eleven sailors had been washed overboard. Mouland launched a lifeboat that succeeded in rescuing the remaining nine men in an hour, “I do not know when anything has alternately so stirred me through and through and then disheartened me, as it did to see the boat every little while get almost close enough and then be hurled three lengths away again by a prodigious wave,’ Sam reported. “Our people managed to haul the party aboard, one at a time, without losing a man.” Sam facetiously claimed some credit for the rescue because as the lifeboat was maneuvering into position he stood on the deck “without any umbrella, keeping an eye on things and seeing that they were done right, and yelling whenever a cheer seemed to be the important thing. ... I would do it again under the same circumstances. On November 27, the day after the ship docked in New York, Sam told the New York Tribune that Mouland “risked his life many times to rescue shipwrecked men—in the days when he occupied a subordinate position.” All of the passengers aboard the Batavia signed a letter written by Sam to thank the captain for his bravery and nautical skills:
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Sam returned to the United States three weeks after the election that returned Ulysses S. Grant to the White House. He had supported the Republicans sotto voce during the campaign even before he departed for England, particularly in a pseudonymous sketch printed in the Hartford Courant titled “The Secret of Dr. Livingstone’s Continued Voluntary Exile,” in which he explained that Livingston had opted to remain secreted in Africa when he learned that Horace Greeley was running for president and his candidacy had been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. Sam also wrote to congratulate Thomas Nast of Harper's Weekly for helping to reelect Grant with his editorial cartoons and win “a prodigious victory” for “Civilization & progress.”
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On November 29, only two days after Sam debarked in New York after almost three months in England, Greeley suddenly died. As a result, Sam inadvertently landed in the middle of a political muddle. The owner-editor of the New York Tribune had failed to anoint a successor.