Clemens had confused the population of Hamilton, which Harper’s Monthly estimated at no more than 2,000, with the entire population of the Islands, given in the census of 1871 as 12,121. Nor were the races equally divided; the census showed 7,396 colored persons and 4,725 whites:   The women and young girls, black and white, who occasionally passed by, were nicely clad, and many were elegantly and fashionably so.

We took a long afternoon walk, and soon found out that that exceedingly white town was built of blocks of white coral. Bermuda is a coral island, with a six-inch crust of soil on top of it, and every man has a quarry on his own premises. Everywhere you go you see square recesses cut into the hillsides, with perpendicular walls unmarred by crack or crevice, and perhaps you fancy that a house grew out of the ground there, and has been removed in a single piece from the mold. If you do, you err. But the material for a house has been quarried there.

Here and there on the country roads we found lemon, papaw, orange, lime, and fig trees; also several sorts of palms, among them the cocoa, the date, and the palmetto. We saw some bamboos forty feet high, with stems as thick as a man’s arm. Jungles of the mangrove tree stood up out of swamps; propped on their interlacing roots as upon a tangle of stilts. In drier places the noble tamarind sent down its grateful cloud of shade. Here and there the blossomy tamarisk adorned the roadside. There was a curious gnarled and twisted black tree, without a single leaf on it.

We saw no bugs or reptiles to speak of, and so I was thinking of saying in print, in a general way, that there were none at all; but one night after I had gone to bed, the Reverend came into my room carrying something, and asked, “Is this your boot?” I said it was, and he said he had met a spider going off with it. Next morning he stated that just at dawn the same spider raised his window and was coming in to get a shirt, but saw him and fled.

Second Trip: Sunday, May 20 to Thursday, May 24, 1877
This visit to the islands was the subject of a piece published in 1877, “Some Rambling Notes on an Idle Excursion”, written for the Atlantic magazine, Oct. to Jan. 1878

Its story began with a “very greate storme or hurricane,” as recorded by Sir George Somers, the admiral of a fleet of nine vessels dispatched from England in 1609 to relieve the famished colonists of Jamestown. The storm separated the ships. Most of them sailed on to Virginia, but the flagship Sea Venture took on nine feet of water before its crew discovered any leaks. Hope nearly vanished before Sir George spied land on July 28. Sir George lodged his sinking ship between two large rocks about a quarter of a mile off the East End. All 150 persons aboard survived.

The town of St. George, redolent of history, rapidly declined after the heady years of the blockade runners. It had long since lost the Royal Navy to Her Majesty’s Dockyard, at the West End, and the capital to Hamilton, which was centrally situated on the mainland by Crow Lane Harbor.

Bermuda comprises several hundred islands, islets, and barren rocks is the shape of a fishhook, tilted about forty degrees, and extended for twenty-two miles. The land mass is less than twenty square miles. Built upon the southeastern arc of a largely submerged plateau on top of an ancient volcano. It consists of windblown sand dunes, coral and limestone. Warmed by the Gulf Stream, the Islands were surrounded by the most northerly coral reefs in the Atlantic.

From Mark Twain in Paradise, Donald Hoffman:

The prospectus had included visit with “our friends the Bermudians”. The pilgrims may have sensed a certain irony as most came from the North, and the British colony of Bermuda had openly sided with the South.

Mark Twain visited Bermuda on eight separate occasions of various durations.  His first visit was from Monday, November 11 to Friday, November 15 of 1867, the final port of call of the Quaker City voyage, before returning to New York.   According to Rasmussen, this was not in fact his first visit.  He reports that the Quaker City stopped there on the way to the Azores in mid-June of 1867.