August 30 Thursday – Sam’s twentieth letter to the Union from Kealakekua Bay:
GREAT BRITAIN’S QUEER MONUMENT TO CAPTAIN COOK

August 24 Friday – Sam’s nineteenth letter to the Union dated “KONA, JULY, 1866: STILL IN KONA - CONCERNING MATTERS AND THINGS”:

August 20 Monday – Sam, in San Francisco, completed the multi-dated letter to his mother, and sister Pamela he began on July 30.
“I have been up to Sacramento & squared accounts with the Union. They paid me a great deal more than they promised me. I suppose that means that I gave satisfaction, but they did not say so….Orion & Mollie are here. They leave for Santa Cruz tomorrow” [MTL 1: 353].

August 14–19 Sunday – In his letter completed Aug. 20 to his mother, Sam wrote that he’d been to Sacramento to square accounts [MTL 1: 353]. The exact date of his return took place within this five-day period. He was paid a bonus for his scoop of the Hornet disaster [MTL 1: 355n6]. Sam came down from Sacramento on the steamboat Capital, where he found a pamphlet issued by an insurance company about various insurable risks.

August 14 Tuesday – Based on his letter of the previous day, Sam left for Sacramento to present his bill to the Union Publishers. They paid him and gave him another assignment to report on the State Fair, which ran from Sept. 10 to 15.

August 13 Monday – At 3 PM, the Smyrniote and the Comet arrived at San Francisco together. The trip had taken 25 days, due to long periods of calm weather [Sanborn 294]. From Walter Frear:

August 3 Friday – From Sam’s notebook: “The calm continues. Magnificent weather. Men all turned boys. Play boyish games on the poop & quarter-deck” [MTNJ 1: 158].

August 1 Wednesday – Sam’s seventeenth letter to the Union dated “Honolulu, July 1, 1866:
FUNERAL OF THE PRINCESS”:
Four or five poodle dogs, which had been the property of the deceased, were carried in the arms of individuals among these servants of peculiar and distinguished trustworthiness. It is likely that all the Christianity the Hawaiians could absorb would never be sufficient to wean them from their almost idolatrous affection for dogs. And these dogs, as a general thing, are the smallest, meanest, and most spiritless, homely and contemptible of their species [Day 182].

End of July – Relating to the diaries of Methuselah and Shem, which were part of a larger project Sam conceived in the late 1860s is this passage in his notebook:
“Conversation between the carpenters of Noah’s Ark, laughing at him for an old visionary—his money as good as anybody’s though going to bust himself on this crazy enterprise” [MTNJ 1: 147}.

July 30 Monday – Sam’s sixteenth letter to the Union, dated “Honolulu, June 30, 1866. A MONTH OF MOURNING”: