April 2 Thursday – The Clemens family was en route on the Wardha in the Bay of Bengal, headed for Colombo, Ceylon. Aboard ship Sam wrote to H.H. Rogers.

April 1 Wednesday – The Clemens family was again en route on the Wardha in the Bay of Bengal, headed for Colombo, Ceylon. Sam noted, “Curving down around the S.E. corner of Ceylon” [NB 37 TS 18].

April – A copy of Walter Bagehot’s Biographical Studies (1895) was inscribed in Sam’s hand: S.L. Clemens from Mr. Skrine, Calcutta, April, 1896 [Gribben 39]. See Mar. 25 for a NB entry on Francis Skrine.

March 31 Tuesday – The Wardha was piloted into the harbor of Madras, India at daybreak for a 24 hour stop. Sam was again suffering from a cold and cough. He was interviewed by the Madras Standard; the interview ran on Apr. 1; a longer version on Apr. 11 in the Calcutta Reis and Rayyet (see Budd, “Interviews” (119) p. 69). From the interview, Sam was quoted:

March 30 Monday – The Clemens family was en route on the Wardha in the Bay of Bengal, headed for Colombo, Ceylon. The Wardha anchored in the bay at Madras, India at 8 p.m. [Budd, “Interviews” 69].

Livy wrote to her sister, Susan Crane.

March 29 Sunday – The Clemens family was en route on the Wardha in the Bay of Bengal, headed for Colombo, Ceylon. During the Mar. 28 to 31 voyage Sam wrote a short essay burlesquing missionaries in a parody of Sir John Lubbock’s Ants, Bees, and Wasps: A Record of Observations on the Hapbits of the Social Hymenoptera (1882). Gribben writes,

March 28 Saturday – En route on the Wardha in the Bay of Bengal, Sam wrote in his notebook:

Our captain (Robinson) is a handsome Hercules; young, resolute, manly … he cannot tell the truth in a plausible way. He is the very opposite of the austere Scot who sits midway of the table: he cannot tell a lie in an unplausible way [NB 37 TS 8-11].

March 27 Friday – The S.S. Wardha negotiated the last stretch of the Hooghly River and by 11:15 a.m. was in the blue of the Bay of Bengal. Again Sam was nursing a cold. Sam’s notebook:

Mch. 27. We have slept on deck these 2 nights. Very hot, & mosquitoes troublesome elsewhere.

10 a.m. The Hoogli here is 5 miles wide, the shores a low fringe of forest — a ribbon….

March 26 Thursday – At 7 a.m. the Clemens party sailed from Calcutta on the S.S. Wardha bound for Ceylon. Before reaching the sea, however, they had to negotiate the Hooghly River. Sam’s notebook:

March 26. At anchor at Garden Reach all night. When wind blew in, icy cold; the moment it stopped, blistering hot & mosquitoes. We all went up & slept on deck….

March 25 Wednesday – In Calcutta at the Hotel Continental, Clara Clemens was confined to her room by a touch of malarial fever. Both cholera and malaria were rampant in the city. Sam had recovered from the trip enough to submit to an interview by a journalist from The Indian Daily News, which ran Mar. 26.