Sam changed his plans to embark for the States when the owners of the Sacramento Union, James Anthony and Paul Morrill—“lovable and well-beloved men,” Sam later called them—offered him a job as special correspondent during a visit to the state capital in late February. “I had a sneaking notion that they would start me east,” he wrote Will Bowen, but instead they assigned him to Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands, to promote the sugar industry there. “The vagabond instinct was strong upon me,’ Sam wrote in Roughing It. “Fortune favored and I got a new berth and a delightful one.” As George Barnes explained, Anthony and Morrill sponsored Sam's voyage in exchange for a series of articles “on the social, commercial, and political condition of the Kanaka group.” In other words, he was hired to be a corporate flack and, in fact, according to Barnes, his correspondence would be “exhaustively discussed in our Chamber of Commerce.” Sam planned to stay only a month “and ransack the islands, the great cataracts and the volcanoes completely,” he informed his mother and sister, “and write twenty or thirty letters to the Sacramento Union—for which they pay me as much money as I would get if I staid [sic] at home” and continued to contribute to the Enterprise. In mid-February he booked passage aboard the Ajax, a 1,354-ton propeller-driven sail- and steamboat built in London to run Union blockades during the Civil War, with a cruising speed of about twelve knots and a crew of eighteen. It could accommodate sixty cabin passengers and forty more in steerage and carry over 1,200 tons of freight. “The Ajax is the finest Ocean Steamer in America, & one of the fastest,” Sam asserted. Its owner, the California Steam Navigation Company, inaugurated regularly scheduled passenger service between San Francisco and Honolulu on January 13, though it was canceled after only two round-trips because the company lost twenty thousand dollars on the experiment. Sam had been invited to join the maiden voyage of the Ajax to Hawaii but, as he explained to his family, “I could not accept it, because there would be no one to write my correspondence [to the Enterprise] while I was gone.” Instead, he chose to resign his column and travel to Honolulu on the second voyage of the Ajax in March. As soon as Evans got wind of Sam’s plans, he predictably ridiculed him while hinting that the “sagebrush bohemian” was leaving San Francisco because of a recurrence of venereal disease. The bohemian “has been a little out of health lately and is now endeavoring to get a chance to go to Honolulu, where he expects to get rid of one disease by catching another; the last being more severe for the time being, but more readily yielding to medical treatment.’ During his absence, Evans added, Sam “will be sadly missed by the police, but then they can stand it; [they are] used to missing men, though the missing men generally go over the Bay instead of out the Golden Gate.” During Sam's months in Hawaii, his friends at the Dramatic Chronicle lamented his absence because he could not badger Evans from afar. “Fitz Smythe is getting really terrible,” the paper editorialized. “Mark Twain! Mark Twain! will you never come back from those cannibal islands? Fitz Smythe must be attended to.” In particular, Evans was “a maniac on the Chinese question”—that is, in his defense of Chinese immigration: “He is willing to swear to the good character of any Chinaman who happens to be brought up in the Police Court. Sam's presence was obviously required to contest such racial toleration.
At 4:00 p.m. on March 7, Sam embarked on the Ajax for Honolulu on his first trip outside the U.S, The Dramatic Chronicle enjoined the ship's captain ‘to take especial care” of “the funniest man now on top of the earth” for “he is worth more than all the ship's cargo. In these dismal days who shall put an estimate upon the value of a man who can make you laugh as ‘Mark’ can?” In his first letter to the Sacramento Union, Sam detailed his departure:
Leaving all care and trouble and business behind in the city, now swinging gently around the hills and passing house by house and street by street out of view, we swept down through the Golden Gate and stretched away toward the shoreless horizon. It was a pleasant, breezy afternoon, and the strange new sense of entire and perfect emancipation from labor and responsibility coming strong upon me, I went up on the hurricane deck so that I could have room to enjoy it. I sat down on a bench, and for an hour I took a tranquil delight in that kind of labor which is such a luxury to the enlightened Christian—to wit, the labor of other people.
Rather than tour the islands for only a month as he originally planned, Sam lingered there until July and mailed twenty-five letters to the Sacramento Union totaling about ninety thousand words—his first extended narrative and a rehearsal for his travel correspondence from Europe and the Holy Land during his Quaker City voyage the following year.” (Pages 315-317)