Innocents Abroad: Day By Day

June 28 Friday – From Sam’s notebook:
“Sat up all night playing dominoes in the smoking room with the purser & saw the sun rise—woke up Dan & the Dr. & called everybody else to see it.—Don’t feel very bright. “Must be 150 miles from Gibraltar yet, this morning & shall hardly have coal enough to make the port” [MTNJ 1: 348].

June 29 Saturday – QC arrived at Gibraltar at 10 AM.
“In a few moments a lonely and enormous mass of rock, standing seemingly in the center of the wide strait and apparently washed on all sides by the sea, swung magnificently into view, and we needed no tedious traveled parrot to tell us it was Gibraltar. There could not be two rocks like that in one kingdom” [Innocents Abroad, Ch 7].

Sam wrote from Gibraltar to his mother and family.

June 3 or 4 Tuesday – Sam agreed to write letters during the trip for the New York Tribune and the New York Herald, at the rates of $40 to $50 dollars per column of type. He eventually published six letters in the Tribune and four in the Herald [MTL 2: 55n3]. Note: Sam may have hated the duty of writing his correspondent letters, but he didn’t shirk from loading his plate with more duty. This was due to an overabundance of affection for money, preferably not in greenbacks.

June 30 Sunday – Sam and seven others, including Dan Slote, boarded a steamer to Tangier. THIS is royal! Let those who went up through Spain make the best of it—these dominions of the Emperor of Morocco suit our little party well enough. We have had enough of Spain at Gibraltar for the present. Tangier is the spot we have been longing for all the time. Elsewhere we have found foreign-looking things and foreign-looking people, but always with things and people intermixed that we were familiar with before, and so the novelty of the situation lost a deal of its force.

June 5 Wednesday – Sam wrote to the Alta his impressions of New York, so different they were from those of his first visit in 1853: “I have at last, after several months’ experience, made up my mind that it is a splendid desert—a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race” [MTNJ 1: 301]. Note: the letter was printed in the Alta on August 11.

June 6 Thursday – The get-together at the Moses Beach house in Brooklyn (Beach was neighbor to Henry Ward Beecher there) came off as planned (See Sam’s June 1 letter to his mother). The New York Sun reported that 70 guests, passengers awaiting departure on the Quaker City, enjoyed an “excellent repast,” and that “Mark Twain …enlivened the company with ebul[l]itions of wit” [MTL 2: 51n2].
In Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, p. xi, Wecter writes:

June 7 Friday – Sam wrote from New York to “my oldest friend,” Will Bowen in Hannibal.

“We leave tomorrow at 3:00 P.M. Everything is ready but my trunks. I will pack them first thing in the morning. We have got a crowd of tiptop people, & shall have a jolly, sociable, homelike trip of it for the next five or six months” [MTL 2: 54].

On this same day Sam wrote to his mother and family in St. Louis. This letter contains evidence that Sam visited Dan Slote’s house before leaving New York. Sam teased his mother:

June 8 Saturday – Quaker City left New York at 2 PM for excursion to the Holy Land, the first organized pleasure party ever assembled for a transatlantic voyage. The ship carried only 65 passengers, way short of the 110 limit. Few were from Plymouth Church. Due to rough seas the ship got only as far as Gravesend Bay, off Brooklyn. The captain elected to drop anchor and wait out the storm for two days.

June 9 Sunday – From Sam’s notebook:
Sunday Morning—June 9—Still lying at anchor in N.Y. harbor—rained all night & all morning like the devil—some sea on—lady had to leave church in the cabin—sea-sick. Rev. Mr. Bullard preached from II Cor. 7 & 8th verses about something.
Everybody ranged up & down sides of upper after cabin—Capt Duncan’s little son played the organ—Tableau–in the midst of sermon Capt. Duncan rushed madly out with one of those d—d dogs but didn’t throw him overboard [MTNJ 1: 331-32].

May 16 Thursday – Sam spotted the ex-leader of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.

May 19 Sunday – Alta California printed Sam’s article “AT HOME AGAIN,” dated Mar. 25 [Schmidt]. Camfield lists this as “Letter from Mark Twain” Number XIII [bibliog.].

May 20 Monday – Sam wrote John Stanton (Corry O’Lanus) again, this time advising him of the canceled New York lecture:
“I am one magazine article & eighteen letters behindhand (18 days to do them in, before sailing,) & so I am obliged to give up the idea of lecturing any more. Confound me if I won’t have a hard time catching up anyhow. I shall stick in the house day & night for 2 weeks & try, though, anyhow” [MTL 2: 45].

May 23 Thursday – The fourth of five letters from Hawaii, reprints of five early Sacramento Union letters with “a few minor omissions” ran in the New York Weekly. Dated Honolulu, March, 1866 and beginning “I did not expect to find as comfortable hotel as the American…” this article omitted “the particulars that a lady passenger from San Francisco had purchased a half interest in the American Hotel and that Mr. Laller, an American, runs a restaurant in Honolulu” [The Twainian, Mar. 1944 p2-3].

May 26 Sunday – Alta California printed Sam’s article “NOTABLE THINGS IN ST.LOUIS,” dated Apr. 16 [Schmidt], mentioned his April visit to Quincy, Illinois and his stay with General James W. Singleton. Camfield lists this as “Letter from Mark Twain” No. 14 [bibliog.]. “Singleton, who had lived on his stock farm near Quincy since 1854 and was noted for his hospitality. As Brigadier-General in the Illinois State Militia, he had played an active part in the Mormon riots during the early forties; tradition relates that he arrested Brigham Young and kept him sawing wood all night.

May 28 Tuesday – Sam reported to the Alta and criticized the dry goods multimillionaire’s home (Alexander T. Stewart) saying that it looked “like a mausoleum”: “Verily it is one thing to have cash and another to know how to spend it” [MTL 1: 6-9n11]. Fresh in New York back in 1853 (“I was a pure and sinless sprout”), Sam had been impressed by Stewart’s “Marble Palace,” an ostentatious dry-good store, but now Sam was older and wiser and saw that all that glittered was not in good taste.

November 1 Friday – Sam’s “Holy Land Excursion. Letter from Mark Twain Number Twenty” dated Aug. 22 “Sebastopol” ran in the Alta California [McKeithan 132-7].

November 10 Sunday – Sam’s “Holy Land Excursion. Letter from Mark Twain Number Twenty-three” dated Aug. 27 at “Yalta, Russia” ran in the Alta California [McKeithan 157-63].

November 11 Monday – QC arrived at St. George, Bermuda at dawn.

“…the beautiful Bermudas rose out of the sea, we entered the tortuous channel, steamed hither and thither among the bright summer islands, and rested at last under the flag of England and were welcome” [IA Ch.60].

November 12 Tuesday – The group rode in carriages to the Gibbs Hill lighthouse, an unusual structure built in 1844-6, mostly from cast-iron parts made in England. The group then returned to the Hamilton Hotel for a meal. Afterward they traveled back to St. George’s for an evening at the W.C.J. and Mary Hyland’s. Hyland was a “fellow Christian and eminent citizen of St.

November 13 Wednesday – A gale from the NW came up, continuing throughout the day. Just after midnight: The ship was anchored about a mile from shore. A rising wind and current made rowing back difficult. Mary Fairbanks wrote:

“Our oarsmen tugged manfully, and ‘Mark Twain’ held the rudder with a strong hand, while the spray dashed over his Parisian broadcloth and almost extinguished his inevitable cigar” [D. Hoffman 22].

November 14 Thursday – Stormy weather continued, delaying the departure of the QC [D. Hoffman 23].

November 15 Friday – QC left St. George at 8 AM. [MTL 2: 105 n5].

November 17 Sunday – Sam’s “Holy Land Excursion. Letter from Mark Twain Number Twenty-four” dated Sept. 5 ran in the Alta California [McKeithan 163-68].

November 19 Tuesday – Charles Dickens arrived in Boston to begin a five-month tour, lecturing and reading from his works [MTL 2: 104n3].

Quaker City arrived at New York City at 10 AM to complete the excursion, 5 months and 11 days long.

November 2 Saturday – Sam’s article, “The American Colony in Palistine” dated Oct. 2, ran in the New York Tribune [McKeithan 306-9].