Mark Twain in Paradise: His Voyages to Bermuda

by Donald Hoffmann

Overview

For Mark Twain, it was love at first landfall. Samuel Clemens first encountered the Bermuda Islands in 1867 on a return voyage from the Holy Land and found them much to his liking. One of the most isolated spots in the world, Bermuda offered the writer a refuge from his harried and sometimes sad existence on the mainland, and this island paradise called him back another seven times. Clemens found that Bermuda’s beauty, pace, weather, and company were just the medicine he needed, and its seafaring culture with few connections to the outside world appealed to his love of travel by water.

This book is the first comprehensive study of Clemens’s love affair with Bermuda, a vivid depiction of a celebrated author on recurring vacations. Donald Hoffmann has culled and clarified passages from Mark Twain’s travel pieces, letters, and unpublished autobiographical dictation—with cross-references to his fiction and infrequently cited short pieces—to create a little-known view of the author at leisure on his fantasy island.

Mark Twain in Paradise sheds light on both Clemens’s complex character and the topography and history of the islands. Hoffmann has plumbed the voluminous Mark Twain scholarship and Bermudian archives to faithfully re-create turn-of-the-century Bermuda, supplying historical and biographical background to give his narrative texture and depth. He offers insight into Bermuda’s natural environment, traditional stone houses, and romantic past, and he presents dozens of illustrations, both vintage and new, showing that much of what Mark Twain described can still be seen today.

Hoffmann also provides insight into the social circles Clemens moved in—and sometimes collected around himself. When visiting the islands, he rubbed shoulders with the likes of socialist Upton Sinclair and multimillionaire Henry H. Rogers; with Woodrow Wilson and his lover, socialite Mary Peck; as well as with the young girls to whom he enjoyed playing grandfather.

“You go to heaven if you want to,” Mark Twain wrote from Bermuda in 1910 during his long last visit. “I’d druther stay here.” And because much of what Clemens enjoyed in the islands is still available to experience today, visitors to Bermuda can now have America’s favorite author as their guide. Mark Twain in Paradise is an unexpected addition to the vast literature by and about Mark Twain and a work of travel literature unlike any other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826216427
Publisher:	University of Missouri Press
Publication date:	03/01/2006
Series:	Mark Twain and His Circle , #1
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.13(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Donald Hoffmann is the author of numerous books, most recently Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan and the Skyscraper and Frank Lloyd Wright’s House on Kentuck Knob. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

The Mark Twain and His Circle Series, edited by Tom Quirk and John Bird

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE "LONG, STRANGE CRUISE" OF 1867

Mark Twain had a magical name; Bermuda was a magical place. Mark Twain voyaged eight times to Bermuda, one of the most isolated spots in the world. All told, he spent more than six months on the Islands, a great deal of time for a man so constitutionally restless. The trips to Bermuda brought into play the basic, recurrent themes of his life and art: not only his famous humor and despair, or impulse to travel (especially on water), but also his flight from a merciless conscience, manifold ways of shading fact into fiction, and nostalgia for the long summers of a small-town childhood. Mark Twain spoke about Bermuda in his autobiographical dictations. He wrote about Bermuda in the Atlantic Monthly and in letters to friends both new and old. He told of the ocean vistas, the stone cottages, flowers, a certain wall, and two specimen trees — all of which can still be seen. Changes did not diminish the clean air and brilliant light, the colors of the sea, or the clear sense of a relaxed and better way of life. Mark Twain and Bermuda have thus remained inextricably linked. "You go to heaven if you want to," he wrote from the Islands in his last days. "I'd druther stay here."

Samuel Langhorne Clemens first set foot in Bermuda on his return from a cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. Earlier, he had used such unpromising pen names as "Josh" and "Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass," but in February 1863 he took for a nom de guerre, as he put it, an old Mississippi River call in the shoal waters that favored boats headed upstream. It signaled a depth of two fathoms (twelve feet): safe enough for vessels of little draft, but dangerous for the largest steamboats. Hence the two-word name he chose, "Mark Twain," expressed both his affection for the river and the stresses and ambiguities of his life. It was a manly name, it caught attention like two short punches, and to Clemens himself it brought back the happy years he spent as a steamboat pilot:

When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. [FIG. 1]

I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it. The reason is plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.

I was a pilot now, full fledged [by April 1859]. ... Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed — and hoped — that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone.

Hannibal, Missouri, where Sam Clemens was raised, was a good town to get away from and a good town to remember. "It was so quiet, so deadly quiet," he said. "Half the people were alive and the other half were dead. A stranger could not tell them apart." But the sight of a steamboat brought the town suddenly to life, and travel on water, whether by raft or sail or steam, took hold of Clemens forever. He found in the nomadic instinct "a charm which, once tasted, a man will yearn to taste again." If his first days in Bermuda were only incidental to a much longer voyage, on every later visit he made the Islands his only destination, and almost always traveled home refreshed.

At first an apprentice, then journeyman printer, and occasional contributor to newspapers, Clemens hoped to strike it rich in silver, or gold, or even coca. But the forces of inborn temperament and outward circumstance, he said, guided him ineluctably toward the most important aspect of his life, its literary feature. Newspapers then maintained far-flung exchanges with out-of-town papers and magazines, a mutual courtesy and lazy way of filling columns with reading matter. Such a practice led to a wide dissemination of word sketches as well as sundry items of news. Clemens held two great advantages: a seemingly innate understanding of man as the storytelling animal and a definite crankiness of mind that led him to think for himself and to express his thoughts idiosyncratically. Early in 1865, at a mining camp in Calaveras County, California, he heard a tale about a compulsive gambler who wagered on a frog well trained to out-jump all others, then lost to a stranger who slyly stuffed the champion with quail shot. He fashioned a story with the title of "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" and gave the name "Dan'l Webster" to the gifted frog. It was published in the November 18, 1865, issue of the Saturday Press, a dying New York magazine. The tale spread through the newspapers. "I published that story, & it became widely known in America, India, China, England," he wrote to a California friend in January 1870, "& the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands & thousands of dollars since."

Before he trained as a pilot, Clemens had hoped to sail to South America and journey up the Amazon. He meant to make a fortune by gathering coca leaves. His first ocean voyage, however, was devoted instead to travel writing. By then, the Civil War was over. He sailed from San Francisco in March 1866 for the Sandwich Islands, now called Hawaii. He stayed four months, and sent twenty-five letters to the Sacramento Union. Essentially, they were intended to encourage trade between Hawaii and California, and to promote in particular the sugar industry. Clemens amused himself with sightseeing excursions and casual sarcasms, and his letters also revealed a distaste for religion. ("I detest novels, poetry & theology," he once wrote in a notebook.) When he came upon the "meagre remains of an ancient heathen temple," he speculated about the natives of bygone days, "long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there." Nor did he find the legislature any better than such bodies elsewhere. "Few men of first-class ability can afford to let their affairs go to ruin while they fool away their time in legislatures for months on a stretch," he wrote. "Few such men care a straw for the small-beer distinction one is able to achieve in such a place."

His finest report to the Union, significantly, told the haunting story of a disaster at sea. The clipper ship Hornet had left New York and rounded the Horn. As it sailed toward San Francisco, on May 3, the ship caught fire. Fifteen castaways in an open boat with only ten days of provisions endured for forty-three days and eight hours before they reached Hawaii, more than thirty-three hundred miles away. Clemens, suffering from saddle boils, had himself carried to the hospital, and by listening to the survivors produced the first full account to reach the United States. When he returned to California, he wrote later, he found himself "about the best-known honest man on the Pacific Coast." He sold the same story to Harper's New Monthly Magazine, where it appeared in the December 1866 issue. Seeing his name indexed as "Mark Swain," he thought his ambitions were sunk. "I was a Literary Person," he said, "but that was all — a buried one; buried alive."

Hawaii nonetheless gave Clemens a clearer sense of a world he had only dreamed of, simple and natural and beautiful, and in Bermuda he would encounter for the second time a chain of paradise islands. Remote and unhurried places, they were happily beyond reach of the telegraph and the daily news, and were blessed with balmy weather, bright flowers, slender palm trees, and scattered white cottages fitted with green shutters. In both he found an easygoing citizenry, predominantly dark skinned and handsome.

Known already as an entertaining correspondent, Mark Twain took to the stage, an alternative way of performing with words. Orion Clemens, his older brother, said Sam had a greater capacity for both enjoyment and suffering, the temperament "to feel the utmost extreme of every feeling." Pathos resided in everything human, Mark Twain wrote later, and the secret source of humor itself was not joy, but sorrow. Clemens very much needed the sense of humor with which he was so richly endowed. His gift for telling amusing stories, moreover, made more palatable his unsparing critiques of human behavior and his conviction that man was "far and away the worst animal that exists; & the only untamable one."

For his first major platform appearance, on October 2, 1866, in San Francisco, he advertised himself as the Honolulu correspondent of the Sacramento Union, fully prepared to discuss the Sandwich Islands and "the absurd Customs and Characteristics of the Natives." A splendid orchestra was in town, he said, "but has not been engaged." A den of ferocious wild beasts would be on exhibition "in the next Block." After other such fooleries came this: "Doors open at 7 o'clock. The Trouble to begin at 8 o'clock." Presented as a traveler and humorist, Mark Twain quickly overcame stage fright and exploited what he variously described as his sniveling drawl or drawling infirmity of speech. (Some years later, in London, a man who observed Clemens at a dinner party wrote of his "inconceivably comical drawl, which seems natural, but which one occasionally suspects is put on in order to turn over in his mind what he shall say. ... His remarks were all shrewd, his language terse and appropriate, and his manner entirely free from affectation.") After a lecture tour across California and Nevada, he pondered a grand trip around the world to generate travel letters for the San Francisco Alta California. Later, he abandoned the plan for a lesser voyage, a pleasure cruise organized for church people bent on seeing the Holy Land.

At thirty-one, Clemens had lived a lifetime, but now he set out to build a reputation on the East Coast. He sailed on December 15 from San Francisco, reached Nicaragua, crossed the isthmus, escaped the fatal cholera aboard ship, and arrived in New York on January 12, 1867. As he continued to post letters to the Alta California, he surveyed the city where he had worked in 1853, and suffered through Sundays all too quiet. "You cannot get a taste of the villainous wines and liquors of New York on the Sabbath," he wrote on February 18. "I could not even find a bootblack yesterday, or a newsboy. ... What was left for me to do? Simply to follow the fashionable mania, and go to church. ... They brave miles of stormy weather to worship and sing praises at the altar, and criticize each other's costumes."

What seemed to him a chance to escape boring Sundays of worship, paradoxically, had already been broadcast in a prospectus that offered an "Excursion to the Holy Land, Egypt, the Crimea, Greece, and Intermediate Points of Interest." Published late in January, the program called for a stop in Bermuda on the return voyage, "and after spending a day with our friends the Bermudians, the final departure will be made for home." Prominent citizens of Brooklyn — members, mostly, of the Plymouth Church — were planning a grand pleasure trip, Mark Twain wrote on March 2. The character and standing of every applicant, he said, "had to undergo the strictest assay by a Committee before his money would be received and his name booked." Hence his companion (the journalist Edward H. House) had introduced him, so he wrote, as the Reverend Mark Twain, of late a missionary to the Sandwich Islands. Cunning though he was, Clemens seemed not to foresee that a man who smoked, drank, swore, and played cards might not find himself at home with so many passengers who were not only older and comfortably well-to-do but also overtly pious.

Mark Twain's first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, appeared at the end of April. The author was already well known, his publisher announced, as the "Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope" and the "Moralist of the Main." Notably, the sketches were advertised as representing Mark Twain in his secondary role, that of humorist. Clemens sent home a copy inscribed "To my mother — the dearest friend I ever had, & the truest." The book could not claim much importance, but it bolstered his status as a writer (FIG. 2). "As for the Frog book," he wrote home on June 7, "I don't believe that will ever pay anything worth a cent. I published it simply to advertise myself." He had also promoted himself by speaking about the Sandwich Islands at the Cooper Institute, on May 6. There he demonstrated a nearly perfected style, as Edward House reported:

The scheme of the lecturer appeared to be to employ the various facts he had gathered as bases upon which to build fanciful illustrations of character, which were furthermore embellished with a multitude of fantastic anecdotes and personal reminiscences. The frequent incongruities of the narration — evidently intentional — made it all the more diverting, and the artifice of its partial incoherence was so cleverly contrived as to intensify the amusement of the audience. ... [H]is style is his own, and needs to be seen to be understood.

To boost the Holy Land voyage, Capt. Charles C. Duncan boasted that the Quaker City, the ship he had leased, was "strong as an iron pot." A side-wheel steamer with auxiliary sails, it had been built in Philadelphia in 1854, and measured more than 225 feet long. Clemens thought it "a right stately-looking vessel," although he dismissed it many years later as an "excursion-tub." The Quaker City, bought by the U.S. Navy in 1861, survived major damage from an encounter with the Confederates near Charleston, in January 1863, and after the war was sold to private investors. For the Holy Land excursion, the passenger list was expected to include Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, and steadfast enemy of liquor. Another of the pilgrims, the New York Independent reported on May 2, would be Samuel Clemens of California. He had talked the Alta California into paying his fare, a princely sum of $1,250, in exchange for a steady stream of travel letters. Clemens hoped, too, to gather material for a book. Never before had an American pleasure cruise set sail to cross the Atlantic.

His reporting, meantime, continued to expose the edginess of his personality, so painfully evident in a letter he wrote on June 1 to his family in St. Louis:

It isn't any use for me to talk about the voyage, because I can have no faith in that voyage or any other voyage till the ship is under way. How do I know she will ever sail? ...

All I do know or feel, is, that I am wild with impatience to move — move — Move! ... Curse the endless delays! They always kill me — they make me neglect every duty & then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never had to stop any where a month. I do more mean things, the moment I get a chance to fold my hands & sit down than ever I can get forgiveness for. ...

I have got a splendid, immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless roommate who is as good & true & right-minded a man as ever lived — a man whose blameless conduct & example will always be an eloquent sermon to all who shall come within their influence. But send on the professional preachers — there are none I like better to converse with — if they ain't narrow minded & bigoted they make good companions.

Less than a week later, Clemens wrote his childhood friend Will Bowen, still in Hannibal, that the Holy Land cruise was bringing together "a crowd of tiptop people," and he expected to have "a jolly, sociable, homelike trip of it for the next five or six months." But on the same day, June 7, in another letter to his family, he laid bare his ruthless conscience, an affliction he was never able to cure:

But I am so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion & toward you all, & an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement & restless moving from place to place. ...

You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me & gives me freely its contempt. I can get away from that at sea, & be tranquil & satisfied.

A conscience accomplished no good, he wrote later, and ranked as "one of the most disagreeable things connected with a person." Outgoing and sociable, Clemens everywhere proved quick to make friends but just as loath to forgive enemies. Once, he drew up a list of persons he hated. Some he designated as permanent, and others only temporary, "to be taken up in idle moments & hated for pastime." Equally unsparing in self-criticism, he could thus excuse his mordant thoughts about mankind. "Taking myself as a just & fair average, & thus as being in my own person the entire human race concentrated," he wrote as if Montaigne, in a letter of November 8, 1909, "I have examined the race daily, carefully, earnestly, honestly, for 39 years — with this result: I do not think much of myself."

(Continues…)

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Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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Table of Contents

Preface IX

1 The "Long, Strange Cruise" of 1867 1

2 An Idle Excursion in 1877 25

3 Hints from the Notebook 56

4 Thirty Years Later, 1907 66

5 Riding in a Donkey Cart, 1908 82

6 The Grand Return 102

7 On Doctor's Orders, 1909 127

8 Islands of the Blest, 1910 142

Appendix. Table of Days on the Islands 157

Notes 159

Index 179

What People are Saying About This

Louis Budd

"A superior travel book. . . . Bermuda (or at least Mark Twain’s Bermuda) became distinct and detailed to me for the first time. . . . Twainians will want to read it and will talk up its virtues."
—author of Mark Twain: Social Philosophe

Editorial Reviews

A superior travel book....Bermuda (or at least Mark Twain’s Bermuda) became distinct and detailed to me for the first time....Twainians will want to read it and will talk up its virtues.”—Louis Budd, author of Mark Twain: Social Philosopher

“Bermuda clearly served as a space in which Twain could explore the intersection between his life as a celebrity (the white suit and the nickname “King” were incorporated into his repertoire between his second and third trips) and his role as a traveler. Mark Twain in Paradise is, above all, a kind of source-book of Bermuda scenes and experiences, many of which would remain obscure if not for [Hoffman’s] methodical unpacking.”—Studies in American Fiction

From the Publisher