... with a gill of water a day to each man. I got the whole story from the third mate and two of the sailors. If my account gets to the Sacramento Union first, it will be published first all over the United States, France, England, Russia and Germany—all over the world; I may say. You will see it. Mr. Burlingame went with me all the time, and helped me question the men—throwing away invitations to dinner with the princes and foreign dignitaries, and neglecting all sorts of things to accommodate me. You know how I appreciate that kind of thing—especially from such a man, who is acknowledged to have no superior in the diplomatic circles of the world, and obtained from China concessions in favor of America which were refused to Sir Frederick Bruce and Envoys of France and Russia until procured for them by Burlingame himself—which service was duly acknowledged by those dignitaries. He hunted me up as soon as he came here, and has done me a hundred favors since, and says if I will come to China in the first trip of the great mail steamer next January and make his house in Pekin my home, he will afford me facilities that few men can have there for seeing and learning. He will give me letters to the chiefs of the great Mail Steamship Company which will be of service to me in this matter. I expect to do all this, but I expect to go to the States first—and from China to the Paris World's Fair.
Don't show this letter.
Yours affly
SAM.
P. S. The crown Princess of this Kingdom will be buried tomorrow with great ceremony—after that I sail in two weeks for California.
This concludes Mark Twain's personal letters from the islands.
Of his descriptive news letters there were about twenty, and they
were regarded by the readers of the Union as distinctly notable.
Re-reading those old letters to-day it is not altogether easy to
understand why. They were set in fine nonpareil type, for one
thing, which present-day eyes simply refuse at any price, and the
reward, by present-day standards, is not especially tempting.
The letters began in the Union with the issue of April the 16th,
1866. The first—of date March 18th—tells of the writer's arrival
at Honolulu. The humor in it is not always of a high order; it
would hardly pass for humor today at all. That the same man who
wrote the Hawaiian letters in 1866 (he was then over thirty years
old) could, two years later, have written that marvelous book, the
Innocents Abroad, is a phenomenon in literary development.
The Hawaiian letters, however, do show the transition stage between
the rough elemental humor of the Comstock and the refined and subtle
style which flowered in the Innocents Abroad. Certainly Mark
Twain's genius was finding itself, and his association with the
refined and cultured personality of Anson Burlingame undoubtedly
aided in that discovery. Burlingame pointed out his faults to him,
and directed him to a better way. No more than that was needed at
such a time to bring about a transformation.
The Sandwich Islands letters, however, must have been precisely
adapted to their audience—a little more refined than the log
Comstock, a little less subtle than the Atlantic public—and they
added materially to his Coast prestige. But let us consider a
sample extract from the first Sandwich Islands letter:
Our little band of passengers were as well and thoughtfully cared for by the friends they left weeping upon the wharf, as ever were any similar body of pilgrims. The traveling outfit conferred upon me began with a naval uniform, continued with a case of wine, a small assortment of medicinal liquors and brandy, several boxes of cigars, a bunch of matches, a fine-toothed comb, and a cake of soap, and ended with a pair of socks. (N. B. I gave the soap to Brown, who bit into it, and then. shook his head and said that, as a general thing, he liked to prospect curious, foreign dishes, and find out what they were made of, but he couldn't go that, and threw it overboard.)
It is nearly impossible to imagine humor in this extract, yet it is
a fair sample of the entire letter.
He improves in his next, at least, in description, and gives us a
picture of the crater. In this letter, also, he writes well and
seriously, in a prophetic strain, of the great trade that is to be
established between San Francisco and Hawaii, and argues for a line
of steamers between the ports, in order that the islands might be
populated by Americans, by which course European trade in that
direction could be superseded. But the humor in this letter, such
as it is, would scarcely provoke a smile to-day.
As the letters continue, he still urges the fostering of the island
trade by the United States, finds himself impressed by the work of
the missionaries, who have converted cannibals to Christians, and
gives picturesque bits of the life and scenery.
Hawaii was then dominated chiefly by French and English; though the
American interests were by no means small.
Extract from letter No. 4:
Cap. Fitch said “There's the king. That's him in the buggy. I know him as far as I can see him.”
I had never seen a king, and I naturally took out a note-book and put him down: “Tall, slender, dark, full-bearded; green frock-coat, with lapels and collar bordered with gold band an inch wide; plug hat, broad gold band around it; royal costume looks too much like livery; this man is not as fleshy as I thought he was.”