Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1 Read online

  My Debut as a Literary Person*

  By Mark Twain (formerly “Mike Swain.”)

  1866

  October 1, 1898. In those early days I had already published one little thing (“The Jumping 1866 Frog,”) in an eastern paper, but I did not consider that that counted. In my view, a person who published things in a mere newspaper could not properly claim recognition as a Literary Person; he must rise away above that; he must appear in a Magazine. He would then be a Literary Person; also he would be famous—right away. These two ambitions were strong upon me. This was in 1866. I prepared my contribution, and then looked around for the best magazine to go up to glory in. I selected Harper’s Monthly. The contribution was accepted. I signed it “MARK TWAIN,” for that name had some currency on the Pacific Coast, and it was my idea to spread it all over the world, now, at this one jump. The article appeared in the December number, and I sat up a month waiting for the January number—for that one would contain the year’s list of contributors, my name would be in it, and I should be famous and could give the banquet I was meditating.

  I did not give the banquet. I had not written the “Mark Twain” distinctly; it was a fresh name to Harper’s printers, and they put it Mike Swain or MacSwain, I do not remember which. At any rate I was not celebrated, and I did not give the banquet. I was a Literary Person, but that was all—a buried one; buried alive.

  My article was about the burning of the clipper ship Hornet on the line, May 3d, 1866. There were thirty-one men on board at the time, and I was in Honolulu when the fifteen lean and ghostly survivors arrived there after a voyage of forty-three days in an open boat through the blazing tropics on ten days’ rations of food. A very remarkable trip; but it was conducted by a captain who was a remarkable man, otherwise there would have been no survivors. He was a New Englander of the best sea-going stock of the old capable times—Captain Josiah Mitchell.

  I was in the Islands to write letters for the weekly edition of the Sacramento Union, a rich and influential daily journal which hadn’t any use for them, but could afford to spend twenty dollars a week for nothing. The proprietors were lovable and well-beloved men; long ago dead, no doubt, but in me there is at least one person who still holds them in grateful remembrance; for I dearly wanted to see the Islands, and they listened to me and gave me the opportunity when there was but slender likelihood that it could profit them in any way.

  I had been in the Islands several months when the survivors arrived. I was laid up in my room at the time, and unable to walk. Here was a great occasion to serve my journal, and I not able to take advantage of it. Necessarily I was in deep trouble. But by good luck his Excellency Anson Burlingame was there at the time, on his way to take up his post in China where he did such good work for the United States. He came and put me on a stretcher and had me carried to the hospital where the shipwrecked men were, and I never needed to ask a question. He attended to all of that himself, and I had nothing to do but make the notes. It was like him to take that trouble. He was a great man, and a great American; and it was in his fine nature to come down from his high office and do a friendly turn whenever he could.

  We got through with this work at six in the evening. I took no dinner, for there was no time to spare if I would beat the other correspondents. I spent four hours arranging the notes in their proper order, then wrote all night and beyond it; with this result: that I had a very long and detailed account of the Hornet episode ready at nine in the morning, while the correspondents of the San Francisco journals had nothing but a brief outline report—for they didn’t sit up. The now-and-then schooner was to sail for San Francisco about nine; when I reached the dock she was free forward and was just casting off her stern-line. My fat envelop was thrown by a strong hand, and fell on board all right, and my victory was a safe thing. All in due time the ship reached San Francisco, but it was my complete report which made the stir and was telegraphed to the New York papers. By Mr. Cash; he was in charge of the Pacific bureau of the New York Herald at the time.

  When I returned to California by and by, I went up to Sacramento and presented a bill for general correspondence, at twenty dollars a week. It was paid. Then I presented a bill for “special” service on the Hornet matter for three columns of solid nonpareil at a hundred dollars a column. The cashier didn’t faint, but he came rather near it. He sent for the proprietors, and they came and never uttered a protest. They only laughed, in their jolly fashion, and said it was robbery, but no matter, it was a grand “scoop” (the bill or my Hornet report I didn’t know which); “pay it; it’s all right.” The best men that ever owned a newspaper.

  The Hornet survivors reached the Sandwich Islands the 15th of June. They were mere skinny skeletons; their clothes hung limp about them and fitted them no better than a flag fits the flagstaff in a calm. But they were well nursed in the hospital; the people of Honolulu kept them supplied with all the dainties they could need; they gathered strength fast, and were presently nearly as good as new. Within a fortnight the most of them took ship for San Francisco. That is, if my dates have not gone astray in my memory. I went in the same ship, a sailing vessel. Captain Mitchell of the Hornet was along; also the only passengers the Hornet had carried. These were two young gentlemen from Stamford, Connecticut—brothers: Samuel Ferguson, aged twenty-eight, a graduate of Trinity College, Hartford, and Henry Ferguson, aged eighteen, a student of the same college, and now at this present writing a professor there, a post which he has held for many years. He is fifty years old, this year—1898. Samuel had been wasting away with consumption for some years, and the long voyage around the Horn had been advised as offering a last hope for him. The Hornet was a clipper of the first class and a fast sailer; the young men’s quarters were roomy and comfortable, and were well stocked with books, and also with canned meats and fruits to help out the ship fare with; and when the ship cleared from New York harbor in the first week of January there was promise that she would make quick and pleasant work of the fourteen or fifteen thousand miles in front of her. As soon as the cold latitudes were left behind and the vessel entered summer weather, the voyage became a holiday picnic. The ship flew southward under a cloud of sail which needed no attention, no modifying or change of any kind for days together; the young men read, strolled the ample deck, rested and drowsed in the shade of the canvas, took their meals with the captain; and when the day was done they played dummy whist with him till bedtime. After the snow and ice and tempests of the Horn the ship bowled northward into summer weather again and the trip was a picnic once more.

  Until the early morning of the 3d of May. Computed position of the ship, 112° 10’ west longitude; latitude, two degrees above the equator; no wind, no sea—dead calm; temperature of the atmosphere, tropical, blistering, unimaginable by one who has not been roasted in it. There was a cry of fire. An unfaithful sailor had disobeyed the rules and gone into the booby-hatch with an open light, to draw some varnish from a cask. The proper result followed, and the vessel’s hours were numbered.

  There was not much time to spare, but the captain made the most of it. The three boats were launched—long-boat and two quarter-boats. That the time was very short and the hurry and excitement considerable is indicated by the fact that in launching the boats a hole was stove in the side of one of them by some sort of a collision, and an oar driven through the side of another. The captain’s first care was to have four sick sailors brought up and placed on deck out of harm’s way—among them a “Portyghee.” This man had not done a day’s work on the voyage, but had lain in his hammock four months nursing an abscess. When we were taking notes in the Honolulu hospital and a sailor told this to Mr. Burlingame, the third mate, who was lying near, raised his head with an effort, and in a weak voice made this correction—with solemnity and feeling—

  “Raising abscesses; he had a family of them. He done it to keep from standing his watch.”

  Any provisions that lay handy were gathered up by the men and the two passengers and brought and
dumped on the deck where the “Portyghee” lay, then they ran for more. The sailor who was telling this to Mr. Burlingame, added—

  “We pulled together thirty-two days’ rations for the thirty-one men that way.”

  The third mate lifted his head again and made another correction—with bitterness:

  “The Portyghee et twenty-two of them while he was soldiering there and nobody noticing. A damned hound.”

  The fire spread with great rapidity. The smoke and flame drove the men back, and they had to stop their incomplete work of fetching provisions, and take to the boats, with only ten days’ rations secured.

  Each boat had a compass, a quadrant, a copy of Bowditch’s Navigator, and a Nautical Almanac, and the captain’s and chief mate’s boats had chronometers. There were thirty-one men, all told. The captain took an account of stock, with the following result: four hams, nearly thirty pounds of salt pork, half-box of raisins, one hundred pounds of bread, twelve two-pound cans of oysters, clams, and assorted meats, a keg containing four pounds of butter, twelve gallons of water in a forty-gallon “scuttle-butt,” four one-gallon demijohns full of water, three bottles of brandy (the property of passengers), some pipes, matches, and a hundred pounds of tobacco. No medicines. Of course the whole party had to go on short rations at once.

  The captain and the two passengers kept diaries; on our voyage to San Francisco we ran into a calm in the middle of the Pacific and did not move a rod during fourteen days; this gave me a chance to copy the diaries. Samuel Ferguson’s is the fullest; I will draw upon it, now. When the following paragraph was written the ship was about one hundred and twenty days out from port, and all hands were putting in the lazy time about as usual, and no one was forecasting disaster:

  May 2. Latitude 1° 28’ N.; longitude 111° 38’ W. Another hot and sluggish day; at one time, however, the clouds promised wind, and there came a slight breeze—just enough to keep us going. The only thing to chronicle to-day is the quantities of fish about: nine bonitas were caught this forenoon, and some large albicores seen. After dinner the first mate hooked a fellow which he could not hold, so he let the line go to the captain, who was on the bow. He, holding on, brought the fish to with a jerk, and snap went the line, hook and all. We also saw astern, swimming lazily after us, an enormous shark, which must have been nine or ten feet long. We tried him with all sorts of lines and a piece of pork, but he declined to take hold. I suppose he had appeased his appetite on the heads and other remains of the bonitas we had thrown overboard.

  Next day’s entry records the disaster. The three boats got away, retired to a short distance, and stopped. The two injured ones were leaking badly; some of the men were kept busy bailing, others patched the holes as well as they could. The captain, the two passengers and eleven men were in the long-boat, with a share of the provisions and water, and with no room to spare, for the boat was only twenty-one feet long, six wide and three deep. The chief mate and eight men were in one of the smaller boats, the second mate and seven men in the other. The passengers had saved no clothing but what they had on, excepting their overcoats. The ship, clothed in flame and sending up a vast column of black smoke into the sky, made a grand picture in the solitudes of the sea, and hour after hour the outcasts sat and watched it. Meantime the captain ciphered on the immensity of the distance that stretched between him and the nearest available land, and then scaled the rations down to meet the emergency: half a biscuit for breakfast; one biscuit and some canned meat for dinner; half a biscuit for tea; a few swallows of water for each meal. And so hunger began to gnaw while the ship was still burning.

  May 4. The ship burned all night very brightly; and hopes are that some ship has seen the light, and is bearing down upon us. None seen, however, this forenoon; so we have determined to go together north and a little west to some islands in 18° to 19° N. latitude, and 114° to 115° W. longitude, hoping in the meantime to be picked up by some ship. The ship sank suddenly at about 5 A.M. We find the sun very hot and scorching; but all try to keep out of it as much as we can.

  They did a quite natural thing, now; waited several hours for that possible ship that might have seen the light to work her slow way to them through the nearly dead calm. Then they gave it up and set about their plans. If you will look at the map you will say that their course could be easily decided. Albemarle island (Galapagos group) lies straight eastward, nearly a thousand miles; the islands referred to in the diary indefinitely as “some islands” (Revillagigedo islands,) lie, as they think, in some widely uncertain region northward about one thousand miles and westward one hundred or one hundred and fifty miles; Acapulco on the Mexican coast lies about northeast something short of one thousand miles. You will say, random rocks in the ocean are not what is wanted; let them strike for Acapulco and the solid continent. That does look like the rational course, but one presently guesses from the diaries that the thing would have been wholly irrational—indeed, suicidal. If the boats struck for Albemarle, they would be in the “doldrums” all the way—and that means a watery perdition, with winds which are wholly crazy, and blow from all points of the compass at once and also perpendicularly. If the boats tried for Acapulco they would get out of the “doldrums” when half way there—in case they ever got halfway—and then they would be in lamentable case, for there they would meet the northeast trades coming down in their teeth; and these boats were so rigged that they could not sail within eight points of the wind. So they wisely started northward, with a slight slant to the west. They had but ten days’ short allowance of food; the long-boat was towing the others; they could not depend on making any sort of definite progress in the doldrums, and they had four or five hundred miles of doldrums in front of them, yet. They are the real equator, a tossing, roaring, rainy belt ten or twelve hundred miles broad which girdles the globe.

  It rained hard the first night and all got drenched, but they filled up their water-butt. The brothers were in the stern with the captain, who steered. The quarters were cramped; no one got much sleep. “Kept on our course till squalls headed us off.”

  Stormy and squally the next morning, with drenching rains. A heavy and dangerous “cobbling” sea. One marvels how such boats could live in it. It is called a feat of desperate daring when one man and a dog cross the Atlantic in a boat the size of a long-boat, and indeed it is; but this long-boat was overloaded with men and other plunder, and was only three feet deep. “We naturally thought often of all at home, and were glad to remember that it was Sacrament Sunday, and that prayers would go up from our friends for us, although they know not our peril.”

  The captain got not even a cat-nap during the first three days and nights, but he got a few winks of sleep the fourth night. “The worst sea yet.” About ten at night the captain changed his course and headed east-northeast, hoping to make “Clipperton Rock.” If he failed, no matter, he would be in a better position to make those other islands. I will mention, here, that he did not find that Rock.

  On the 8th of May no wind all day—sun blistering hot. They take to the oars. Plenty of dolphins, but they couldn’t catch any. “I think we are all beginning to realize more and more the awful situation we are in.” “It often takes a ship a week to get through the doldrums—how much longer, then, such a craft as ours.” “We are so crowded that we cannot stretch ourselves out for a good sleep, but have to take it any way we can get it.”

  Of course this feature will grow more and more trying, but it will be human nature to cease to set it down; there will be five weeks of it, yet—we must try to remember that for the diarist, it will make our beds the softer.

  The 9th of May the sun gives him a warning: “looking with both eyes, the horizon crossed thus X.” “Henry keeps well, but broods over our troubles more than I wish he did.” They caught two dolphins—they tasted well. “The captain believed the compass out of the way, but the long-invisible North Star came out—a welcome sight—and indorsed the compass.”

  May 10, latitude 7° 0’ 3” N.; longitu
de 111° 32’ W. So they have made about three hundred miles of northing in the six days since they left the region of the lost ship. “Drifting in calms all day.” And baking hot, of course; I have been down there, and I remember that detail. “Even as the captain says, all romance has long since vanished, and I think the most of us are beginning to look the fact of our awful situation full in the face.” “We are making but little headway on our course.” Bad news from the rearmost boat; the men are improvident; “they have eaten up all of the canned meats brought from the ship, and are now growing discontented.” Not so with the chief mate’s people—they are evidently under the eye of a man.

  Under date of May 11: “Standing still! or worse; we lost more last night than we made yesterday.” In fact, they have lost three miles of the three hundred of northing they had so laboriously made. “The cock that was rescued and pitched into the boat while the ship was on fire still lives, and crows with the breaking of dawn, cheering us a good deal.” What has he been living on for a week? Did the starving men feed him from their dire poverty? “The second mate’s boat out of water again, showing that they overdrink their allowance. The captain spoke pretty sharply to them.” It is true; I have the remark in my old note-book; I got it of the third mate, in the hospital at Honolulu. But there is not room for it here, and it is too combustible, anyway. Besides, the third mate admired it, and what he admired he was likely to enhance.

  They were still watching hopefully for ships. The captain was a thoughtful man, and probably did not disclose to them that that was substantially a waste of time. “In this latitude the horizon is filled with little upright clouds that look very much like ships.” Mr. Ferguson saved three bottles of brandy from his private stores when he left the ship, and the liquor came good in these days. “The captain serves out two tablespoonsful of brandy and water—half and half—to our crew.” He means the watch that is on duty; they stood regular watches—four hours on and four off. The chief mate was an excellent officer,—a self-possessed, resolute, fine all-around man. The diarist makes the following note—there is character in it: “I offered one bottle of the brandy to the chief mate, but he declined, saying he could keep the after-boat quiet, and we had not enough for all.”