Mark Twain surfed the waves in Hawaii in 1866. More accurately, the waves surfed him.
Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands, was the latest travel destination for the elite and The California Steam Navigation Company was advertising its popular new route. Twain smelled an opportunity to broaden his horizons.
Born Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), he adopted the pen name Mark Twain in 1863. Having worked in the newspaper industry from the age of 12, he had grown bored with the drudgery of reporting ‘just the facts’. In 1865 (the year the Civil War ended) he won national fame as a literary writer with his short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”.
Capitalizing on his growing popularity, he finagled an assignment as special correspondent to the Sacramento Union. His deal was to write travel letters from the islands for $20 a piece.
Initially planned for one month, he stayed four. He wrote 25 dispatches that were published serially in the newspaper throughout that year. They ranged from humorous stories with a fictional sidekick named Mr. Brown to serious pieces about politics and industries developing on the islands. They were later compiled and published in a volume entitled “Letters From Hawaii”.
Topics included his visit to an erupting volcano, climbing Diamond Head, observing customs including natives swimming naked, and of course, there was the day Twain surfed and failed to hang ten.
Following: Eight top takeaways from Twain’s Months in Hawaii.
Hawaii Catapulted His Literary Career
If Twain was frustrated and bored with his work as a reporter, Hawaii was the cure.
According to Mark Twain Studies (MTS) the dispatches he sent to his home base “represent a watershed” in his career by amplifying his reputation as both a reporter and a humorous ‘yarn spinner’ of comic tales.
Twain’s letters were reprinted in newspapers across America, amplifying his reputation as a brilliant humorist.
“The comic phrasing and description, raillery, and lampooning that Clemens employs throughout the letters from the Kingdom of Hawai‘i spotlight the sharp-tongued aspect of Mark Twain already known from his writings while working in Nevada and California.“(MTS)
Read his letters from Hawaii (including the day Twain Surfed) here.
This Clever Literary Device Gave Him Humorous Leeway
The device he employs in the Hawaii Letters is a comic sidekick, Mr. Brown, who both playful and irreverent. In contrast, Twain is a civilized gentleman who continually scolds and corrects Brown for his impertinent, off-beat behavior. While Brown isn’t present on every outing, such as the time Twain surfed, he plays a significant role in the collection of stories.
“The comic scenes Clemens invents for Mark Twain and Mr. Brown contribute the most to enlivening the letters and to creating a reading experience markedly different from standard travel letters.” (MTS)
While many of the letters were humorous, Twain also wrote serious pieces about whaling, sugar industries and trade between the United States and then Kingdom of Hawaii.
Hawaiian Waves Refused To Cooperate With Twain’s Board
It happened on his visit to the Kona Coast on the Big Island of Hawaii. Some time after observing Hawaiian natives gracefully ride the waves to shore, Twain surfed but was unable to become one with the waves.
“In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf- bathing. Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell!
It did not seem that a lightning express-train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed.
I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me. None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.” (Roughing It)
Kilauea Stoked Twain’s Fire
On the Big Island where Twain surfed, he also took the long, rough ride by horseback to observe Kīlauea, a volcano that was in a prolonged period of activity. Kīlauea had erupted 61 times since 1823. He was initially disappointed by the wide, level, black plain that he described as a “a large cellar – nothing more”.
But according to the National Park Service (NPS) he changed his tone later that night when he ventured to an observation point overlooking the caldera. “The summit of Kīlauea consistently featured a lava lake during the period from 1790 to 1924.” (NPS)
Twain wrote:
“The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky”
“…the fiercest jagged lightning. These streams met other streams, and they mingled with and crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction, like skate tracks on a popular skating ground. Sometimes streams twenty or thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing – and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down small, steep hills and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their source but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with alternate lines of black and gold.”
The sounds of the volcano intrigued him as well as the sights.
“The lava lake engaged Twain’s other senses as well. “The noise made by the bubbling lava is not great, heard as we heard it from our lofty perch. It makes three distinct sounds – a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or puffing sound; and if you stand on the brink and close your eyes it is no trick at all to imagine that you are sweeping down a river on a large low pressure steamer, and that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing from her escape pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft her wheels. The smell of sulfur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.”
Witnessing volcanic eruptions became an obsession for visitors throughout the 1800s and for the Volcano School Painters in the late n1800s.
His Cultural Observations Reflected The Times
Twain’s cultural observations are a decidedly 19th-century notion of correctness. That said, Twain was known for insulting everyone equally and he was relatively enlightened for his time. Years later, American newspapers called Princess Kaiulani and her people barbarians.
Clemens joked about the United State annexing the islands because “some folks in the American community in 1866 were agitating for that outcome of securing a reciprocity treaty for sugar.”
In the lecture tours that followed his return from Hawaii, Twain elaborated his ironic satire about the advantages of becoming part of the United States. In the 1869-70 version:
“When these islands were discovered, the population was about 400,000, but the white man came and brought various complicated diseases, and education, and civilization, and all sorts of calamities, and consequently the population began to drop off with commendable activity. Forty years ago, they were reduced to 200,000, and the educational and civilizing facilities being increased they dwindled down to 55,000, and it is proposed to send a few more missionaries and finish them. It isn’t the education or civilization that has settled them; it is the imported diseases, and they have all got the consumption and other reliable distempers, and to speak figuratively, they are retiring from business pretty fast. When they pick up and leave, we will take possession as lawful heirs.”
Hawaii Also Gave Twain A Big Scoop
On May 3, 1866, the San Francisco- bound USS Hornet sank off the coast of South America. On June 15, after 43 days in a lifeboat,15 of its survivors washed ashore on the Big Island.
After a particularly difficult trek, Twain was in bed, recovering when eleven of the Hornet’s sailors arrived at the Honolulu hospital. As the story goes, he arranged to be carried there on a stretcher. He interviewed the men, collecting gut wrenching details about the ordeal. The Union published Twain’s account in July of 1866.
With pieces ranging in tone from the tale of the day Twain surfed to his business and political essays, he had made his mark both as a humorist, a serious reporter and a brilliant dramatist.
Hawaiian Adventures Offered Twain A New Direction
Upon his return from the islands, Twain launched a speaking tour throughout California.
In his post for the Library of Congress (LOC) Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, writes that Twain was awkward, but soon found his footing.
“His early take on the subject established his comical recounting of the values and the vices of the islanders. He closed his early programs with an apology for subjecting the audience to his talk, explaining that he needed the money.” (LOC)
According to one critic, Twain’s “method as a lecturer was distinctly unique and novel. His slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his visage, the apparently painful effort with which he framed his sentences ….”
The first tour was so successful that it catapulted him into a new level. In February 1873 he appeared at Steinway Hall, the same venue where he attended Charles Dicken’s American lectures while in New York. (LOC)
A New York Times reviewer wrote that Twain “kept the audience convulsed with laughter…. His attitudes, gestures, and looks, even his very silence were provocative of mirth.”
His handbill for New York lecture, Twain supplied the poster’s fictional editorial comments included “The most stupid lecture we ever heard” and “Twain is the homeliest man living.”
There was no mention of the day Twain surfed but lost to the waves of Hawaii.
Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland Followed Twain’s Lead
On November 14. 1889, Nellie Bly set out on an eastward course for the Joseph Pulitizer’s New York World. Her goal was to beat Jules Verne’s fictional record set in his book, Around the World in Eighty Days. Hours later, Elizabeth Bisland set out on a westward course for the Cosmopolitan Magazine to beat both Verne and Bly.
Both reporters wrote dispatches for their respective publications. Bly later published her book Around the World in Seventy-two Days.
Bisland published hers under the title In Seven Stages: A Flying Trip Around the World.
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