Twain - The innocents abroad, or, The new pilgrims progress: being some account of the steamship Quaker Citys pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land, with descriptions of countries, nations,

Table of Contents

TO
MY MOST PATIENT READER
AND
MOST CHARITABLE CRITIC,
MY AGED MOTHER,
THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY
INSCRIBED.

MARK TWAIN

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri; his family moved to the port town of Hannibal four years later. His father, an unsuccessful farmer, died when Twain was eleven. Soon afterward the boy began working as an apprentice printer, and by age sixteen he was writing newspaper sketches. He left Hannibal at eighteen to work as an itinerant printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. From 1857 to 1861 he worked on Mississippi steamboats, advancing from cub pilot to licensed pilot.

After river shipping was interrupted by the Civil War, Twain headed west with his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the Nevada Territory. Settling in Carson City, he tried his luck at prospecting and wrote humorous pieces for a range of newspapers. Around this time he first began using the pseudonym Mark Twain, derived from a riverboat term. Relocating to San Francisco, he became a regular newspaper correspondent and a contributor to the literary magazine Golden Era. He made a five-month journey to Hawaii in 1866 and the following year traveled to Europe to report on the first organized tourist cruise. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and OtherSketches (1867) consolidated his growing reputation as humorist and lecturer.

After his marriage to Livy Langdon, Twain settled first in Buffalo, New York, and then for two decades in Hartford, Connecticut. His European sketches were expanded into The Innocents Abroad (1869), followed by Roughing It (1872), an account of his Western adventures; both were enormously successful. Twains literary triumphs were offset by often ill-advised business dealings (he sank thousands of dollars, for instance, in a failed attempt to develop a new kind of typesetting machine, and thousands more into his own ultimately unsuccessful publishing house) and unrestrained spending that left him in frequent financial difficulty, a pattern that was to persist throughout his life.

Following The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, Twain began a literary exploration of his childhood memories of the Mississippi, resulting in a trio of masterpieces TheAdventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and finally Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), on which he had been working for nearly a decade. Another vein, of historical romance, found expression in The Prince and the Pauper (1882), the satirical A Connecticut Yankee inKing Arthurs Court (1889), and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), while he continued to draw on his travel experiences in A Tramp Abroad (1880) and Following the Equator (1897). His close associates in these years included William Dean Howells, Bret Harte, and George Washington Cable, as well as the dying Ulysses S. Grant, whom Twain encouraged to complete his memoirs, published by Twains publishing company in 1885.

For most of the 1890s Twain lived in Europe, as his life took a darker turn with the death of his daughter Susy in 1896 and the worsening illness of his daughter Jean. The tone of Twains writing also turned progressively more bitter. The Tragedy of Puddnhead Wilson (1894), a detective story hinging on the consequences of slavery, was followed by powerful anti-imperialist and anticolonial statements such as To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901), The War Prayer (1905), and King Leopolds Soliloquy (1905), and by the pessimistic sketches collected in the privately published What Is Man? (1906). The unfinished novel The Mysterious Stranger was perhaps the most uncompromisingly dark of all Twains later works. In his last years, his financial troubles finally resolved, Twain settled near Redding, Connecticut, and died in his mansion, Stormfield, on April 21, 1910.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

This edition of The Innocents Abroad reprints the text of the first American edition, distributed by the American Publishing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1869.

PREFACE

This book is a record of a pleasure-trip. If it were a record of a solemn scientific expedition, it would have about it that gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of that kind, and withal so attractive. Yet notwithstanding it is only a record of a pic-nic, it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who travelled in those countries before him. I make small pretence of showing any one how he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the seaother books do that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there is no need.

I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of travel-writing that may be charged against mefor I think I have seen with impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at least honestly, whether wisely or not.

In this volume I have used portions of letters which I wrote for the Daily Alta California, of San Francisco, the proprietors of that journal having waived their rights and given me the necessary permission. I have also inserted portions of several letters written for the New York Tribune and the New York Herald.

THE AUTHOR.
SAN FRANCISCO, 1869.

INTRODUCTION

Jane Jacobs

Each season the fat travel sections of Americas weekend newspapers carry tidings of additions to the great procession of pleasure and educational voyages available to those hankering for sights at the ends of the earth: tours visiting flocks of Antarctic emperor penguins; voyages offering close-up views of glaciers and calving icebergs in Bristol Bay, Alaska; eco-trips through teeming jungle treetop canopies in Central America or Borneo; leisurely journeys through the Panama Canal complete with historical lectures on the Spanish Empire, Magellans and Drakes global circumnavigations and other exploratory voyages, the engineering of the canal locks, and the conquest of yellow fever.

Attention, travel agents and prospective passengers: the lead vessel in this ever-growing procession was the Quaker City, a commodious side-wheel steamer with auxiliary sails that in 1867 put out from New York for a five-month pleasure pilgrimage of Mediterranean Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Among the seventy adult passengers was thirty-two-year-old Mark Twain, who had persuaded a San Francisco newspaper, the Daily AltaCalifornia, to name him special traveling correspondent and to pay his passage of $1,250, in return for weekly reports on this innovative voyage.

From every point of view, the cost was a fruitful investment. The passage fee paid for visits by Twain to the Azores, Gibraltar, Tangier, Marseille, Paris, Genoa, Milan, Padua, Verona, Bellagio and Lake Como, Venice, Florence, Pisa, the Papal States, Rome, Naples, Pompei, Athens, Constantinople, Sevastopol, Odessa, Yalta, Smyrna, the ruins of Ephesus, Beirut, the full length of Palestine, Damascus, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Seville, Cordoba, Cadiz, rural Andalusia, Bermuda, and many points between.