He had himself served, he declares, as “a missionary to the Sandwich Islands, and I have got the hang of that sort of thing to a fraction.” As editor, he would replace sentimental tales, wit, humor, and elevated literature with morality, just what he believes is really called for.24 If Clemens was now ambitious, ready to undertake the social climbing Burlingame had urged, he was not yet willing to stifle his irreverence. He now added to the cluster of Mark Twain’s attributes the pretense of being, sometimes, a moralist.
For five and a half eventful years, Clemens had not been home to Missouri. Tired of the West, he contracted with the San Francisco Alta California to supply a weekly letter “on such subjects and from such places as will best suit him,” during a trip that would, according to the expectations of the Alta proprietors, take Clemens to Europe, India, China, Japan, and back to San Francisco.24 He left for New York on December 15, 1866. The Alta published his farewell the day before his departure. He declared that he was leaving San Francisco “for a season… to go back to that common home we all tenderly remember in our waking hours and fondly visit in dreams of the night—a home that is familiar to my recollections but will be an unknown land to my unaccustomed eyes.”25 He wrote to his family that he was “leaving more friends behind … than any newspaperman that ever sailed out of the Golden Gate.”
In the next eight months, twenty-six letters signed “Mark Twain” appeared in the Alta. Although he did nothing more with them, they were collected in 1940 into a book aptly titled Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown, since the traveler is accompanied, at least in the early pages, by his vulgar companion. Not as well known as the Hawaiian letters and probably not taken as seriously by their author (who was not now traveling in order to write for a newspaper), these letters are nonetheless attractive and significant in the growth of the writer. Through them one follows Clemens on his trip from San Francisco to Nicaragua, across the isthmus, then up to Key West and on to New York. On the first leg of the journey he met Captain Edgar Wakeman, who was to appear again and again in Mark Twain’s works, including Roughing It, where he is Captain Ned Blakely, and in “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” which the writer began in 1868 but did not publish until the end of his life. In his Alta letters he had a good deal to say about Wakeman, but the more hearty comment, though incomplete, is in his notebook: “I had rather travel with that portly, hearty, jolly, boisterous, good-natured old sailor, Capt Ned Wakeman than with any other man I ever came across. He never drinks, & never plays cards; he never swears, except in the privacy of his own quarters, with a friend or so, & then his feats of blasphemy are calculated to fill the hearer with awe & admiration. His yarns—” Here he broke off.26
Later, long after he found it difficult, if not impossible, to call up his early literary personality, Mark Twain was able to return to the spirit of his earlier self by the use of a vernacular narrator, and a favorite was Captain Wakeman. In one of his Alta letters, Mark Twain lets Wakeman tell tall tales of rats. Here Wakeman tells how rats saved his life by indicating that a ship was not safe.
We were going home passengers from the Sandwich Islands in a brannew brig, on her third voyage, and our trunks were below—he [his friend Josephus] went with me—laid over one vessel to do it—because he warn’t no sailor, and he liked to be conveyed by a man that was—felt safer, you understand—and the brig was sliding out between the buoys, and her headline was paying out ashore—there was a woodpile right where it was made fast on the pier—when up come the biggest rat—as big as an ordinary cat, he was, and darted out on that line and cantered for the shore! and up come another! and another! and another! and away they galloped over the hawser, each one treading on t’other’s tail, till they were so thick you couldn’t see a thread of cable, and there was a procession of ’em three hundred yards long over the levee like a streak of pismires, and the Kanakas [Hawaiians], some throwing sticks from that woodpile and chunks of lava and coral at ’em and knocking ’em endways every shot—but do you suppose it made any difference to them rats?—not a particle—not a particle on earth, bless you!—they’d smelt trouble!—they’d smelt it by their unearthly, supernatural instinct!—they wanted to go, and they never let up till the last rat was ashore out of that brannew beautiful brig.27
Wakeman and his friend wisely followed the rats’ example and thereby saved their lives; the ship was never seen again. In the Alta letters he is alternately Wakeman and Waxman, though Mark Twain insisted that all the names he used were fictitious.
The trip to New York was by way of Nicaragua, which took two days to cross on “horseback, muleback, and four-mules ambulances,” with Clemens traveling by ambulance or “mud wagons.”28 On board the ship that then took them from Nicaragua, cholera broke out among the steerage passengers and soon spread. There were several deaths. Many passengers left the ship when it landed at Key West. On January 12, 1867, the ship reached New York.
What he would do next was not clear to the journalist. Three days after he arrived in New York, Clemens wrote to E. P. Hingston, who had been Artemus Ward’s manager, to report that he was planning a lecture tour but needed Hingston to manage him. He wrote to Orion’s wife from New York in February that he had been made good offers by newspapermen, and he arranged for the New York Weekly Review to publish five of his Sandwich Island letters. By early March he had discovered that “Prominent Brooklynites are getting up a great European pleasure excursion for the coming summer” (p. 111), as he explained to his California readers. His account describes at length how he and a fellow journalist had visited the chief officer of the excursion, with his friend entertaining himself by introducing the Rev. Mark Twain of San Francisco. Playing along, Clemens explained, “I have latterly been in the missionary business.” Clemens’s friend elaborated on the joke and arranged for him to preach on the vessel while at sea. The next day Clemens went back to book passage for himself and reveal his true identity. The cruise was intended to have a strong religious orientation, with a visit to the Holy Land as a feature. When the letter describing all this appeared in the Alta, readers were notified by the editor that Mark Twain’s plans had been authorized by his employers. He would leave for Europe in June.
In the interim, in March, Clemens went on to Missouri, where he lectured in St. Louis on the Sandwich Islands and published a series of funny pieces on “Female Suffrage”29 and then went on to Hannibal, where he also lectured.30 His visit to his hometown caused him to recall Jimmy Finn and the excitement he brought to Hannibal. Finn was to be portrayed as Huck’s “pap.” How close to fact the portrait of the town drunkard is in the novel may be suggested by this 1867 account of Finn’s reformation and its aftermath.
Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, reformed, and that broke up the only saloon in the village. But the temperance people liked it; they were willing enough to sacrifice public prosperity to public morality. And so they made much of Jimmy Finn—dressed him up in new clothes, and had him out to breakfast and to dinner, and so forth, and showed him off as a great living curiosity—a shining example of the power of temperance doctrines when earnestly and eloquently set forth. Which was all very well, you know, and sounded well, and looked well in print but Jimmy Finn couldn’t stand it. He got remorseful about the loss of his liberty; and then he got melancholy from thinking about it so much; and after that, he got drunk. He got awfully drunk in the chief citizen’s house, and the next morning that house was as if the swine had tarried in it. (p. 214)
Perhaps because of this Hannibal visit Mark Twain soon wrote up another anecdote from his boyhood memories. A request for a contribution to the New York Sunday Mercury resulted in “Jim Wolf and the Tom-Cats.” While he had some references to boyhood memories in the Alta and elsewhere, notably his experience as a “Cadet of Temperance,” this is the first extended piece on the subject. The hero, or victim, is Sam’s bashful friend Jim, some sixteen years of age, whose efforts one winter night to chase away noisy cats that had awakened him from his sleep leads him on to an icy roof in nothing but his short shirt. He slips and ends up in the midst of a group of girls having a candy pull. The story purports to be,
