Autobiography of Mark Twain (34 page)

Sunday, June 10
. Latitude 18° 40’ longitude 142° 34’. A pretty good night last night, with some wettings, and again another beautiful Sunday. I cannot but think how we should all enjoy it at home, and what a contrast is here! How terrible their suspense must begin to be! God grant it may be relieved before very long, and He certainly seems to be with us in everything we do, and has preserved this boat miraculously; for since we left the ship we have sailed considerably over three thousand miles, which, taking into consideration our meagre stock of provisions, is almost unprecedented. As yet I do not feel the stint of food so much as I do that of water. Even Henry, who is naturally a great water-drinker, can save half of his allowance from time to time, when I cannot. My diseased throat may have something to do with that, however.

Nothing is now left which by any flattery can be called food. But they must manage somehow for five days more, for at noon they have still eight hundred miles to go. It is a race for life, now.

This is no time for comments, or other interruptions from me—every moment is valuable. I will take up the boy-brother’s diary, and clear the seas before it and let it fly.

HENRY FERGUSON’S LOG.

Sunday, June 10
. Our ham-bone has given us a taste of food to-day, and we have got left a little meat and the remainder of the bone for to-morrow. Certainly never was there such a sweet knuckle-bone, or one which was so thoroughly appreciated. * * * I do not know that I feel any worse than I did last Sunday, notwithstanding the reduction of diet; and I trust that we may all have strength given us to sustain the sufferings and hardships of the coming week. We estimate that we are within seven hundred miles of the Sandwich Islands, and that our average, daily, is somewhat over a hundred miles, so that our hopes have some foundation in reason. Heaven send we may all live to see land!

June 11
. Ate the meat and rind of our ham-bone, and have the bone and the greasy cloth from around the ham left to eat to-morrow. God send us birds or fish, and let us not perish of hunger, or be brought to the dreadful alternative of feeding on human flesh! As I feel now, I do not think anything could persuade me; but you cannot tell what you will do when you are reduced by hunger and your mind wandering. I hope and pray we can make out to reach the Islands before we get to this strait; but we have one or two desperate men aboard, though they are quiet enough now.
It is my firm trust and belief that we are going to be saved
.

All
food gone.—
Captain’s Log
^*
.

June 12
. Stiffbreeze, and we are fairly flying—dead ahead of it—and toward the Islands. Good hopes, but the prospects of hunger are awful. Ate ham-bone to-day. It is the captain’s birthday—he is fifty-four years old.

June 13
. The ham-rags are not quite all gone yet, and the boot-legs, we find, are very palatable after we get the salt out of them. A little smoke, I think, does some little good; but I don’t know.

June 14
. Hunger does not pain us much, but we are dreadfully weak. Our water is getting frightfully low. God grant we may see land soon!
Nothing to eat
—but feel better than I did yesterday. Toward evening saw a magnificent rainbow—
the first we had seen
. Captain said, “Cheer up, boys, it’s a prophecy!—
it’s the bow of promise!”

June 15
. God be forever praised for His infinite mercy!
Land in sight!
Rapidly neared it and soon were
sure
of it..... Two noble Kanakas swam out and took the boat ashore. We were joyfully received by two white men—Mr. Jones and his steward Charley—and a crowd of native men, women and children. They treated us splendidly—aided us, and carried us up the bank, and brought us water, poi, bananas and green cocoanuts; but the white men took care of us and prevented those who would have eaten too much from doing so. Everybody overjoyed to see us, and all sympathy expressed in faces, deeds and words. We were then helped up to the house; and help we needed. Mr. Jones and Charley are the only white men here. Treated us splendidly. Gave us first about a teaspoonful of spirits in water, and then to each a cup of warm tea with a little bread. Takes
every
care of us. Gave us later another cup of tea—and bread the same—and then let us go to rest.
It is the happiest day of my life
..... God in His mercy has heard our prayer..... Everybody is so kind. Words cannot tell—

June 16
. Mr. Jones gave us a delightful bed, and we surely had a good night’s rest—but not sleep—we were too happy to sleep; would keep the reality and not let it turn to a delusion—dreaded that we might wake up and find ourselves in the boat again.....

It is an amazing adventure. There is nothing of its sort in history that surpasses it in impossibilities made possible. In one extraordinary detail—the survival of
every person
in the boat—it probably stands alone in the history of adventures of its kind. Usually merely a part of a boat’s company survive—officers, mainly, and other educated and tenderly reared men, unused to hardship and heavy labor—the untrained, roughly-reared hard workers succumb. But in this case even the rudest and roughest stood the privations and miseries of the voyage almost as well as did the college-bred young brothers and the captain. I mean, physically. The minds of most of the sailors broke down in the fourth week and went to temporary ruin, but physically the endurance exhibited was astonishing. Those men did not survive by any merit of their own, of course, but by merit of the character and intelligence of the captain—they lived by the mastery of his spirit. Without him they would have been children without a nurse; they would have exhausted their provisions in a week, and their pluck would not have lasted even as long as the provisions.

The boat came near to being wrecked, at the last. As it approached the shore the sail was let go, and came down with a run; then the captain saw that he was drifting swiftly toward an ugly reef, and an effort was made to hoist the sail again, but it could not be done, the men’s strength was wholly exhausted; they could not even pull an oar. They were helpless, and death imminent. It was then that they were discovered by the two Kanakas who achieved the rescue. They swam out and manned the boat and piloted her through a narrow and hardly noticeable break in the reef—the only break in it in a stretch of thirty-five miles! The spot where the landing was made was the only one in that stretch where footing could have been found on the shore—everywhere else precipices came sheer down into forty fathoms of water. Also, in all that stretch this was the only spot where anybody lived.

Within ten days after the landing all the men but one were up and creeping about. Properly, they ought to have killed themselves with the “food” of the last few days—some of them, at any rate—men who had freighted their stomachs with strips of leather from old boots and with chips from the butter-cask, a freightage which they did not get rid of by digestion, but by other means. The captain and the two passengers did not eat strips and chips as the sailors did, but
scraped
the boot-leather and the wood and made a pulp of the scrapings by moistening them with water. The third mate told me that the boots were old, and full of holes; then added, thoughtfully, “but the holes digested the best.” Speaking of digestion, here is a remarkable thing, and worth noting: during this strange voyage, and for a while afterward on shore, the bowels of some of the men virtually ceased from their functions; in some cases there was no action for twenty and thirty days, and in one case for forty-four! Sleeping, also, came to be rare. Yet the men did very well without it. During many days the captain did not sleep at all—twenty-one, I think, on one stretch.

When the landing was made, all the men were successfully protected from overeating except the “Portyghee;” he escaped the watch and ate an incredible number of bananas; a hundred
and fifty-two, the third mate said, but this was undoubtedly an exaggeration; I think it was a hundred and fifty-one. He was already nearly full of leather—it was hanging out of his ears. (I do not state this on the third mate’s authority, for we have seen what sort of a person he was; I state it on my own.) The Portyghee ought to have died, of course, and even now it seems a pity that he didn’t; but he got well, and as early as any of them; and all full of leather, too, the way he was, and butter-timber and handkerchiefs and bananas. Some of the men did eat handkerchiefs, in those last days, also socks; and he was one of them.

It is to the credit of the men that they did not kill the rooster that crowed so gallantly, mornings. He lived eighteen days, and then stood up and stretched his neck and made a brave weak effort to do his duty once more, and died in the act. It is a picturesque detail; and so is that rainbow, too—the only one seen in the forty-three days—raising its triumphal arch in the skies for the sturdy fighters to sail under to victory and rescue.

With ten days’ provisions Captain Josiah Mitchell performed this memorable voyage of forty-three days and eight hours in an open boat, sailing four thousand miles in reality and thirty-three hundred and sixty by direct courses, and brought every man safe to land. A bright, simple-hearted, unassuming, plucky, and most companionable man. I walked the deck with him twenty-eight days—when I was not copying diaries—and I remember him with reverent honor. If he is alive he is eighty-six years old, now.

If I remember rightly, Samuel Ferguson died soon after we reached San Francisco. I do not think he lived to see his home again; his disease had doubtless doomed him when he left it.

For a time it was hoped that the two quarter-boats would presently be heard of, but this hope suffered disappointment. They went down with all on board, no doubt. Not even that knightly chief mate spared.

The authors of the diaries wanted to smooth them up a little before allowing me to copy them, but there was no occasion for that, and I persuaded them out of it. These diaries are finely modest and unaffected; and with unconscious and unintentional art they rise toward the climax with graduated and gathering force and swing and dramatic intensity, they sweep you along with a cumulative rush, and when the cry rings out at last, “Land in sight!” your heart is in your mouth and for a moment you think it is yourself that have been saved. The last two paragraphs are not improvable by anybody’s art; they are literary gold; and their very pauses and uncompleted sentences have in them an eloquence not reachable by any words.

The interest of this story is unquenchable; it is of the sort that time cannot decay. I have not looked at the diaries for thirty-two years, but I find that they have lost nothing in that time. Lost?—they have gained; for by some subtle law all tragic human experiences gain in pathos by the perspective of time. We realize this when in Naples we stand musing over the poor Pompeian mother, lost in the historic storm of volcanic ashes eighteen centuries ago, who lies with her child gripped close to her breast, trying to save it, and whose despair and grief have been preserved for us by the fiery envelop which took her life but eternalized her form and features. She moves us, she haunts us, she stays in our thoughts for many days, we do not know why, for she is nothing to us, she has been nothing to any one for eighteen centuries; whereas of the like case to-day we should say “poor thing, it is pitiful,” and forget it in an hour.

Vienna, October, 1898.

Mark Twain

The manuscripts for these next three pieces (“Horace Greeley,” “Lecture-Times,” and “Ralph Keeler”) are all in the Mark Twain Papers. Clemens wrote all three in Vienna at about the same time, either in late 1898 or (more likely) in early 1899. He had apparently abandoned (at least briefly) the autobiography as he had originally conceived it in favor of a “portrait gallery of contemporaries,” as he told one interviewer in May 1899: “A man cannot tell the whole truth about himself, even if convinced that what he wrote would never be seen by others.... For that reason I confine myself to drawing the portraits of others” (“Mark Twain’s Bequest,” datelined “Vienna, May 22,” London
Times
, 23 May 1899, 4, in Scharnhorst 2006, 333–34).

Although Clemens here placed the encounter with Greeley in 1871, it almost certainly occurred slightly earlier, sometime between 12 and 17 December 1870, while Clemens was on a week-long trip to New York (
RI 1993
, 825 n. 78). He told a nearly identical version of the story in 1905 (3 Oct 1905 to the Editor of
Harper’s Weekly
, RPB-JH, published in SLC 1905e). Paine did not include this anecdote in his edition of the autobiography, but a brief typescript of it prepared for him suggests that he very likely considered doing so. He had already quoted still another version of the story in his 1912 biography (
MTB
, 1:472). Neider likewise omitted it, but Bernard DeVoto published it in the “Miscellany” section of
Mark Twain in Eruption
, which he said was “composed of fragments lifted from contexts that did not seem to me interesting enough to be run in their entirety” (
MTE
, xii–xiii, 347–48).