St. Mark on the Islands

MARK TWAIN AND HAWAII (519 pp.)--Walter Francis Frear--Philip Duschnes ($10).

About noon one March Sunday in 1866, a bushy-haired newspaperman stepped ashore at Honolulu from the steamship Ajax. He had recently been fired from the San Francisco Morning Call for "unsatisfactoriness." Now he was in Hawaii to write a series of articles on the islands for the Sacramento Union at $20 an article. He was 30, unknown by his right name (Samuel Clemens) or the name he used on his dispatches (Mark Twain), and his arrival excited no comment.

Mark Twain spent four months and a day in Hawaii. Dressed in a ridiculous linen duster that reached nearly to the ground, he roamed the islands on horseback until saddle boils laid him low. The former Mississippi riverboat pilot admitted that he was "one of the poorest horsemen in the world," once asked an island landlord for "an excessively gentle horse--a horse with no spirit whatever--a lame one, if he had such a thing." Where a horse found the going tough, Mark rode a mule, went from island to island by boat, and sent back to his paper 25 "letters" that touched on everything from the hula-hula to island politics.

Ham Sandwiches. Much of the humor in his "letters" is hard to take, even with the Mark Twain name on it (sample: "The Sandwich Islanders always squat on their hams and who knows but they may be the old original 'ham sandwiches.' "). But even so there were already traces of the talent that led Rudyard Kipling to call Mark Twain "beyond question the largest man of his time, both in the direct outcome of his work and ... in his indirect influence as a protesting force in an age of iron philistinism."

Of the Hawaiian Legislative Assembly Mark Twain wrote: "This Legislature is like all other Legislatures. A woodenhead gets up and proposes an utterly absurd something or other, and he and half a dozen other wooden-heads discuss it with windy vehemence for an hour. . . . Now on one occasion a Kanaka member . . . got up and gravely gave notice of a bill to authorize the construction of a suspension bridge from Oahu to Hawaii, a matter of a hundred and fifty miles! ... Do not do an unjust thing now, and imagine Kanaka Legislatures do stupider things than other similar bodies. Rather blush to remember that once, when a Wisconsin Legislature had the affixing of a penalty for the crime of arson under consideration, a member got up and seriously suggested that when a man committed the damning crime of arson they ought either to hang him or make him marry the girl!"

Vile Tobacco. This book on Mark Twain in Hawaii (which puts his Sandwich Islands letters in a single volume for the first time) is an uncritical labor of love by 84-year-old Walter Francis Frear, who was chief justice of the Hawaiian Supreme Court from 1893 to 1907, and governor of the territory for three successive terms. Author Frear has carefully retraced Mark Twain's movements about the islands, talked with those who remember him.

Mark Twain was long remembered on the islands, says Frear, as a hard-swearing, hard-drinking yarner who smoked vile tobacco. A woman still living recalls that when Mark Twain visited her father's plantation (she was 5 then), her ears were stuffed with cotton wool to shut off Mark's shocking language.*

In his letters to the Sacramento Union, and in lectures and letters for many years after, Mark Twain argued for the annexation of Hawaii to the U.S. He sent back able reports on sugar growing, the fertility of the soil, missionary activities (his California newspaper pals began to call him St. Mark), even had the foresight to see the islands as a "commanding sentry-box for an armed squadron." And his humorous lectures on the islands, when he got back home, gave him his first widespread reputation (he outdrew Actress Fanny Kemble 1,500 to 200 in Pittsburgh, packed London's largest hall six nights running).

* Later, Mark swore off swearing, drinking and chewing but remained a heavy smoker. The December Atlantic printed for the first time the letter Mark wrote to Olivia ("Livy") Langdon three weeks before their marriage in 1870: "I ceased from profanity because Mrs. Fairbanks [a friend] desired it. I stopped drinking strong liquors because you desired it. I stopped drinking all other liquors because it seemed plain that you desired it. I did what I could to learn to leave my hands out of my pantaloon pockets and quit lolling at full length in easy chairs, because you desired it. There was no sacrifice about any of these things."

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