Innocent Abroad

MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM HAWAII edited by A. Grove Day. 298 pages. Appleton-Century. $5.95.

In 1866, when he toured the Hawaiian Islands, Mark Twain planted a monkeypod tree which lived to a great age and developed to enormous proportions. What he did for the tree he also did for his career. When Twain sailed for Honolulu as a South Pacific correspondent for the powerful, popular Sacramento Union, his literary reputation rested uncertainly on one widely read newspaper story: "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." When he returned to California four months later, his newsy and engaging letters from Hawaii had made him "the best-known honest man on the Pacific Coast."

A responsive audience awaited the successful lecture career on which he immediately embarked; in 1867 he sailed off triumphantly on another journalistic junket to the Mediterranean and Palestine, where he mined the material for his first important book, Innocents Abroad. Twain's Hawaiian letters have previously been issued only in limited editions. Now Professor A. Grove Day of the University of Hawaii has prepared the first edition of the Letters for broader publication. The book offers nothing that is not already known about Hawaii, but it provides a fresh, funny portrait of Mark Twain as a young man.

Saddle-Colored Maidens. He was a roaring American primitive who hit Honolulu like a monsoon. Hawaiians were not merely amazed at his exuberant ways; they thought that he was always drunk. His appetite for experience was enormous. Ill in bed with saddle boils, he had himself carried to an interview with survivors of a shipwreck at sea, had his dispatch thrown aboard a ship already under sail. Astride a spavined horse named Oahu, he viewed a bone-strewn battleground, exotic foliage, and "long-haired, saddle-colored maidens" with the rapt admiration of a Peeping Tom newly admitted to Eden.

"I had rather smell Honolulu at sun set," he said, "than the old police courtroom in San Francisco." He kept his eye unawed, describing the mourning for a deceased royal princess as an occasion when native women writhe "to a weird howling which it would be rather complimentary to call singing." Sometimes he reported earnestly, filing statistic-studded essays on the whaling and sugar industries. He was at his best when he gave in to his sense of humor. Of lower-class Hawaiians traveling on an inter-island schooner, he reported that "as soon as we set sail the natives all laid down on deck as thick as Negroes in a slave pen, and smoked and conversed and captured vermin and ate them, spit on each other, and were truly sociable." Hawaiian oranges were delicious, although "I seldom eat more than 10 or 15 at a sitting, however, because I despise to see anybody gormandize."

Isles of the Blest. Tall tales of horse trading, Twain found, were the same the world over. For instance, a visiting American, shopping for a matched pair of horses, was led by a Hawaiian native trader to a little stable, unfortunately locked, as the trader's brother had gone to the country with the key. The purchaser examined one horse critically through a window, went around the stable, and examined the other through a window at the other end. The match was perfect, the deal concluded on the spot, and the salesman went off--leaving his client to discover for himself that he had bought the same horse twice.

After his four-month exploration, Twain forever yearned to return to Hawaii. In 1881, he wrote to a Hawaiian friend that "if the house would only burn down, we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of Haleakala and get a good rest; for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph. And after resting, we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt and give thanks to whom all thanks belong, for those privileges, and never housekeep any more." Yet, aside from a tantalizing shipboard glimpse of a Honolulu quarantined by cholera in 1895, he never found his way back.

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