Hunh. I never knew that Mark Twain had visited Hawaii, much less wrote about it. This article, a travel piece, offers some excerpts of Twain’s 1866 letters from the Sandwich Islands, at a time when whaling ships visited the islands, where France, Britain and the US were competing for influence, and when Kamehameha V was king.
My sister Kat lived in Hawaii for years, and her son H is part native Hawaiian (which I always find amusing, given how blond and blue-eyed he is). H is eligible for the Kamehameha Schools, but not other native-Hawaiian programs. Anyway, Kat enlightened me about the fact that Twain’s (really, Clemons’s) letters are quite well known in Hawaii. But, since it’s my blog, I’m going to post my own excerpts from Twain’s letters and mourn the fact that I have spent a grand total of four days in Hawaii, most of them on a military recreation base.
Determined to “ransack the islands” for his dispatches, Twain rented a horse and rode until he was laid up with saddle sores. He rode by moonlight through a ghostly plain of sand strewn with human bones, the remains of an ancient battlefield. He scaled the summit of Kilauea during an eruption, standing at the crater’s edge on a foggy night, his face made crimson by lava-glow. He hiked through misty valleys. He surfed.
You heard right, Huck: America’s greatest writer took a wooden surfboard and paddled out to wait, as he had seen naked locals do, “for a particularly prodigious billow to come along,” upon which billow he prodigiously wiped out.
“None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly,” he wrote.
. . .
“The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it — imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire!”