October/november 1981 | Volume 32, Issue 6 He Never Got Hawaii
out of His System On Sunday morning, March 18, 1866, the steamer
A jay. sailed into Honolulu Harbor while the bells of six
different mission churches called the freshly converted faithful
to worship. Among the passengers most eager to go ashore was a
thirty-one-year-old knockabout journalist named Samuel Clemens,
on assignment for the Sacramento Union . Mark Twain would later
make the Mississippi immortal, but first Hawaii would make him
famous. He spent four months and a day exploring the islands and
sent back twenty-five dispatches (at twenty dollars each),
recounting all that he had seen and heard. Fresh from the grime
and clamor of the California mining camps, he was enraptured by
the lush, silent Hawaiian landscape and was alternately amused
and fascinated by the ^l native Hawaiians and the missionaries,
planters, whalers, and hangers-on already seeking to displace
them. Compared with his later works, the letters from the
Sandwich Islands are