4 May 1866 • Island of Maui, Sandwich Islands (MS: NPV, UCCL 00099)
11 o’clock at Night.—This is the infernalest darkest country, when the moon don’t shine; I stumbled & fell over my horse’s lariat a minute ago & hurt my leg, & so I must stay here to-night; I came went Ⓐemendationto Ulapalakua ⒶemendationPlantation (25 miles,) a few days ago, & returned yesterday afternoon, to Mr. Cornwell’s (Waikapu Plantation) & staid all night (it is 2 miles from here) & came here this evening to Mr Peck’s, (Honolulu friends of mine,), Ⓐemendation& took tea, & we have been playing seven-up & whist (plenty of ladies in his family;) but I only hitched that horse, intending to ride to the further sea-shore, a (this Ⓐemendationis a narrow peninsula in the middle of the island), & stay all night at the Waihee Plantation, 5 miles from here, but as I said, I couldn’t even see the horse it was so dark when I came out of Mr Peck’s a while ago, & so I fell & hurt my leg.1explanatory note I got the same leg hurt the other last weekⒶemendation; I said I hadn’t got hold of a spirited horse since I had been on the island, & one of the proprietors loaned me a big, vicious colt; he was altogether too spirited; I went to tighten the cinch before mounting him, when he let out with his left & kicked me across a ten-acre lot. A native rubbed & doctored me so well that I was able to stand on my feet in half an hour. It was then half after 4, & I had an appointment to go 7 miles & get a girl & take her to a pic-nic a card party at 5. If I hadn’t had a considerable weakness for her she might have gone to the devil under the circumstances, but as it was, I went after her. I got even with the colt; it was a very rough road, but I got there at 5 minutes past 5, & then had to quit, my leg hurt me so. She was ready & her horse was saddled, but we didn’t go. But I had a jolly time—played a cribbage Ⓐemendationnearly all night. If I were worth even $5,000 I would try to marry that plantation—but as it is, I resign myself to a long & useful bachelordom as cheerfully as I may.
I had a pleasant time of it at Ulupalakua Plantation. It is 3,000 feet above the level of the sea (in plain sight from here, 25 miles;) two pretty & accomplished girl’s Ⓐemendationin the family & the plantation yields an income of $60,000 a year—chance for some enterprising scrub.2explanatory note I have been clattering around among the plantations for 3 weeks, now, & next week I am going to visit the extinct crater of Mount Hala HaleakalaⒶemendation—the largest in the world; it is ten miles to the foot of the mountain; it rises 10,000 feet above the valley; the crater is 29 miles in circumference & 1,000 feet deep. Seen from the summit, the city of St Louis would look like a picture in the bottom of it.3explanatory note
As soon as I get back from Haleakala (pronounced Hally-ekka-lah,) I will sail for Honolulu again & from thence to the Island of Hawaii (pronounced Hah-wy-ye,) to see the greatest active volcano in the world—that of Kilauea (pronounced Kee-low-way-ah).—Ⓐemendation& from thence back to San Francisco—& then, doubtless, to the States. I have been on this trip 2 months, & it will probably be 2 more before I get back to California.
Sherman Peck (1800–71) was senior partner in Charles Brewer and Company, Honolulu commission merchants and sugar factors. The firm had a controlling interest in the Wailuku Sugar Company, which comprised three of the plantations Clemens mentions here: Wailuku, Waikapu (owned by Henry Cornwell), and Waihee. In addition, Brewer and Company was agent for the plantation at Ulupalakua, described in the next paragraph (Sullivan, 123–24, 127, 129; Condé and Best, 267; “Waikapu Plantation!” Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 12 May 66, 1; Adler, 36). Clemens discussed sugar production on these and other plantations in a Sacramento Union letter published on 26 September 1866 (SLC 1866, 1).
James Makee’s Rose Ranch, at Ulupalakua on the slopes of Haleakala, was the largest sugar plantation in the Sandwich Islands, with a thousand acres under cultivation. Makee, formerly a Massachusetts whaling captain, had been put ashore in 1843 after suffering a severe injury in a shipboard assault. At the time of Clemens’s visit he was famed for his lavish way of life and hospitality at Rose Ranch, which had guest cottages, lush gardens populated by hundreds of peacocks, “a billiard room, a tennis court, and a bowling alley with one small kanaka boy to tend each pin” (Daws, 207). Clemens may have visited Rose Ranch at the recommendation of a San Francisco friend, poet Charles Warren Stoddard (1843–1909). Stoddard had stayed there in 1864 while visiting his sister Sara, who was married to James Makee’s son Parker (Lee, 237; Day, 169; Walker 1969, 272).
Modern sources agree on these dimensions for Haleakala: height, 10,023 feet; crater circumference, about twenty miles; crater depth, 2,720 feet. In chapter 76 of Roughing It Clemens remarked, “If it had a level bottom it would make a fine site for a city like London.”
References
- Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 1: 1853–1866. Edited by Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1988
- Paine, Albert Bigelow, ed. Mark Twain’s Letters. Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1917
- Webster, Samuel Charles. Mark Twain, Business Man. Edited by Samuel Charles Webster. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1946
- Frear, Walter Francis. Mark Twain and Hawaii. By Walter Francis Frear. Chicago: Lakeside Press. 1947
- Sullivan, Josephine. A History of C. Brewer & Company Limited: One Hundred Years in the Hawaiian Islands. Edited by K. C. Leebrick. Boston: Walton Advertising and Printing Company. 1926
- Conde, Jesse C., and Gerald M. Best. Sugar Trains: Narrow Gauge Rails of Hawaii. Felton, Calif.: Glenwood Publishers. 1973
- Adler, Jacob. Claus Spreckels: The Sugar King in Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1966
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). “From the Sandwich Islands.” Letter dated 10 September, number 23 in the sequence. Sacramento Union, 26 September, 1. Reprinted in MTH, 398–407. 1866
- Daws, Gavan. Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands. New York: Macmillan Company. 1968
- Lee, W. Storrs. The Islands. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1966
- Day, A. Grove. Hawaii and Its People. Rev. ed. New York: Meredith Press. 1968
- Walker, Franklin. San Francisco’s Literary Frontier. Rev. ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1969
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L1 , 336–338; MTL , 1:104–5, with omissions; MTBus , 85–86, with omissions; MTH , 40–41, brief excerpt.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.