Following the Equator, Complete

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> Following the Equator, Complete


Then, of course, they wanted to know all about the trip; and he said--

"Come right up on the boiler deck and order the drinks it's my treat.
I'm going to tell you all about it. And to-night it's my treat again
--and we'll have oysters and a time!"

When the drinks were brought and cigars lighted, Ed said:

"Well, when, I delivered the letter to Mr. Vanderbilt----"

"Great Scott!"

"Gracious, how you scared me. What's the matter?"

"Oh--er--nothing. Nothing--it was a tack in the chair-seat," said one.

"But you all said it. However, no matter. When I delivered the
letter----"

"Did you deliver it?" And they looked at each other as people might who
thought that maybe they were dreaming.

Then they settled to listening; and as the story deepened and its marvels
grew, the amazement of it made them dumb, and the interest of it took
their breath. They hardly uttered a whisper during two hours, but sat
like petrifactions and drank in the immortal romance. At last the tale
was ended, and Ed said--

"And it's all owing to you, boys, and you'll never find me ungrateful
--bless your hearts, the best friends a fellow ever had! You'll all have
places; I want every one of you. I know you--I know you 'by the back,'
as the gamblers say. You're jokers, and all that, but you're sterling,
with the hallmark on. And Charley Fairchild, you shall be my first
assistant and right hand, because of your first-class ability, and
because you got me the letter, and for your father's sake who wrote it
for me, and to please Mr. Vanderbilt, who said it would! And here's to
that great man--drink hearty!"

Yes, when the Moment comes, the Man appears--even if he is a thousand
miles away, and has to be discovered by a practical joke.




CHAPTER XXIX.

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in
his private heart no man much respects himself.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Necessarily, the human interest is the first interest in the log-book of
any country. The annals of Tasmania, in whose shadow we were sailing,
are lurid with that feature. Tasmania was a convict-dump, in old times;
this has been indicated in the account of the Conciliator, where
reference is made to vain attempts of desperate convicts to win to
permanent freedom, after escaping from Macquarrie Harbor and the "Gates
of Hell." In the early days Tasmania had a great population of convicts,
of both sexes and all ages, and a bitter hard life they had. In one spot
there was a settlement of juvenile convicts--children--who had been sent
thither from their home and their friends on the other side of the globe
to expiate their "crimes."

In due course our ship entered the estuary called the Derwent, at whose
head stands Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. The Derwent's shores
furnish scenery of an interesting sort. The historian Laurie, whose
book, "The Story of Australasia," is just out, invoices its features with
considerable truth and intemperance: "The marvelous picturesqueness of
every point of view, combined with the clear balmy atmosphere and the
transparency of the ocean depths, must have delighted and deeply
impressed" the early explorers. "If the rock-bound coasts, sullen,
defiant, and lowering, seemed uninviting, these were occasionally broken
into charmingly alluring coves floored with golden sand, clad with
evergreen shrubbery, and adorned with every variety of indigenous wattle,
she-oak, wild flower, and fern, from the delicately graceful
'maiden-hair' to the palm-like 'old man'; while the majestic gum-tree,
clean and smooth as the mast of 'some tall admiral' pierces the clear air
to the height of 230 feet or more."

It looked so to me. "Coasting along Tasman's Peninsula, what a shock of
pleasant wonder must have struck the early mariner on suddenly sighting
Cape Pillar, with its cluster of black-ribbed basaltic columns rising to
a height of 900 feet, the hydra head wreathed in a turban of fleecy
cloud, the base lashed by jealous waves spouting angry fountains of
foam."

That is well enough, but I did not suppose those snags were 900 feet
high. Still they were a very fine show. They stood boldly out by
themselves, and made a fascinatingly odd spectacle. But there was
nothing about their appearance to suggest the heads of a hydra. They
looked like a row of lofty slabs with their upper ends tapered to the
shape of a carving-knife point; in fact, the early voyager, ignorant of
their great height, might have mistaken them for a rusty old rank of
piles that had sagged this way and that out of the perpendicular.

The Peninsula is lofty, rocky, and densely clothed with scrub, or brush,
or both. It is joined to the main by a low neck. At this junction was
formerly a convict station called Port Arthur--a place hard to escape
from. Behind it was the wilderness of scrub, in which a fugitive would
soon starve; in front was the narrow neck, with a cordon of chained dogs
across it, and a line of lanterns, and a fence of living guards, armed.
We saw the place as we swept by--that is, we had a glimpse of what we
were told was the entrance to Port Arthur. The glimpse was worth
something, as a remembrancer, but that was all.

The voyage thence up the Derwent Frith displays a grand succession of
fairy visions, in its entire length elsewhere unequaled. In gliding over
the deep blue sea studded with lovely islets luxuriant to the water's
edge, one is at a loss which scene to choose for contemplation and to
admire most. When the Huon and Bruni have been passed, there seems no
possible chance of a rival; but suddenly Mount Wellington, massive and
noble like his brother Etna, literally heaves in sight, sternly guarded
on either hand by Mounts Nelson and Rumney; presently we arrive at
Sullivan's Cove--Hobart!

It is an attractive town. It sits on low hills that slope to the harbor
--a harbor that looks like a river, and is as smooth as one. Its still
surface is pictured with dainty reflections of boats and grassy banks and
luxuriant foliage. Back of the town rise highlands that are clothed in
woodland loveliness, and over the way is that noble mountain, Wellington,
a stately bulk, a most majestic pile. How beautiful is the whole region,
for form, and grouping, and opulence, and freshness of foliage, and
variety of color, and grace and shapeliness of the hills, the capes, the,
promontories; and then, the splendor of the sunlight, the dim rich
distances, the charm of the water-glimpses! And it was in this paradise
that the yellow-liveried convicts were landed, and the Corps-bandits
quartered, and the wanton slaughter of the kangaroo-chasing black
innocents consummated on that autumn day in May, in the brutish old time.
It was all out of keeping with the place, a sort of bringing of heaven
and hell together.

The remembrance of this paradise reminds me that it was at Hobart that we
struck the head of the procession of Junior Englands. We were to
encounter other sections of it in New Zealand, presently, and others
later in Natal. Wherever the exiled Englishman can find in his new home
resemblances to his old one, he is touched to the marrow of his being;
the love that is in his heart inspires his imagination, and these allied
forces transfigure those resemblances into authentic duplicates of the
revered originals. It is beautiful, the feeling which works this
enchantment, and it compels one's homage; compels it, and also compels
one's assent--compels it always--even when, as happens sometimes, one
does not see the resemblances as clearly as does the exile who is
pointing them out.

The resemblances do exist, it is quite true; and often they cunningly
approximate the originals--but after all, in the matter of certain
physical patent rights there is only one England. Now that I have
sampled the globe, I am not in doubt. There is a beauty of Switzerland,
and it is repeated in the glaciers and snowy ranges of many parts of the
earth; there is a beauty of the fiord, and it is repeated in New Zealand
and Alaska; there is a beauty of Hawaii, and it is repeated in ten
thousand islands of the Southern seas; there is a beauty of the prairie
and the plain, and it is repeated here and there in the earth; each of
these is worshipful, each is perfect in its way, yet holds no monopoly of
its beauty; but that beauty which is England is alone--it has no
duplicate.

It is made up of very simple details--just grass, and trees, and shrubs,
and roads, and hedges, and gardens, and houses, and vines, and churches,
and castles, and here and there a ruin--and over it all a mellow
dream-haze of history. But its beauty is incomparable, and all its own.

Hobart has a peculiarity--it is the neatest town that the sun shines on;
and I incline to believe that it is also the cleanest. However that may
be, its supremacy in neatness is not to be questioned. There cannot be
another town in the world that has no shabby exteriors; no rickety gates
and fences, no neglected houses crumbling to ruin, no crazy and unsightly
sheds, no weed-grown front-yards of the poor, no back-yards littered with
tin cans and old boots and empty bottles, no rubbish in the gutters, no
clutter on the sidewalks, no outer-borders fraying out into dirty lanes
and tin-patched huts. No, in Hobart all the aspects are tidy, and all a
comfort to the eye; the modestest cottage looks combed and brushed, and
has its vines, its flowers, its neat fence, its neat gate, its comely cat
asleep on the window ledge.

We had a glimpse of the museum, by courtesy of the American gentleman who
is curator of it. It has samples of half-a-dozen different kinds of
marsupials--[A marsupial is a plantigrade vertebrate whose specialty is
its pocket. In some countries it is extinct, in the others it is rare.
The first American marsupials were Stephen Girard, Mr. Aston and the
opossum; the principal marsupials of the Southern Hemisphere are Mr.
Rhodes, and the kangaroo. I, myself, am the latest marsupial. Also, I
might boast that I have the largest pocket of them all. But there is
nothing in that.]--one, the "Tasmanian devil;" that is, I think he was
one of them. And there was a fish with lungs. When the water dries up
it can live in the mud. Most curious of all was a parrot that kills
sheep. On one great sheep-run this bird killed a thousand sheep in a
whole year. He doesn't want the whole sheep, but only the kidney-fat.
This restricted taste makes him an expensive bird to support. To get the
fat he drives his beak in and rips it out; the wound is mortal. This
parrot furnishes a notable example of evolution brought about by changed
conditions. When the sheep culture was introduced, it presently brought
famine to the parrot by exterminating a kind of grub which had always
thitherto been the parrot's diet. The miseries of hunger made the bird
willing to eat raw flesh, since it could get no other food, and it began
to pick remnants of meat from sheep skins hung out on the fences to dry.
It soon came to prefer sheep meat to any other food, and by and by it
came to prefer the kidney-fat to any other detail of the sheep. The
parrot's bill was not well shaped for digging out the fat, but Nature
fixed that matter; she altered the bill's shape, and now the parrot can
dig out kidney-fat better than the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or
anybody else, for that matter--even an Admiral.

And there was another curiosity--quite a stunning one, I thought:
Arrow-heads and knives just like those which Primeval Man made out of
flint, and thought he had done such a wonderful thing--yes, and has been
humored and coddled in that superstition by this age of admiring
scientists until there is probably no living with him in the other world
by now. Yet here is his finest and nicest work exactly duplicated in our
day; and by people who have never heard of him or his works: by
aborigines who lived in the islands of these seas, within our time. And
they not only duplicated those works of art but did it in the brittlest
and most treacherous of substances--glass: made them out of old brandy
bottles flung out of the British camps; millions of tons of them. It is
time for Primeval Man to make a little less noise, now. He has had his
day. He is not what he used to be. We had a drive through a bloomy and
odorous fairy-land, to the Refuge for the Indigent--a spacious and
comfortable home, with hospitals, etc., for both sexes. There was a
crowd in there, of the oldest people I have ever seen. It was like being
suddenly set down in a new world--a weird world where Youth has never
been, a world sacred to Age, and bowed forms, and wrinkles. Out of the
359 persons present, 223, were ex-convicts, and could have told stirring
tales, no doubt, if they had been minded to talk; 42 of the 359 were past
80, and several were close upon 90; the average age at death there is 76
years. As for me, I have no use for that place; it is too healthy.
Seventy is old enough--after that, there is too much risk. Youth and
gaiety might vanish, any day--and then, what is left? Death in life;
death without its privileges, death without its benefits. There were 185
women in that Refuge, and 81 of them were ex-convicts.

The steamer disappointed us. Instead of making a long visit at Hobart,
as usual, she made a short one. So we got but a glimpse of Tasmania, and
then moved on.




CHAPTER XXX.

Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made
him with an appetite for sand.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

We spent part of an afternoon and a night at sea, and reached Bluff, in
New Zealand, early in the morning. Bluff is at the bottom of the middle
island, and is away down south, nearly forty-seven degrees below the
equator. It lies as far south of the line as Quebec lies north of it,
and the climates of the two should be alike; but for some reason or other
it has not been so arranged. Quebec is hot in the summer and cold in the
winter, but Bluff's climate is less intense; the cold weather is not very
cold, the hot weather is not very hot; and the difference between the
hottest month and the coldest is but 17 degrees Fahrenheit.

In New Zealand the rabbit plague began at Bluff. The man who introduced
the rabbit there was banqueted and lauded; but they would hang him, now,
if they could get him. In England the natural enemy of the rabbit is
detested and persecuted; in the Bluff region the natural enemy of the
rabbit is honored, and his person is sacred. The rabbit's natural enemy
in England is the poacher, in Bluff its natural enemy is the stoat, the
weasel, the ferret, the cat, and the mongoose. In England any person
below the Heir who is caught with a rabbit in his possession must
satisfactorily explain how it got there, or he will suffer fine and
imprisonment, together with extinction of his peerage; in Bluff, the cat
found with a rabbit in its possession does not have to explain--everybody
looks the other way; the person caught noticing would suffer fine and
imprisonment, with extinction of peerage. This is a sure way to
undermine the moral fabric of a cat. Thirty years from now there will
not be a moral cat in New Zealand. Some think there is none there now.
In England the poacher is watched, tracked, hunted--he dare not show his
face; in Bluff the cat, the weasel, the stoat, and the mongoose go up and
down, whither they will, unmolested. By a law of the legislature, posted
where all may read, it is decreed that any person found in possession of
one of these creatures (dead) must satisfactorily explain the
circumstances or pay a fine of not less than L5, nor more than L20. The
revenue from this source is not large. Persons who want to pay a hundred
dollars for a dead cat are getting rarer and rarer every day. This is
bad, for the revenue was to go to the endowment of a University. All
governments are more or less short-sighted: in England they fine the
poacher, whereas he ought to be banished to New Zealand. New Zealand
would pay his way, and give him wages.

It was from Bluff that we ought to have cut across to the west coast and
visited the New Zealand Switzerland, a land of superb scenery, made up of
snowy grandeurs, anal mighty glaciers, and beautiful lakes; and over
there, also, are the wonderful rivals of the Norwegian and Alaskan
fiords; and for neighbor, a waterfall of 1,900 feet; but we were obliged
to postpone the trip to some later and indefinite time.

November 6. A lovely summer morning; brilliant blue sky. A few miles
out from Invercargill, passed through vast level green expanses snowed
over with sheep. Fine to see. The green, deep and very vivid sometimes;
at other times less so, but delicate and lovely. A passenger reminds me
that I am in "the England of the Far South."

Dunedin, same date. The town justifies Michael Davitt's praises.
The people are Scotch. They stopped here on their way from home to
heaven-thinking they had arrived. The population is stated at 40,000, by
Malcolm Ross, journalist; stated by an M. P. at 60,000. A journalist
cannot lie.

To the residence of Dr. Hockin. He has a fine collection of books
relating to New Zealand; and his house is a museum of Maori art and
antiquities. He has pictures and prints in color of many native chiefs
of the past--some of them of note in history. There is nothing of the
savage in the faces; nothing could be finer than these men's features,
nothing more intellectual than these faces, nothing more masculine,
nothing nobler than their aspect. The aboriginals of Australia and
Tasmania looked the savage, but these chiefs looked like Roman
patricians. The tattooing in these portraits ought to suggest the
savage, of course, but it does not. The designs are so flowing and
graceful and beautiful that they are a most satisfactory decoration. It
takes but fifteen minutes to get reconciled to the tattooing, and but
fifteen more to perceive that it is just the thing. After that, the
undecorated European face is unpleasant and ignoble.

Dr. Hockiu gave us a ghastly curiosity--a lignified caterpillar with a
plant growing out of the back of its neck--a plant with a slender stem 4
inches high. It happened not by accident, but by design--Nature's
design. This caterpillar was in the act of loyally carrying out a law
inflicted upon him by Nature--a law purposely inflicted upon him to get
him into trouble--a law which was a trap; in pursuance of this law he
made the proper preparations for turning himself into a night-moth; that
is to say, he dug a little trench, a little grave, and then stretched
himself out in it on his stomach and partially buried himself--then
Nature was ready for him. She blew the spores of a peculiar fungus
through the air with a purpose. Some of them fell into a crease in the
back of the caterpillar's neck, and began to sprout and grow--for there
was soil there--he had not washed his neck. The roots forced themselves
down into the worm's person, and rearward along through its body, sucking
up the creature's juices for sap; the worm slowly died, and turned to
wood. And here he was now, a wooden caterpillar, with every detail of
his former physique delicately and exactly preserved and perpetuated, and
with that stem standing up out of him for his monument--monument
commemorative of his own loyalty and of Nature's unfair return for it.

Nature is always acting like that. Mrs. X. said (of course) that the
caterpillar was not conscious and didn't suffer. She should have known
better. No caterpillar can deceive Nature. If this one couldn't suffer,
Nature would have known it and would have hunted up another caterpillar.
Not that she would have let this one go, merely because it was defective.
No. She would have waited and let him turn into a night-moth; and then
fried him in the candle.

Nature cakes a fish's eyes over with parasites, so that it shan't be able
to avoid its enemies or find its food. She sends parasites into a
star-fish's system, which clog up its prongs and swell them and make them
so uncomfortable that the poor creature delivers itself from the prong to
ease its misery; and presently it has to part with another prong for the
sake of comfort, and finally with a third. If it re-grows the prongs,
the parasite returns and the same thing is repeated. And finally, when
the ability to reproduce prongs is lost through age, that poor old
star-fish can't get around any more, and so it dies of starvation.

In Australia is prevalent a horrible disease due to an "unperfected
tapeworm." Unperfected--that is what they call it, I do not know why,
for it transacts business just as well as if it were finished and
frescoed and gilded, and all that.

November 9. To the museum and public picture gallery with the president
of the Society of Artists. Some fine pictures there, lent by the S. of
A. several of them they bought, the others came to them by gift. Next,
to the gallery of the S. of A.--annual exhibition--just opened. Fine.
Think of a town like this having two such collections as this, and a
Society of Artists. It is so all over Australasia. If it were a
monarchy one might understand it. I mean an absolute monarchy, where it
isn't necessary to vote money, but take it. Then art flourishes. But
these colonies are republics--republics with a wide suffrage; voters of
both sexes, this one of New Zealand. In republics, neither the
government nor the rich private citizen is much given to propagating art.
All over Australasia pictures by famous European artists are bought for
the public galleries by the State and by societies of citizens. Living
citizens--not dead ones. They rob themselves to give, not their heirs.
This S. of A. here owns its buildings built it by subscription.




CHAPTER XXXI.

The spirit of wrath--not the words--is the sin; and the spirit of wrath
is cursing. We begin to swear before we can talk.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

November 11. On the road. This train-express goes twenty and one-half
miles an hour, schedule time; but it is fast enough, the outlook upon sea
and land is so interesting, and the cars so comfortable. They are not
English, and not American; they are the Swiss combination of the two.
A narrow and railed porch along the side, where a person can walk
up and down. A lavatory in each car. This is progress; this is
nineteenth-century spirit. In New Zealand, these fast expresses run twice
a week. It is well to know this if you want to be a bird and fly through
the country at a 20-mile gait; otherwise you may start on one of the five
wrong days, and then you will get a train that can't overtake its own
shadow.

By contrast, these pleasant cars call to mind the branch-road cars at
Maryborough, Australia, and the passengers' talk about the branch-road
and the hotel.

Somewhere on the road to Maryborough I changed for a while to a
smoking-carriage. There were two gentlemen there; both riding backward,
one at each end of the compartment. They were acquaintances of each
other. I sat down facing the one that sat at the starboard window. He
had a good face, and a friendly look, and I judged from his dress that he
was a dissenting minister. He was along toward fifty. Of his own motion
he struck a match, and shaded it with his hand for me to light my cigar.
I take the rest from my diary:

In order to start conversation I asked him something about Maryborough.
He said, in a most pleasant--even musical voice, but with quiet and
cultured decision:

"It's a charming town, with a hell of a hotel."

I was astonished. It seemed so odd to hear a minister swear out loud.
He went placidly on:

"It's the worst hotel in Australia. Well, one may go further, and say in
Australasia."

"Bad beds?"

"No--none at all. Just sand-bags."

"The pillows, too?"

"Yes, the pillows, too. Just sand. And not a good quality of sand. It
packs too hard, and has never been screened. There is too much gravel in
it. It is like sleeping on nuts."

"Isn't there any good sand?"

"Plenty of it. There is as good bed-sand in this region as the world can
furnish. Aerated sand--and loose; but they won't buy it. They want
something that will pack solid, and petrify."

"How are the rooms?"

"Eight feet square; and a sheet of iced oil-cloth to step on in the
morning when you get out of the sand-quarry."

"As to lights?"

"Coal-oil lamp."

"A good one?"

"No. It's the kind that sheds a gloom."

"I like a lamp that burns all night."

"This one won't. You must blow it out early."

"That is bad. One might want it again in the night. Can't find it in
the dark."

"There's no trouble; you can find it by the stench."

"Wardrobe?"

"Two nails on the door to hang seven suits of clothes on if you've got
them."

"Bells?"

"There aren't any."

"What do you do when you want service?"

"Shout. But it won't fetch anybody."