Following the Equator, Complete

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


A change had come, but that was political, and not visible from the ship.
The monarchy of my day was gone, and a republic was sitting in its seat.
It was not a material change. The old imitation pomps, the fuss and
feathers, have departed, and the royal trademark--that is about all that
one could miss, I suppose. That imitation monarchy, was grotesque
enough, in my time; if it had held on another thirty years it would have
been a monarchy without subjects of the king's race.

We had a sunset of a very fine sort. The vast plain of the sea was
marked off in bands of sharply-contrasted colors: great stretches of dark
blue, others of purple, others of polished bronze; the billowy mountains
showed all sorts of dainty browns and greens, blues and purples and
blacks, and the rounded velvety backs of certain of them made one want to
stroke them, as one would the sleek back of a cat. The long, sloping
promontory projecting into the sea at the west turned dim and leaden and
spectral, then became suffused with pink--dissolved itself in a pink
dream, so to speak, it seemed so airy and unreal. Presently the
cloud-rack was flooded with fiery splendors, and these were copied on the
surface of the sea, and it made one drunk with delight to look upon it.

From talks with certain of our passengers whose home was Honolulu, and
from a sketch by Mrs. Mary H. Krout, I was able to perceive what the
Honolulu of to-day is, as compared with the Honolulu of my time. In my
time it was a beautiful little town, made up of snow-white wooden
cottages deliciously smothered in tropical vines and flowers and trees
and shrubs; and its coral roads and streets were hard and smooth, and as
white as the houses. The outside aspects of the place suggested the
presence of a modest and comfortable prosperity--a general prosperity
--perhaps one might strengthen the term and say universal. There were no
fine houses, no fine furniture. There were no decorations. Tallow
candles furnished the light for the bedrooms, a whale-oil lamp furnished
it for the parlor. Native matting served as carpeting. In the parlor
one would find two or three lithographs on the walls--portraits as a
rule: Kamehameha IV., Louis Kossuth, Jenny Lind; and may be an engraving
or two: Rebecca at the Well, Moses smiting the rock, Joseph's servants
finding the cup in Benjamin's sack. There would be a center table, with
books of a tranquil sort on it: The Whole Duty of Man, Baxter's Saints'
Rest, Fox's Martyrs, Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, bound copies of The
Missionary Herald and of Father Damon's Seaman's Friend. A melodeon; a
music stand, with 'Willie, We have Missed You', 'Star of the Evening',
'Roll on Silver Moon', 'Are We Most There', 'I Would not Live Alway', and
other songs of love and sentiment, together with an assortment of hymns.
A what-not with semi-globular glass paperweights, enclosing miniature
pictures of ships, New England rural snowstorms, and the like; sea-shells
with Bible texts carved on them in cameo style; native curios; whale's
tooth with full-rigged ship carved on it. There was nothing reminiscent
of foreign parts, for nobody had been abroad. Trips were made to San
Francisco, but that could not be called going abroad. Comprehensively
speaking, nobody traveled.

But Honolulu has grown wealthy since then, and of course wealth has
introduced changes; some of the old simplicities have disappeared. Here
is a modern house, as pictured by Mrs. Krout:

"Almost every house is surrounded by extensive lawns and gardens
enclosed by walls of volcanic stone or by thick hedges of the
brilliant hibiscus.

"The houses are most tastefully and comfortably furnished; the
floors are either of hard wood covered with rugs or with fine Indian
matting, while there is a preference, as in most warm countries, for
rattan or bamboo furniture; there are the usual accessories of
bric-a-brac, pictures, books, and curios from all parts of the world,
for these island dwellers are indefatigable travelers.

"Nearly every house has what is called a lanai. It is a large
apartment, roofed, floored, open on three sides, with a door or a
draped archway opening into the drawing-room. Frequently the roof
is formed by the thick interlacing boughs of the hou tree,
impervious to the sun and even to the rain, except in violent
storms. Vines are trained about the sides--the stephanotis or some
one of the countless fragrant and blossoming trailers which abound
in the islands. There are also curtains of matting that may be
drawn to exclude the sun or rain. The floor is bare for coolness,
or partially covered with rugs, and the lanai is prettily furnished
with comfortable chairs, sofas, and tables loaded with flowers, or
wonderful ferns in pots.

"The lanai is the favorite reception room, and here at any social
function the musical program is given and cakes and ices are served;
here morning callers are received, or gay riding parties, the ladies
in pretty divided skirts, worn for convenience in riding astride,
--the universal mode adopted by Europeans and Americans, as well as
by the natives.

"The comfort and luxury of such an apartment, especially at a
seashore villa, can hardly be imagined. The soft breezes sweep
across it, heavy with the fragrance of jasmine and gardenia, and
through the swaying boughs of palm and mimosa there are glimpses of
rugged mountains, their summits veiled in clouds, of purple sea with
the white surf beating eternally against the reefs, whiter still in
the yellow sunlight or the magical moonlight of the tropics."

There: rugs, ices, pictures, lanais, worldly books, sinful bric-a-brac
fetched from everywhere. And the ladies riding astride. These are
changes, indeed. In my time the native women rode astride, but the white
ones lacked the courage to adopt their wise custom. In my time ice was
seldom seen in Honolulu. It sometimes came in sailing vessels from New
England as ballast; and then, if there happened to be a man-of-war in
port and balls and suppers raging by consequence, the ballast was worth
six hundred dollars a ton, as is evidenced by reputable tradition. But
the ice-machine has traveled all over the world, now, and brought ice
within everybody's reach. In Lapland and Spitzbergen no one uses native
ice in our day, except the bears and the walruses.

The bicycle is not mentioned. It was not necessary. We know that it is
there, without inquiring. It is everywhere. But for it, people could
never have had summer homes on the summit of Mont Blanc; before its day,
property up there had but a nominal value. The ladies of the Hawaiian
capital learned too late the right way to occupy a horse--too late to get
much benefit from it. The riding-horse is retiring from business
everywhere in the world. In Honolulu a few years from now he will be
only a tradition.

We all know about Father Damien, the French priest who voluntarily
forsook the world and went to the leper island of Molokai to labor among
its population of sorrowful exiles who wait there, in slow-consuming
misery, for death to cone and release them from their troubles; and we
know that the thing which he knew beforehand would happen, did happen:
that he became a leper himself, and died of that horrible disease. There
was still another case of self-sacrifice, it appears. I asked after
"Billy" Ragsdale, interpreter to the Parliament in my time--a half-white.
He was a brilliant young fellow, and very popular. As an interpreter he
would have been hard to match anywhere. He used to stand up in the
Parliament and turn the English speeches into Hawaiian and the Hawaiian
speeches into English with a readiness and a volubility that were
astonishing. I asked after him, and was told that his prosperous career
was cut short in a sudden and unexpected way, just as he was about to
marry a beautiful half-caste girl. He discovered, by some nearly
invisible sign about his skin, that the poison of leprosy was in him.
The secret was his own, and might be kept concealed for years; but he
would not be treacherous to the girl that loved him; he would not marry
her to a doom like his. And so he put his affairs in order, and went
around to all his friends and bade them good-bye, and sailed in the leper
ship to Molokai. There he died the loathsome and lingering death that
all lepers die.

In this place let me insert a paragraph or two from "The Paradise of
the Pacific" (Rev. H. H. Gowen)--

"Poor lepers! It is easy for those who have no relatives or friends
among them to enforce the decree of segregation to the letter, but
who can write of the terrible, the heart-breaking scenes which that
enforcement has brought about?

"A man upon Hawaii was suddenly taken away after a summary arrest,
leaving behind him a helpless wife about to give birth to a babe.
The devoted wife with great pain and risk came the whole journey to
Honolulu, and pleaded until the authorities were unable to resist
her entreaty that she might go and live like a leper with her leper
husband.

"A woman in the prime of life and activity is condemned as an
incipient leper, suddenly removed from her home, and her husband
returns to find his two helpless babes moaning for their lost
mother.

"Imagine it! The case of the babies is hard, but its bitterness is
a trifle--less than a trifle--less than nothing--compared to what
the mother must suffer; and suffer minute by minute, hour by hour,
day by day, month by month, year by year, without respite, relief,
or any abatement of her pain till she dies.

"One woman, Luka Kaaukau, has been living with her leper husband in
the settlement for twelve years. The man has scarcely a joint left,
his limbs are only distorted ulcerated stumps, for four years his
wife has put every particle of food into his mouth. He wanted his
wife to abandon his wretched carcass long ago, as she herself was
sound and well, but Luka said that she was content to remain and
wait on the man she loved till the spirit should be freed from its
burden.

"I myself have known hard cases enough:--of a girl, apparently in
full health, decorating the church with me at Easter, who before
Christmas is taken away as a confirmed leper; of a mother hiding her
child in the mountains for years so that not even her dearest
friends knew that she had a child alive, that he might not be taken
away; of a respectable white man taken away from his wife and
family, and compelled to become a dweller in the Leper Settlement,
where he is counted dead, even by the insurance companies."

And one great pity of it all is, that these poor sufferers are innocent.
The leprosy does not come of sins which they committed, but of sins
committed by their ancestors, who escaped the curse of leprosy!

Mr. Gowan has made record of a certain very striking circumstance. Would
you expect to find in that awful Leper Settlement a custom worthy to be
transplanted to your own country? They have one such, and it is
inexpressibly touching and beautiful. When death sets open the
prison-door of life there, the band salutes the freed soul with a burst
of glad music!




CHAPTER IV.

A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic
compliment.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Sailed from Honolulu.--From diary:

Sept. 2. Flocks of flying fish-slim, shapely, graceful, and intensely
white. With the sun on them they look like a flight of silver
fruit-knives. They are able to fly a hundred yards.

Sept. 3. In 9 deg. 50' north latitude, at breakfast. Approaching the
equator on a long slant. Those of us who have never seen the equator are
a good deal excited. I think I would rather see it than any other thing
in the world. We entered the "doldrums" last night--variable winds,
bursts of rain, intervals of calm, with chopping seas and a wobbly and
drunken motion to the ship--a condition of things findable in
other regions sometimes, but present in the doldrums always. The
globe-girdling belt called the doldrums is 20 degrees wide, and the
thread called the equator lies along the middle of it.

Sept. 4. Total eclipse of the moon last night. At 1.30 it began to go
off. At total--or about that--it was like a rich rosy cloud with a
tumbled surface framed in the circle and projecting from it--a bulge of
strawberry-ice, so to speak. At half-eclipse the moon was like a gilded
acorn in its cup.

Sept. 5. Closing in on the equator this noon. A sailor explained to a
young girl that the ship's speed is poor because we are climbing up the
bulge toward the center of the globe; but that when we should once get
over, at the equator, and start down-hill, we should fly. When she asked
him the other day what the fore-yard was, he said it was the front yard,
the open area in the front end of the ship. That man has a good deal of
learning stored up, and the girl is likely to get it all.

Afternoon. Crossed the equator. In the distance it looked like a blue
ribbon stretched across the ocean. Several passengers kodak'd it. We
had no fool ceremonies, no fantastics, no horse play. All that sort of
thing has gone out. In old times a sailor, dressed as Neptune, used to
come in over the bows, with his suite, and lather up and shave everybody
who was crossing the equator for the first time, and then cleanse these
unfortunates by swinging them from the yard-arm and ducking them three
times in the sea. This was considered funny. Nobody knows why. No, that
is not true. We do know why. Such a thing could never be funny on land;
no part of the old-time grotesque performances gotten up on shipboard to
celebrate the passage of the line would ever be funny on shore--they
would seem dreary and less to shore people. But the shore people would
change their minds about it at sea, on a long voyage. On such a voyage,
with its eternal monotonies, people's intellects deteriorate; the owners
of the intellects soon reach a point where they almost seem to prefer
childish things to things of a maturer degree. One is often surprised at
the juvenilities which grown people indulge in at sea, and the interest
they take in them, and the consuming enjoyment they get out of them.
This is on long voyages only. The mind gradually becomes inert, dull,
blunted; it loses its accustomed interest in intellectual things; nothing
but horse-play can rouse it, nothing but wild and foolish grotesqueries
can entertain it. On short voyages it makes no such exposure of itself;
it hasn't time to slump down to this sorrowful level.

The short-voyage passenger gets his chief physical exercise out of
"horse-billiards"--shovel-board. It is a good game. We play it in this
ship. A quartermaster chalks off a diagram like this-on the deck.

The player uses a cue that is like a broom-handle with a quarter-moon of
wood fastened to the end of it. With this he shoves wooden disks the
size of a saucer--he gives the disk a vigorous shove and sends it fifteen
or twenty feet along the deck and lands it in one of the squares if he
can. If it stays there till the inning is played out, it will count as
many points in the game as the figure in the square it has stopped in
represents. The adversary plays to knock that disk out and leave his own
in its place--particularly if it rests upon the 9 or 10 or some other of
the high numbers; but if it rests in the "10off" he backs it up--lands
his disk behind it a foot or two, to make it difficult for its owner to
knock it out of that damaging place and improve his record. When the
inning is played out it may be found that each adversary has placed his
four disks where they count; it may be found that some of them are
touching chalk lines and not counting; and very often it will be found
that there has been a general wreckage, and that not a disk has been left
within the diagram. Anyway, the result is recorded, whatever it is, and
the game goes on. The game is 100 points, and it takes from twenty
minutes to forty to play it, according to luck and the condition of the
sea. It is an exciting game, and the crowd of spectators furnish
abundance of applause for fortunate shots and plenty of laughter for the
other kind. It is a game of skill, but at the same time the uneasy
motion of the ship is constantly interfering with skill; this makes it a
chancy game, and the element of luck comes largely in.

We had a couple of grand tournaments, to determine who should be
"Champion of the Pacific"; they included among the participants nearly
all the passengers, of both sexes, and the officers of the ship, and they
afforded many days of stupendous interest and excitement, and murderous
exercise--for horse-billiards is a physically violent game.

The figures in the following record of some of the closing games in the
first tournament will show, better than any description, how very chancy
the game is. The losers here represented had all been winners in the
previous games of the series, some of them by fine majorities:

Chase,102 Mrs. D.,57 Mortimer, 105 The Surgeon, 92
Miss C.,105 Mrs. T.,9 Clemens, 101 Taylor,92
Taylor,109 Davies,95 Miss C., 108 Mortimer,55
Thomas,102 Roper,76 Clemens, 111 Miss C.,89
Coomber, 106 Chase,98

And so on; until but three couples of winners were left. Then I beat my
man, young Smith beat his man, and Thomas beat his. This reduced the
combatants to three. Smith and I took the deck, and I led off. At the
close of the first inning I was 10 worse than nothing and Smith had
scored 7. The luck continued against me. When I was 57, Smith was 97
--within 3 of out. The luck changed then. He picked up a 10-off or so,
and couldn't recover. I beat him.

The next game would end tournament No. 1.

Mr. Thomas and I were the contestants. He won the lead and went to the
bat--so to speak. And there he stood, with the crotch of his cue resting
against his disk while the ship rose slowly up, sank slowly down, rose
again, sank again. She never seemed to rise to suit him exactly. She
started up once more; and when she was nearly ready for the turn, he let
drive and landed his disk just within the left-hand end of the 10.
(Applause). The umpire proclaimed "a good 10," and the game-keeper set
it down. I played: my disk grazed the edge of Mr. Thomas's disk, and
went out of the diagram. (No applause.)

Mr. Thomas played again--and landed his second disk alongside of the
first, and almost touching its right-hand side. "Good 10." (Great
applause.)

I played, and missed both of them. (No applause.)

Mr. Thomas delivered his third shot and landed his disk just at the right
of the other two. "Good 10." (Immense applause.)

There they lay, side by side, the three in a row. It did not seem
possible that anybody could miss them. Still I did it. (Immense
silence.)

Mr. Thomas played his last disk. It seems incredible, but he actually
landed that disk alongside of the others, and just to the right of them-a
straight solid row of 4 disks. (Tumultuous and long-continued applause.)

Then I played my last disk. Again it did not seem possible that anybody
could miss that row--a row which would have been 14 inches long if the
disks had been clamped together; whereas, with the spaces separating them
they made a longer row than that. But I did it. It may be that I was
getting nervous.

I think it unlikely that that innings has ever had its parallel in the
history of horse-billiards. To place the four disks side by side in the
10 was an extraordinary feat; indeed, it was a kind of miracle. To miss
them was another miracle. It will take a century to produce another man
who can place the four disks in the 10; and longer than that to find a
man who can't knock them out. I was ashamed of my performance at the
time, but now that I reflect upon it I see that it was rather fine and
difficult.

Mr. Thomas kept his luck, and won the game, and later the championship.

In a minor tournament I won the prize, which was a Waterbury watch. I
put it in my trunk. In Pretoria, South Africa, nine months afterward, my
proper watch broke down and I took the Waterbury out, wound it, set it by
the great clock on the Parliament House (8.05), then went back to my room
and went to bed, tired from a long railway journey. The parliamentary
clock had a peculiarity which I was not aware of at the time
--a peculiarity which exists in no other clock, and would not exist in that
one if it had been made by a sane person; on the half-hour it strikes the
succeeding hour, then strikes the hour again, at the proper time. I lay
reading and smoking awhile; then, when I could hold my eyes open no
longer and was about to put out the light, the great clock began to boom,
and I counted ten. I reached for the Waterbury to see how it was getting
along. It was marking 9.30. It seemed rather poor speed for a
three-dollar watch, but I supposed that the climate was affecting it. I
shoved it half an hour ahead; and took to my book and waited to see what
would happen. At 10 the great clock struck ten again. I looked--the
Waterbury was marking half-past 10. This was too much speed for the
money, and it troubled me. I pushed the hands back a half hour, and
waited once more; I had to, for I was vexed and restless now, and my
sleepiness was gone. By and by the great clock struck 11. The Waterbury
was marking 10.30. I pushed it ahead half an hour, with some show of
temper. By and by the great clock struck 11 again. The Waterbury showed
up 11.30, now, and I beat her brains out against the bedstead. I was
sorry next day, when I found out.

To return to the ship.

The average human being is a perverse creature; and when he isn't that,
he is a practical joker. The result to the other person concerned is
about the same: that is, he is made to suffer. The washing down of the
decks begins at a very early hour in all ships; in but few ships are any
measures taken to protect the passengers, either by waking or warning
them, or by sending a steward to close their ports. And so the
deckwashers have their opportunity, and they use it. They send a bucket
of water slashing along the side of the ship and into the ports,
drenching the passenger's clothes, and often the passenger himself. This
good old custom prevailed in this ship, and under unusually favorable
circumstances, for in the blazing tropical regions a removable zinc thing
like a sugarshovel projects from the port to catch the wind and bring it
in; this thing catches the wash-water and brings it in, too--and in
flooding abundance. Mrs. L, an invalid, had to sleep on the locker--sofa
under her port, and every time she over-slept and thus failed to take
care of herself, the deck-washers drowned her out.

And the painters, what a good time they had! This ship would be going
into dock for a month in Sydney for repairs; but no matter, painting was
going on all the time somewhere or other. The ladies' dresses were
constantly getting ruined, nevertheless protests and supplications went
for nothing. Sometimes a lady, taking an afternoon nap on deck near a
ventilator or some other thing that didn't need painting, would wake up
by and by and find that the humorous painter had been noiselessly daubing
that thing and had splattered her white gown all over with little greasy
yellow spots.

The blame for this untimely painting did not lie with the ship's
officers, but with custom. As far back as Noah's time it became law that
ships must be constantly painted and fussed at when at sea; custom grew
out of the law, and at sea custom knows no death; this custom will
continue until the sea goes dry.

Sept. 8.--Sunday. We are moving so nearly south that we cross only about
two meridians of longitude a day. This morning we were in longitude 178
west from Greenwich, and 57 degrees west from San Francisco. To-morrow
we shall be close to the center of the globe--the 180th degree of west
longitude and 180th degree of east longitude.

And then we must drop out a day-lose a day out of our lives, a day never
to be found again. We shall all die one day earlier than from the
beginning of time we were foreordained to die. We shall be a day
behindhand all through eternity. We shall always be saying to the other
angels, "Fine day today," and they will be always retorting, "But it
isn't to-day, it's tomorrow." We shall be in a state of confusion all the
time and shall never know what true happiness is.

Next Day. Sure enough, it has happened. Yesterday it was September 8,
Sunday; to-day, per the bulletin-board at the head of the companionway,
it is September 10, Tuesday. There is something uncanny about it. And
uncomfortable. In fact, nearly unthinkable, and wholly unrealizable,
when one comes to consider it. While we were crossing the 180th meridian
it was Sunday in the stern of the ship where my family were, and Tuesday
in the bow where I was. They were there eating the half of a fresh apple
on the 8th, and I was at the same time eating the other half of it on the
10th--and I could notice how stale it was, already. The family were the
same age that they were when I had left them five minutes before, but I
was a day older now than I was then. The day they were living in
stretched behind them half way round the globe, across the Pacific Ocean
and America and Europe; the day I was living in stretched in front of me
around the other half to meet it. They were stupendous days for bulk and
stretch; apparently much larger days than we had ever been in before.
All previous days had been but shrunk-up little things by comparison.
The difference in temperature between the two days was very marked, their
day being hotter than mine because it was closer to the equator.