THE SMOKE IS SO DENSE all over this upper coast,” wrote Clemens to Rogers from Vancouver, “that you can’t see a cathedral at 800 yards.” The Clemenses learned in Vancouver that the departure of the SS Warrimoo, on which they were to sail from Victoria to Sydney, had been delayed. It was to have sailed on August 16, the day after Clemens’s performance in Vancouver. But before it reached Victoria, it ran aground in the fog and smoke as it entered the Juan de Fuca Strait, the hundred-mile passage that connects the Pacific Ocean to the town, and so had to be repaired. This ill wind brought at least two benefits. It gave Clemens a chance to recover from his cold — he stayed in bed most of the time during his extra four days in Vancouver — and it provided Pond with an opportunity to arrange a performance in Victoria.
The day after Clemens’s Vancouver performance, a doctor examined him and announced that he was not seriously ill. Nonetheless, Mrs. Clemens was worried. “I was very anxious about him,” she wrote to Rogers, “fearing an attack of bronchitis or lung fever. We have kept him in bed now for two days and he seems better.”
“Mrs. Clemens is curing him,” noted Pond. “The more I see of this lady the greater and more wonderful she appears to be. There are few women that could manage and absolutely rule such a nature as ‘Mark’s.’ She knows the gentle and smooth way over every obstruction he meets, and makes everything lovely.” During the last years of his life, when Clemens was dictating his autobiographical notes, he said that meeting Olivia Langdon had “made the fortune of my life — not in dollars, I am not thinking of dollars; it made the real fortune of my life in that it made the happiness of my life.”
When they left Vancouver for Victoria on August 20, the smoke was denser than ever. The slight rain that was falling could not disperse it. Clemens was still weak, his voice still hoarse. He was, according to Pond, downhearted in spite of his tremendous success on the platform, perhaps because of unfavorable reports of the Warrimoo and his wife’s dread of the long Pacific crossing.
He may have been depressed, but he managed to sound cheerful in a letter he gave to the San Francisco Examiner, the paper for which his nephew worked. “Lecturing,” he said, “is gymnastics, chest-expander, medicine, mind-healer, blues-destroyer, all in one. I am twice as well as I was when I started out. I have gained nine pounds in twenty-eight days, and expect to weigh six hundred before January.”
The next day, he wrote in a similarly ebullient fashion to Kipling about his forthcoming visit to India: “I shall arrive next January, and you must be ready. I shall come riding my Ayah, with his tusks adorned with silver bells and ribbons, and escorted by a troop of native Howdahs, richly clad and mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows, and you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty.”
Before they left Vancouver for Victoria, Clemens gave a statement to The New-York Times about his debts. He wanted to scotch the rumor that he was lecturing for his own benefit and not for that of his creditors. “The law recognizes no mortgage on a man’s brain, and a merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the rules of insolvency and start free again for himself; but I am not a business man, and honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot compromise for less than a hundred cents on the dollar.” He explained that his wife was the firm’s principal creditor, to whom he had assigned his copyrights until his debt to her should be paid. “The present situation is that the wreckage of the firm, together with what money I can scrape together with my wife’s aid, will enable me to pay the other creditors about 50 per cent, of their claims. It is my intention to ask them to accept that as a legal discharge, and trust to my honor to pay the other 50 per cent, as fast as I can earn it.”
From his reception thus far on his lecturing tour, he said, he was confident that if he lived he could pay off his debts within four years, when, at the age of sixty-four, he could start life anew. “In my preliminary run through the smaller cities on the northern route, I have found a reception the cordiality of which has touched my heart and made me feel how small a thing money is in comparison with friendship.
“I meant, when I began, to give my creditors all the benefit of this, but I begin to feel that I am gaining something from it, too, and that my dividends, if not available for banking purposes, may be even more satisfactory than theirs.”
By the time he reached British Columbia, Clemens had earned $5,000. He sent it to Rogers to hold for the firm’s creditors.
The Charmer, which was to convey the Clemenses and Ponds on a long southwest slant down the Strait of Georgia to Victoria, arrived in Vancouver at one in the afternoon, half an hour late. After the Clemenses and the Ponds had rushed to the vessel, the captain informed them that the departure would be delayed to enable him to unload 180 tons of freight. They would have to postpone and reschedule Clemens’s performance. After the women had gone aboard, wrote Pond, Clemens told the captain, “in very plain and unpious language, his opinion of a passenger-carrying company that, for a few dollars extra, would violate their contract and obligations to the public.” The captain’s face reddened, but he said nothing. After Clemens joined the women, who apparently had overheard his outburst, he asked Pond to approach the captain and apologize for his abuse. Pond obliged, establishing amicable relations between the captain and his famous passenger.
The Victoria Times stopped its presses to insert a note informing ticketholders that Mark Twain’s performance was postponed; all telephone subscribers were notified; handbills were distributed. Nonetheless, many ticket holders appeared at the theater only to be disappointed, particularly those who came from across the straits on the Olympic Peninsula and could not remain to hear him the next night.
The Charmer’s delay was the only occasion during the North American leg of the world tour that forced the postponement of a performance. Considering the enormous sweep of territory that the Clemenses covered in North America, the number of trains and steamers on which they traveled, the forest fire through which the train carrying Clemens and Pond sped in Michigan, and the dense smoke through which they all traveled in the Pacific Northwest, their delays were remarkably few.
Still, they needed to be flexible. When they arrived in Duluth, for example, they learned that their agents in New York had forgotten about that night’s transfer to Minneapolis. Pond had to attend to it himself, although the party was in Duluth for only a few hours. More than a week later, when Clemens and Pond were traveling from their hotel in Butte to the train station (the women stayed behind), their electric trolley stopped dead after only three blocks. The power had failed. No cab was in sight. When the owner of a grocery wagon demanded ten dollars to take them to the station, Pond told him to go to hell and offered the driver of a nearby wagon “any price” to reach the train. Clemens and Pond mounted the seat next to the driver, who lashed his two horses and arrived at the station in record time. The driver asked for one dollar. Pond handed him two. The train was moving as Clemens and Pond jumped on.
Although they slept in more than twenty different hotels, in no case was the party unexpected (of course, it’s not every day that an international celebrity and his entourage arrive at your hotel). And of the twenty-two North American theaters in which Clemens performed, Major Pond complained of insufficient arrangements in only two instances, and in only one did he accuse the manager of trying to avoid his contract. The only real muddle was in Cleveland, where Clemens was delayed by two soloists and undermined by five hundred newsboys. All in all, the travel and theater arrangements worked well. So the sentiments that Clemens inscribed in a presentation copy of Roughing It, which he gave to Major Pond in Vancouver, seem entirely appropriate: “Here ends one of the smoothest and pleasantest trips across the continent that any group of five has ever made.”
Nonetheless, Clemens was dissatisfied. On board the Warrimoo, he wrote to Rogers that Pond, three years younger than himself, was “superannuated,” without gumption, intelligence, or judgment. “I must make no contract with him to platform me through America next year if I can do better.” And from India, in February, he told Rogers, “I mean to write my book (or books) before I decide on an American lecture season. I don’t see how I can stand Pond, he is such an idiot. Yet I know no other American lecture agent.”
Perhaps, as Mrs. Clemens had gently suggested at the Crookston railway station, Clemens was not entirely reasonable. Perfection itself was unlikely to have pleased him during his North American run, during that hot summer of fire and smoke, when he was plagued by hoarseness, a cold, and a hole in his leg, when he was forced to compose and memorize new routines as he traveled from one engagement to the next, when he had to change hotels more than twenty times within a forty-day period, and when, in spite of the brave face he showed to The New-York Times, he did not know if he could ever pay his debts in full.
The Charmer carried the Clemens party from Vancouver to Victoria in about six hours. Today the ferry takes about an hour and a half. The ride is steady and, during the last half hour, beautiful, as you sail between heavily wooded islands flecked with summer cottages. As you approach the dock, seagulls drift in a lazy ellipse above the water.
The house was full for Clemens’s performance in Victoria. Governor-General and Lady Aberdeen, with their small son in Highland kilts, came to hear him. When they entered fifteen minutes late, to the strains of “God Save the Queen,” the audience rose. Clemens wished that the Queen’s representatives would always attend his performances because it was not permissible to start before they arrived, and by that time the latecomers had found their seats. During his performance, the audience laughed when a kitten walked across the stage behind him. It was not until after the show that he learned why they laughed in the wrong place.
The SS Warrimoo, on which the Clemenses sailed to Sydney, was one of the two new vessels that made up the Canadian-Australian Royal Mail Steamship Company, established in 1893. Most of the passengers who had arrived with the Warrimoo in Victoria were bound for other cities, for the line provided the most direct available route from Australasia to North America.
The accident that delayed the Warrimoo’s departure would have been a disaster had the wind and sea not been calm at the time. Heavy fog at the entrance to the Juan de Fuca Strait, one of the most treacherous places to navigate on the northern Pacific coast, caused the vessel to proceed at half steam, with frequent soundings. When the captain heard breakers ahead, he shut down the engines. The vessel had almost stopped when it ran onto the Sea Lion reef, in water that navigators usually avoided. The Warrimoo’s crew pumped water ballast from the vessel’s forward compartments and then, using a nearby rock as a fulcrum, swung the steamer clear of the ledge. This, however, pushed her onto rocks, from which she was ultimately lifted by the rising tide and the efforts of her crew, who then took her to a safe anchorage in deep water.
A few fishermen visited the vessel while it was stranded. They were reported to have informed the passengers that the woods on Vancouver Island, visible from the vessel, were full of ferocious panthers as large as tigers. The passengers were said to have conscientiously recorded this information in their notebooks and diaries.
A maritime inquiry concluded that although fog had caused the accident, a chart with unreliable soundings contributed to the mishap. The vessel’s chart, which did not mark the reef, was based on soundings taken forty years before and now incorrect. Later measurements were more reliable, but these were unavailable in Sydney at the time of sailing. While the board of inquiry reported that the captain exercised due caution in steering the course and in taking frequent soundings, and while it praised him for good seamanship in getting the ship off the reef, it criticized him for not taking into account the stage of the tide and the set of the current, although the latter was of unknown quantity. Taking all factors into consideration, however, it recommended that his certificate not be revoked.
The captain was R. E. Arundell, who had been the vessel’s first mate and was now substituting for the regular captain, who was on holiday. This was Arundell’s first command. He must have been a charming fellow, if we can trust the passengers’ letter to him at the conclusion of their voyage to Victoria. They asserted that he was not to blame for the accident, expressed admiration for the “masterful way” in which he extricated the ship from its hazardous position, and thanked him for his “uniform courtesy and untiring care,” which “converted what might have been a monotonous voyage into a pleasant trip.”
Clemens’s description of him in Following the Equator is an encomium. “Our young captain was a very handsome man, tall and perfectly formed, the very figure to show up a smart uniform’s finest effects … The captain, with his gentle nature, his polish, his sweetness, his moral and verbal purity, seemed pathetically out of place in his rude and autocratic vocation. It seemed another instance of the irony of fate.” The passengers, Clemens wrote, were all sorry for the captain, who was going home under a cloud, despite the maritime board’s recommendation not to revoke his license. Everyone feared that the steamship company would dismiss him.
When the ship reached Auckland, the damage was found to be much greater than had been thought. Thirty or forty plates on the vessel’s bottom had been crumpled out of shape. One plate was so badly dented that at its joint with the next plate a gap appeared. The money spent to repair the vessel was almost one-third as much as the initial cost of building it. Had the Clemenses realized how unsafe it was, they might have waited for another ship. When the repaired Warrimoo sailed back to Victoria, Arundell was not on board. The regular captain had returned to his post and under him served a new first mate.
On Friday, August 23, the day the Warrimoo left Victoria, Clemens and Pond spent the morning buying books, cigars, and tobacco. Pond reports that Clemens bought 3,000 manila cheroots and four pounds of Durham smoking tobacco. “If perpetual smoking ever kills a man,” wrote Pond, “I don’t see how ‘Mark Twain’ can expect to escape.” Clemens, who said he “came into the world asking for a light,” claimed that it was always his rule “never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake.” The manuscript on which Following the Equator is based, now held by the New York Public Library, smells faintly of cigar smoke.
The Ponds and the Clemenses boarded the Warrimoo and lunched together for the last time. Olivia Clemens told Pond she was disappointed by the ship, but that she intended to “brave it through.” Pond photographed the three Clemenses standing at the Warrimoo’s rail, shortly before departure. Clemens is sucking on a long-stemmed pipe, the bowl of which rests in his left hand. Mrs. Clemens, wearing a pince-nez, her arms akimbo, smiles gamely. Between her parents stands Clara, arms on the rail, holding a white handkerchief in her right hand. Affixed to the rail is a large notice that all stowaways will be prosecuted at Honolulu and brought back to Victoria. Honolulu was to be the vessel’s first port of call.
A subsequent snapshot shows the Warrimoo on its way, issuing an enormous plume of coal smoke from its single stack. The Ponds and the Clemenses waved good-bye until they vanished from each other’s sight.