ONE WEEK AFTER QUITTING THE SMOKE of Victoria, the Warrimoo sailed past Diamond Head, dropped anchor near Honolulu, and waited for the pilot to board. It was night. The vessel lay one mile from the shore, close enough that passengers could see the glimmering lights of the town.
Almost thirty years before, Clemens had spent four months in the islands as a reporter for the Sacramento Union, which had engaged him to write a series of travel letters. Although he found the native Hawaiians in a degraded state, their numbers decimated by European diseases and their culture vitiated by missionaries, and although he suffered for weeks from saddle sores after riding from plantation to plantation, he remembered the islands as a paradise. For years he had longed to see them again. Now he would have an opportunity to do so, when he performed in Honolulu.
The small boat that approached the Warrimoo that Friday night did not bring the pilot, as everyone expected, but a notice that cholera had broken out. Five deaths had been reported that day. Neither passengers nor freight would be taken on, nor fresh produce for the kitchen, nor even the mails. Those passengers who disembarked would not be taken back. They might have to wait for months before the quarantine was lifted. Two Bostonians, an elderly woman and her son, who had gone to the Finger Lakes region of western New York for a holiday and gradually worked their way west, now found themselves sailing home via Sydney and London. A couple who had expected to spend a month in Honolulu, leaving three small children in Canada, also stayed with the ship, unable to inform anyone at home. Mail from Honolulu was embargoed. No cable had yet been laid between Hawaii and California. To send a cable, they would have to wait until they reached Auckland, a journey of close to two weeks. The cargo for Honolulu was offloaded onto freighters without any help from longshoremen, who were forbidden to board. Clemens had to cancel his performance and refund $500 in advance sales.
Let us hope that he missed the report, published in Sydney a few days after he arrived there, that the deaths in Honolulu were due not to cholera but to the consumption of poisoned fish. In fact, as was reported later, the scare was fully justified. Within a month after the first case was reported, sixty-two victims had died of cholera, most of them native Hawaiians.
The next day, while the offloading proceeded, Clemens could only sit under a canopy and gaze at the shore, “just as silky and velvety and lovely as ever.” Paine, his authorized biographer, likened Clemens’s banishment to Moses’ exclusion from the Promised Land. But Clemens, of course, had been there before. “If I might I would go ashore and never leave.”
The paradise from which Clemens was excluded, the Sandwich Islands, was no longer the kingdom which he had known, when it was ruled by Kamehameha V. It was now a republic. Two years before, settlers from Europe and America had toppled the reigning monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, who had alarmed them by her efforts to expand the powers of the monarchy and by her view, strenuously expressed, that Hawaii belonged to the Hawaiians. President Cleveland, to whom she had appealed for help, ordered the queen restored, but the president of the new republic refused, asserting that the United States had no standing in the matter. Seven months before the Clemenses’ visit, the queen had inspired a royalist insurrection. When it failed, she was forced to abdicate in order to win the release of her supporters from prison.
“The old imitation pomps, the fuss and feathers, have departed, and the royal trade-mark — that is about all that one could miss, I suppose,” wrote Clemens about the new republic. “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.”
Clemens adored sea voyages. He found the languid vacancies, the “eternal monotonies” restorative. After a forced march of one-night stands across the sweltering North American continent, he welcomed a three-week sea voyage. “We had the whole Pacific Ocean in front of us,” he wrote in Following the Equator, “with nothing to do but do nothing and be comfortable.”
The Warrimoo, like other transoceanic passenger liners of the day, offered most of the comforts of a good hotel. As with other such vessels, its appointments were modest, for the transformation of liners from hotel to floating palace was only just beginning. So the Warrimoo boasted no grand staircases, no opulent staterooms, no orchestras, no palm courts, no salons lavished with mahagony and sandalwood. The Clemenses were too early for that.
The Warrimoo’s cabins were outfitted with flush toilets and electric lights, but it is unlikely that the passengers enjoyed hot running water, which was not provided as a matter of course until well into the twentieth century.
If the Warrimoo’s passengers had nothing to do but be comfortable, a large staff worked hard to make them so. Both saloon-class and second-class passengers had their own bedroom stewards and salon stewards. Of the more than eighty officers and men, only about fifty-five were devoted solely to the management of the vessel and its freight, including engineers, greasers, firemen, trimmers, able-bodied seamen, and a “donkeyman,” who operated a small “donkey engine” used to power a winch.
The Warrimoo was a liner, a passenger-carrying vessel that sailed a fixed route and followed a fixed time table. Today, transoceanic liners, like the Great Lakes steamers, are extinct. Nowadays vessels that convey passengers across the ocean are either cruise ships, offering casinos, nightclubs, and organized activities to amuse their hundreds of passengers, or freighters, whose revenue is derived primarily from cargo. Most freighters carry no passengers, but those that do usually carry no more than twelve, the maximum allowed by international maritime regulations for vessels with no physician on board.
Among the ten passengers who are sailing with me from California to New Zealand and Australia is my wife, Alice, who joined me in Oakland, where we embarked for Sydney, one hundred years and two days after the Clemenses sailed from Victoria. Like the Warrimoo, our freighter will take about three weeks to reach Sydney. (Although the speed of our vessel is probably a bit greater than that of the Warrimoo, our route is longer, inasmuch as we will sail down the coast of California before setting out across the Pacific. We average about 17.5 knots per day compared to the minimum of fourteen knots required by the Warrimoo’s contract with the Canadian mails, a speed that it “easily ran.”)
Unlike the Warrimoo, which derived a substantial proportion of its revenue from passenger fares, our vessel earns relatively little from its passengers. A single one-way fare equals the revenue from merely one of the many hundreds of freight containers on board. The allocation of functions among the crew reflects the relative unimportance of the passengers. Of the twenty-five or so employees, there are only three stewards and two cooks, who serve the crew as well as us. Of course, we don’t need much done for us. The self-service kitchen in which we can prepare our own snacks contains a washing machine, drying closet, iron, and ironing board.
Heaps of luggage accompanied the Warrimoo’s passengers. Stickers announcing “not wanted on the voyage” were pasted on immense, brass-bound trunks that would be kept in the hold until their owners reached their destination. In contrast, we and our fellow passengers, who have taken very little on board, keep all our luggage in our rooms.
Unlike the Warrimoo, which was staffed by British officers and men, our freighter, owned by a British firm, employs only two British officers, the captain and the chief engineer. The junior officers and crew are from the Philippines. While the crewmen’s wages are low by British standards, they are luxurious in comparison to the average Philippine wage, so the crew are keen to keep their jobs, even though they can spend little time at home. They receive only six weeks’ leave after nine months at sea. From each port they call home, using reduced-rate telephone cards that they purchase from seamen’s associations.
The officers have a better deal, with three months on shore after six months at sea, an arrangement that would have been unworkable one hundred years ago, when it might require one month just to sail home. The British chief engineer on the vessel that took the Clemenses to Ceylon told Clemens that in thirty-three years, spent mainly in the tropics, he was home for Christmas three times.
The Warrimoo’s passengers amused themselves in much the same ways as we do on our freighter. They read; they played cards; they napped; they gazed at the sea and the enormous sky and the changing shapes of clouds; they watched the occasional albatross and pod of dolphins accompany the ship; they pointed out to one another the flying fish, which Clemens likened to “a flight of silver fruit-knives,” as the creatures leaped out of the vessel’s path.
Unlike us, the Warrimoo’s passengers engaged in what Clemens termed the “violent exercise” of shuffleboard, a deck game that required both skill and strategy, and, owing to the ship’s random rolling and pitching, left something to chance as well. Our freighter’s decks, devoted mainly to containers, have no room for shuffleboard, but we play a miniature version indoors after supper, using quarters as counters, which we hit with the edge of our hands.
Towards the end of the Warrimoo’s voyage, Clemens participated in the ship’s shuffleboard playoffs. In Following the Equator, he reported losing the final game through a series of moves so improbably bad that in retrospect he was proud of his performance. “It will take a century to produce another man,” he wrote, who could lose in so spectacular a fashion. But in fact, as he reported to Rogers, he won the game, becoming “Champion of the South Seas.”
Although he told Rogers, in a letter written a few days before landing in Sydney, that the voyage was “charming,” elsewhere Clemens recorded numerous gripes: rats and cockroaches infested the ship; the food was terrible (“furnished by the Deity and cooked by the devil”); seamen in the early morning would douse the decks, along with passengers sleeping near open portholes; and, although the vessel was going into drydock when it reached Australia, the crew were forever painting exterior surfaces, staining the passengers’ clothes. When the Clemenses’ bathroom flooded, their complaints produced no results. When a passenger requested ice for his sick wife, he was told that he would have to wait two hours, even though Clemens was convinced that ice was readily available. He worried about the absence of a watch at the rear of the vessel: what would happen if someone at the stern fell overboard?
The regular captain’s pet dog, who had remained on board while his master stayed in Sydney, would decorate the decks. So when a notice appeared reminding passengers that ship rules forbade smoking in the cabins and the main reception rooms, Clemens took the doctor aside, showed him a turd, and told him that as long as the animal was allowed to roam freely, the captain should keep quiet about breaking the rules.
Anxiety may have colored his view of the Warrimoo. After about two weeks at sea, Olivia Clemens wrote to her sister that Clemens “is pretty cheerful — in fact he appears entirely cheerful — but underneath he has a steady, unceasing feeling that he is never going to be able to pay his debts.”
One evening, shortly before sunset, our captain shows us the navigation bridge and its array of instruments, one of which receives satellite readings of the ship’s exact location. Why, then, I ask the captain, does one of the junior officers take readings with a sextant? The captain explains that if officers practice their skills with a sextant, they can be independent of the fancy equipment, which may occasionally fail. Ability to read the sextant is a requirement for the young man’s promotion to the next grade.
I ask if the watch uses radar to avoid collisions at sea. “No,” says the captain, “they use their eyes.” By and large, then, the officers on this vessel could navigate it by means of last century’s maritime methods, and to some extent still do.
I told the captain that Clemens, who believed that vermin were an inevitable accompaniment of a South Seas voyage, complained about the excess number of rats and cockroaches on the Warrimoo. The captain said that to avoid rats, you must keep the decks clean, because rats on the wharves can smell food on deck. In addition, you must coat the lines that tie a vessel to the wharf with an antirodent substance. Our vessel was certified rat-free when it tied up in Los Angeles. As for cockroaches, the vessel is sprayed every two weeks with a poisonous liquid that becomes a powder, which the cockroaches track into their nests. After about two weeks on board, we’ve seen no evidence of either rats or cockroaches.
In addition to playing shuffleboard, reading, card playing, and staring vacantly at the sea and sky, the Warrimoo’s passengers told each other stories. Clemens wrote in Following the Equator that “we have come far from the snake liar and the fish liar, and there was rest and peace in the thought; but now we have reached the realm of the boomerang liar, and sorrow is with us once more.” He related several of the boomerang stories he heard, including that of the Australian passenger who said that his brother saw a boomerang kill a bird and bring it to the thrower.
Clemens was no slouch as a teller of tales that lacked, as he said in Portland, “a good deal in the way of facts.” In Following the Equator, he informed us that “an enormously rich brewer” on board the Warrimoo had promised to give $10,000 to an infant due to be born in steerage class if the child arrived on the rich man’s birthday. The baby emerged at the exact moment that the vessel was crossing the International Date Line. The doctor thought he was born on Tuesday and the nurse thought he was born on Sunday. Monday, the day that dropped from the calendar, was the brewer’s birthday. One needn’t check the records to suspect that the story is too implausible to be true.
One evening, Alice and I are talking to the captain over a postprandial coffee. The conversation turns to stowaways. After he tells us of his experiences with them, I describe the sign on the Warrimoo that promised to return unauthorized passengers to Victoria, where they would be prosecuted. I ask him what will be done in Suva, which we reach tomorrow, to discourage stowaways from boarding the vessel.
“Wait and see,” he says.