AS YOU WALK THROUGH the ancient forest on Bluff Hill, you reach an opening, a rocky headland overlooking the sea. You are standing above Bluff, New Zealand’s oldest European settlement and its southernmost town, on the south coast of the South Island. Only Stewart Island, a barely inhabited teardrop a few miles away, and a few wind-scoured islets lie between you and Antarctica. Below, you can see the harbor at which the Mararoa docked. You can also see, on a peninsula at the opposite side of the harbor, gray smoke spewing from one of the largest aluminum smelters in the world. An eyesore as well as the region’s biggest employer, its fumes can be smelled from the little town of Bluff.
The Mararoa landed on Guy Fawkes Day, but if Clemens saw any of the traditional observances, he left no record of it. On that morning, at least in some of the larger towns, New Zealand schoolchildren paraded through the streets with straw-headed effigies of Guy Fawkes capped with tattered hats, dressed in worn-out clothes, and stuffed with grass or newspaper. Thus armed, the children begged for pennies to buy firecrackers. That night they tossed the effigies onto bonfires as high as houses and set off their firecrackers as they watched the blaze. Fawkes had been dead for almost three hundred years.
Modern New Zealand, long independent of the English Houses of Parliament, continues to commemorate the failure of an ancient plot to blow them up. Although bonfires seem to have gone out of fashion on Guy Fawkes Day, fireworks are still set off, with municipalities often organizing official displays. Children no longer finance their firecrackers by begging, but, as was true at the turn of the century, a few are still badly burned every year.
From Bluff, Clemens and his party took a train to Invercargill, about seventeen miles north, where that night he was to make his New Zealand debut. From the train windows he looked west at the Southern Alps, which run the length of the South Island. In his journal entry for that day he noted the country’s natural beauty. His schedule, alas, was too crowded for a visit to the most spectacular region, the South Island’s majestic west coast, with its glaciers, fjords, waterfalls, lakes, and mountains. Today a visiting celebrity could book a ride in a five-passenger ski plane, land on a glacier, and walk along the icy slopes, six thousand feet high, with other day trippers, and be back in time for an evening performance. As it was, Clemens had to be content with a distant view of the snowy mountains. He noted with ironic surprise that the grandest of these, Mount Cook, the loftiest peak in Australasia, was not yet named for Wellington or Victoria. Its Maori name, Aorangi, means “piercer of the clouds.” He regretted the change.
On the day Clemens arrived in Invercargill, the New Zealand Railroad advertised a special train back to Bluff, leaving “15 minutes after Mark Twain closes his remarks to-night.” The audience that greeted him in the Theatre Royal was one of the largest that Invercargill had ever seen, with many forced to stand. A local speculator was said to have profited handsomely by buying up the house. The Theatre Royal, whose cast-iron façade had been shipped out from Melbourne in the 1860s, burned down in 1983. Today a library and a multistory garage occupy its site.
Modern Invercargill’s rectangular grid, parks, and wide streets date from the mid-nineteenth century, when a mile-square settlement was planned on what was then a dense forest. The city never grew large enough to justify the broadness of the principal streets, Dee and Tay, which today seem almost ludicrously wide in view of the low structures that line them and the sparseness of their traffic. In 1872, Anthony Trollope described Invercargill as a “small English town,” but by the time the Clemenses arrived, its cultural amenities included the Invercargill Atheneum, which boasted a statue of Minerva on its roof. Inside, its shelves provided creeping space for a tuatara, a four-legged reptile with a crest of soft spines on its neck and back, thought to live as long as 150 years.
The tuatara (“spiny back” in Maori) became extinct throughout the world, along with the dinosaur, except in New Zealand. But now, after more than a thousand years of human settlement, the tuatara has almost disappeared from New Zealand as well. By Clemens’s time it was no longer found in the wild on the South Island or the North Island, the two major land masses which form the country. A tuatara breeding program at Invercargill's Southland Museum and Art Gallery a successor to the Invercargill Atheneum, displays several of the living creatures, including Henry, two and a half feet long. Henry is more than one hundred years old. He was alive, in other words, when Clemens performed at the Theatre Royal, and it may even have been Henry who gazed haughtily from the shelves of the old Atheneum while theatergoers rushed for places to hear Mark Twain. If not, at least one survivor reminds us of the earlier establishment. The Atheneum’s helmeted statue of Minerva, which escaped conversion into scrap metal during the Second World War because not enough of it was salvageable, endures. Today, with a spear in one hand and a laurel wreath in the other, the goddess stands outside a huge white pyramid, the new home of the Southland Museum and Art Gallery She now presides over Maori artifacts, natural history exhibits, and local arts and crafts displays, all housed within the largest pyramid in the southern hemisphere. And, as she did a hundred years ago, she guards a living tuatara.
The day after his New Zealand debut, Clemens and his party took the train to Dunedin, about sixty-five miles northeast of Invercargill, on the east coast. “A lovely summer morning; brilliant blue sky,” he wrote in Following the Equator. “A few miles out from Invercargill, passed through vast level green expanses snowed over with sheep.” Although new technology has increased productivity — for example, airplanes drop lime and fertilizer on the fields to keep them green all year round — the scene has changed little. As you travel from Invercargill to Dunedin, you pass more sheep than you could count in a lifetime of insomnia. Today, as one hundred years ago, the fields are a vivid coloring-book green, still threatened by gorse and broom, whose waterfall-spills of glorious yellow persist in delighting the nonfarmer. Lambs still cuddle against their mothers’ flanks.
On the train to Dunedin, Clemens heard the results of the Melbourne Cup, a horse race run on Cup Day, which he characterized as “the Australasian National Day,” the “supreme” day that “overshadows all other holidays and specialised days of whatever sort in that congeries of colonies,” a day on which whoever can afford it goes to Melbourne, even from New Zealand. That year’s winner, Auraria, won the Caulfield Cup as well, a feat accomplished by only ten or so horses since the Melbourne Cup was established in 1861. One hundred years after Auraria took both cups in 1895, another horse, Doriemus, did so as well.
Smythe later reported that “the Australian journals contended one against the other in making [Clemens] alluring offers to write a description of the ‘Melbourne Cup,’” but he refused. Clemens, who was sorry to miss “a spectacle such as is never to be seen in Australasia elsewhere,” told his journal that “everybody bet on the wrong horse.” Maybe so, but a solicitor from Christchurch, New Zealand, won £13,500, almost a million and a quarter dollars in today’s money, in a sweepstakes based on the Cup.
“The people are Scotch,” wrote Clemens of Dunedin. “They stopped here on their way from home to heaven — thinking they had arrived.” When the Otago Early Settlers Association adopted a new set of rules in 1898 to mark the province’s fiftieth anniversary, it stipulated that Mark Twain’s comment be adopted as colophon. Even today, perhaps thirty percent of Dunedin’s population is of Scottish descent, with the Dunedin telephone directory listing page after page of surnames beginning with Mac or Mc.
Dunedin, whose name is based on the Scots Gaelic for Edinburgh, is often called “the Edinburgh of the South.” Certainly Dunedin is reminiscent of Edinburgh, with its hilly site, Gothic Revival churches, stone buildings, and the lovely patchwork hills which surround it. Strengthening the resemblance is the frequency of rain and gray skies.
As in Edinburgh, good Scotch whiskey can be readily obtained, which was also true in Clemens’s day, although, as he wrote in his journal, it was officially a dry town. “When men want drink,” he had earlier told an interviewer in Australia, “they’ll have it in spite of all the laws ever passed; when they don’t want it, no drink will ever be sold.” Sydney and Melbourne were officially dry on Sundays, he continued, but any stranger could see that “the most inveterate boozer can get all he wants while he is able to pay for it.” Clemens argued that “what marriage is to morality a properly conducted licensed liquor traffic is to sobriety’’ He concluded the interview after looking at his watch. “Time is pressing; come let us solve the liquor problem in our own way. What are you going to have?”
Clemens arrived at Dunedin about an hour before his performance at eight. Greeting this apostle of liquor licensing were the members of New Zealand’s Presbyterian Synod, all of whom appeared to be present. The clerics had concluded their annual session that afternoon. “Whether this was a case of cause and effect,” one critic commented, “can of course be only a matter of conjecture … Certainly there could not have been a more merry audience,” because “there was apparently only one serious person in the building, and that was the entertainer himself, who told his stories in a matter-of-fact way as if utterly unconscious of their drollery”
The next morning the three Clemenses visited Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Moreland Hocken on Moray Place. When introduced to the Hockens’ eleven-year-old daughter, Gladys, Clemens joked, “My, how you’ve grown since I last saw you.” Her father, born in England, had settled in Dunedin in 1862, the year after the discovery of gold in the region was transforming the settlement into a large town. His great energy, pleasing personality, and medical skills quickly made him one of Dunedin’s most eminent practioners. During the gold rush of the 1860s, when typhoid and diphtheria raged through the hastily constructed and rapidly growing settlement, his earnings were high, enabling him to build, in 1871, the handsome two-story house, with gardens and greenhouses, that the Clemenses visited. This was “Ataharpara,” after the Maori word for the first glimmerings of dawn.
Not only was he Otago Medical School’s first lecturer in clinical medicine and not only did he serve as president of the Otago Medical Association, he also discovered, in a government basement buried in a pile of trash, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, now on display at the National Library in Wellington. The signing of this treaty, between Maori chiefs and the Crown, is regarded as the beginning of New Zealand’s modern history and is commemorated every year as New Zealand’s national day An American’s finding the original Declaration of Independence would be akin to Hocken’s discovery But it is neither his recovery of the Waitangi Treaty nor his medical career for which he is remembered. His name endures because of his superb collection of printed matter, manuscripts, photographs, paintings, and artifacts relating to New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific. In 1897, two years after the Clemenses’ visit, Hocken offered his collections to the nation. They are now housed in Dunedin at the Otago Museum and at the Hocken Library.
When the Clemenses came to call, Hocken — short, bearded, bespectacled, enthusiastic, and highly cultivated — introduced them to his treasures. Clemens admired the portraits of Maori chieftains. Unlike the Aborigines of Australia, he wrote in Following the Equator, “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.” Their tattooing, he added, ought to make them look savage 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.”
Moko, or Maori tattooing, was a mark of rank, its absence indicating low social status. The untattooed face was ugly in Maori eyes, and indeed even to Clemens the undecorated European face seemed “unpleasant and ignoble.” But beauty had its price. The process of tattooing was long and painful. Tiny bone chisels incised deep cuts to create the main lines, with a full-face tattoo requiring many sessions. While female facial tattooing was generally limited to the chin and lips, male faces were often fully decorated, with a large spiral on each cheek, smaller spirals on each side of the nose, and curving lines sweeping down from nose to chin and upward over the temples from between the brows. By the time the Clemenses reached New Zealand, facial tattooing was dying out, a casualty of westernization. It is now enjoying a modest revival, along with growing Maori assertiveness and self-confidence.
Hocken showed the Clemenses his Maori wood and jade carvings and gave them what Clemens described as “a ghastly curiosity — a lignified caterpillar with a plant growing out of the back of its neck — a plant with a slender stem four inches high.” The oddity was a larva that had partially buried itself underground in preparation for becoming a ghost moth. Spores fell into soil on the caterpillar’s neck and began to sprout. The plant sent roots through the creature and into the ground, sucking up the life of the worm, which slowly died as it turned to wood, its smallest features preserved. This happened not by accident, Clemens wrote, but by nature’s design, another example, he noted in his journal, of “Nature’s attitude toward all life,” which is “profoundly vicious, treacherous and malignant.” Hocken’s lesson in natural history became the occasion for a bitter essay in his journal, about the malevolence of nature. He amplified this essay in his manuscript account of the world tour, an essay that was truncated in Following the Equator but, preserved in the British version, More Tramps Abroad.
Today the Friends of the Hocken Collections hold an annual dinner; its theme this year is the centenary of Mark Twain’s visit to Dunedin. The dinner’s venue is the upstairs dining room of a hall built on the site of Ataharpara, the Hockens’ home on Moray Place. The guests this night hear a talk about teaching Huckleberry Finn in America, listen to a drawling, deadpan Mark Twain impersonator deliver some of the master’s one-liners, and examine a lignified caterpillar, loaned by the Otago Museum, which houses Hocken’s enthnographic and natural history collections.
Too late for the dinner, Alice and I drop in on Anthony Harris at the Otago Museum and ask if we might see its lignified caterpillar. He enters a storeroom that emits the lovely aroma of cedar, extracts a specimen box, brings it out, and opens it. Inside are two such caterpillars, every feature and wrinkle distinct, with the remains of the plants that turned them to wood. Mr. Harris says that these date from Hocken’s period and were likely present in the doctor’s collection when the Clemenses visited him.
That evening Clemens gave his second Dunedin performance. He stepped onto the platform seemingly out of breath and claimed that he had been wandering about for the past forty-five minutes looking for the hall That night he introduced a new item, which told how a Mrs. McWilliams, terrified by what she thought to be a thunderstorm, hid herself in a wardrobe and forced her husband to resort to various strategems to keep him from being struck by lightning. Following her frantic instructions, he donned a fireman’s helmet, stood on a chair with its legs set in glass tumblers, and rang a large dinner bell for several minutes. The clamor attracted a crowd that informed him that a cannon had been firing in celebration of Garfield’s nomination. Clemens’s burlesque was inspired, perhaps, by his wife’s fear of lightning.
This performance was originally scheduled to be the last in Dunedin, but demand justified a third appearance. Smythe scheduled the extra show for the following night at “popular prices,” which meant a 25 percent reduction for the most expensive seats and a 50 percent reduction for the cheapest. Like the first two At Homes, it was well attended. Clemens wrote to his nephew that a woman traveled for two hundred miles to hear him. One reviewer commented that “the author of ’The Innocents Abroad’ has neither surprised nor disappointed his audiences: he simply satisfied them. What higher tribute need be paid?”
The next day, before traveling north, he visited the Otago Museum, the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, and the Otago Art Society’s nineteenth annual exhibition. William Mathew Hodgkins, president of the Otago Art Society, was his guide. Hodgkins was a principal founder of the Public Art Gallery (the first in New Zealand), the driving force behind the Otago Art Society, and a gifted landscape watercolorist. His daughter Frances was to become New Zealand’s most famous artist. If he was not the father of New Zealand art, as his daughter claimed, he was the most prominent of its three or four most important promoters during the second half of the nineteenth century. He was a good friend of Dr. Hocken. Like Hocken, he was born in England and arrived in Dunedin during the gold rush. Unlike Hocken, he was born in modest circumstances, but his emigration to the colonies enabled him to improve his social and economic position. Starting as a clerk, he became a solicitor and a much-loved, honored, and influential citizen.
Hodgkins attended the second of Clemens’s At Homes and sketched him twice as he told the watermelon story (according to the artist’s notation), a story told at that performance. In one of these sketches, we see the performer in a characteristic pose, supporting an elbow with one hand while pressing his cheek with the other, as if, in the words of a Dunedin reporter, “suffering the agonies of an 80-horsepower, stump-jumping toothache.”
Clemens was impressed by what Hodgkins showed him. “Think of a town like this having two such collections as this, and a Society of Artists,” he wrote in Following the Equator. “It is so 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.”
He performed that evening at Timaru, a coastal town about 125 miles northeast of Dunedin. Mrs. Clemens and Clara had continued up to Christchurch, where Clemens would join them in a few days. His performance drew a mixed reception. A Timaru critic wrote that when Mark Twain speaks, “the moderate enjoyment of a reader becomes the unrestrainable delight of the listener.” Still, he reported that many in the audience complained that “Mark Twain was not funny all the time.” The critic explained that “such people must have been misinformed as to the character of the man. Mark Twain is not a mere ‘funny’ man. His humour is but the foam floating upon a deep stream of serious thought and of liquid wisdom.” Clemens himself, during one of his first interviews in Sydney a few months earlier, had commented on the relationship between laughter and tears. “The two are as often as not simultaneous … Look at the poor fool in ‘Lear’; look at Lamb, getting the quaintest, most spirit-moving effects with the tears just trembling on the verge of every jest; look at Thackeray and Dickens, and all the bright host who have gained niches in the gallery of the immortals. They have one thing always in their mind, no matter what parts they make their puppets play. Behind the broadest grins, the most exquisitely ludicrous situations, they know there is the grinning skull, and that all roads lead along the dusty road to death.”
The day following his Timaru performance was a Sunday. After five consecutive At Homes, Clemens deserved a rest. He stayed in bed for part of the day, writing letters and attending to his journal. He decided not to watch an outdoor meeting of the Salvation Army in Timaru because his presence there would cause a stir and interrupt the Army’s work, but he did drive five miles south of town to see the remains of a magnificent new three-masted steamer that had run aground on a reef a few years before and could not be refloated. Like the Warrimoo, it had been sailing with antiquated charts in dense fog.
Saturday was the birthday of the Prince of Wales, but in an early example of a long weekend, Monday was treated as a holiday as well. On that day Clemens retraced his steps, traveling from Timaru to Oamaru, about fifty miles southwest along the coast. His train, he wrote in Following the Equator, was scheduled to travel at twenty and a half miles an hour, “but it is fast enough, the outlook upon sea and land is so interesting, and the cars so comfortable … 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 Oamaru, Smythe used the Monday holiday as an excuse to advertise lower ticket prices. Demand had been slack owing to competition from other shows and concerts that evening at lower tariffs. Even with lower prices, the theater was not filled. Dogs attended, however, and caused the only dogfight Clemens observed in his New Zealand venues. Although attendance was relatively sparse, Clemens’s performance received an extremely favorable review.
When Clemens wrote that the New Zealand railroad displayed proper nineteenth-century spirit, he referred, of course, to technological advance and change. He might be surprised, were he to visit the town today, to see its efforts to preserve the nineteenth century. Oamaru boasts perhaps the most complete Victorian streetscape in New Zealand, with numerous nineteenth-century buildings standing one next to the other in a fairly good state of preservation. They survive in part because they are built of locally quarried, easily worked limestone. Had there been a ready supply of wood nearby, many of the buildings would have been lost to fire, as in other New Zealand towns. Another reason for their survival is that the town’s commercial importance declined, as shipping shifted to larger ports. Oamaru port finally closed in 1970. There were few economic incentives to replace Victorian buildings with modern structures. When you walk through Oamaru’s original business district alongside the harbor, you see opulent commercial structures — built as hotels, banks, offices, and grain and wool warehouses — fronted by elaborate neoclassical façades.
A civic trust is buying and renovating these empty structures with the aim of developing the historic area as a major tourist attraction. A few local businesses have already moved in. A bookbinder employs nineteenth-century methods. Through his window you can see a wooden screw for compressing pages. A restored hotel bar, open on Friday nights, sprinkles its floors with sawdust and offers beers brewed in the fashion of the late nineteenth century. A workshop produces penny-farthing cycles to order.
As we stand outside the cycle workshop, a red-haired young man rides toward us on a penny-farthing. He sees us gawking, dismounts gracefully, and tells us that it takes only ten minutes to learn to ride one. Perhaps, but remembering Clemens’s humorous essay on the subject, we are doubtful. If it takes ten minutes to learn, it takes no time at all to fall off.
The splendid Victorian buildings and their period businesses are not alone in linking Oamaru to its past. As the dusk fades into night, blue penguins begin their nightly emergence from the sea. Oamaru was and remains a breeding colony for these birds, which, at about fourteen inches in height and weighing two pounds, are the world’s smallest penguins. By the time of Clemens’s visit, their breeding grounds had been degraded, after first becoming a quarry and then a dump, and the colony had declined. Nonetheless, the birds continued to repair to Oamaru for the breeding season, August to December, after seven months at sea, and as Clemens’s audience was applauding his entrance, the penguins were tumbling onto the beach and braying to their chicks on the hill above.
Today the colony is protected and the flora of its breeding area has been restored. Two wooden bleachers enable you to watch the birds return from their day’s foraging at sea. Their indigo backs glistening like wet fish, they waddle across the beach, shimmy up a steep bank, then huddle together at the top. When a critical mass of birds is achieved, they dash across an open space to their burrows in the rocky hill above, their bodies bent low over the ground. Their huddle, dash, and crouch protect them from avian predators found in other breeding sites but not in this one.
After watching the penguins race along their immemorial path, Alice and I return to our hotel, the Brydone. Clemens probably stayed there too — it was then the Queens Hotel — because it was, as it is today, the best hotel in town. We ascend its elegantly curving staircase to our room, grazing the ghost of Sam Clemens as he descends, cigar in hand, in search of a hot Scotch.
“It was Junior England all the way to Christchurch — in fact, just a garden,” Clemens wrote in Following the Equator, about his 140-mile journey northeast from Oamaru. This scenery, he told a reporter, was “the most charming I have seen.” One hundred years later you can still admire the blue and green of the sea and “the green fields and the trim hedges with the cottages nestling in a clump of trees.” But when you choose to drive, as we have, rather than take a train or bus, it’s harder to enjoy the view if you want to avoid driving into a ditch. Unlike the modern driver, Clemens could devote himself to the scenery
On his arrival in Christchurch, the president and members of the Savage Club welcomed him and escorted him to Coker’s Hotel. This grand hotel, once one of the most fashionable in New Zealand, became a backpackers’ lodge about a year and a half ago. Longtime guests still arrive, to find not the doorman and bellboys they expect, but a locked door that must be buzzed for admittance.
At the hotel, Clemens met interviewers. He was surprised by the great cities of Australia, he said. Before his tour, he had never talked to anyone who had been there. On a topic closer to home, he said he saw no solution to “the negro problem,” although he was encouraged by the declining percentage of blacks to whites in the South.
Asked how colonial audiences compared with American and British ones, he said that “colonial audiences at once are friendly with you. They encourage you to give your best. You feel as soon as you step on the platform that they are your friends, that they wish you to succeed, and that puts fire and mettle into you, and puts you at once on terms with them.” The same is true for English audiences. But the audiences in America are different. “They come prepared to demand that you give them the best you have got, and they will therefore feel to you somewhat critical … They have made a contract with you to give them something, and they hold you strictly to your part of the bargain, and all the time they are watching to see you don’t go back on it.” No audience could have demonstrated their appreciation and affection more than the audience at his first Christchurch At Home. At the conclusion of his performance, after several minutes of stamping and cheering, they sang a rousing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”
He concluded his third and final show by telling his audience that he had enjoyed himself in Christehurch, where “he left the crops flourishing and everybody prosperous, which was very satisfactory to him.” Afterwards, the Savage Club gave him a late supper at the Canterbury Provincial Council Chamber, where the menu included Mayonnaise à Mons. Thomas Sawyer, Poudin à la tête de Wilson, and Gelée au vin Huckleberry. The members welcomed him with their war whoop “Ake, ake, ake, kia kaha!” and elected him an honorary member, the first in the club’s history. The honor, he said, made him feel “as large as your great moa — and if I go on dissipating like this I shall be as extinct as your great moa.” A few days earlier he had seen a skeleton of the extinct, giant bird.
He warned the members that if prohibition came to town, they could expect difficulties. He told them that in America, a few years before, a stranger came to a dry town and discovered that the only place he could get a drink was at a pharmacy. When he asked the pharmacist for a drink, he found he needed a doctor’s prescription, except for snakebite. “The man said, ‘Where’s the snake?’ So the apothecary gave him the snake’s address, and he went off. Soon after, however, he came back and said, Tor goodness’ sake, give me a drink. That snake is engaged for months ahead.’ “ “Christchurch is an English town,” Clemens wrote in Following the Equator, “with an English-park annex, and a winding English brook just like the Avon — and named the Avon … Its grassy banks are bordered by the stateliest and most impressive weeping willows to be found in the world, I suppose … It is a settled old community, with all the serenities, the graces, the conveniences, and the comforts of the ideal home-life. If it had an Established Church and social inequality it would be England over again with hardly a lack.”
The “settled old community” had been founded only forty-five years before, in 1850, when the first settlers arrived. The Church of England had planned the settlement, which was intended for English Anglicans, and its cathedral stands at the historic and geographic center of town. If the church was ever parochial, it is not so today. A new stained-glass window, devoted to the Pacific Islanders, portrays Jesus with a brown face (in an unfortunate slip, the hands and feet are white), and its book of prayer offers the liturgy not only in English but in Fijian, Maori, and Tongan as well.
Nearby stand the Canterbury Provincial Council Buildings, in whose Council Chamber the Savage Club entertained Clemens. Provincial councils administered New Zealand until 1876, when they were abolished. Their revenues arose from land sales, and inasmuch as few Maori lived in Canterbury, the provincial government there had much land to sell. The income paid for this splendid neoGothic complex on the banks of the Avon, the only council house to have survived.
In Christchurch, the Clemenses were befriended by the Joseph Kinseys, whose daughter May was about Clara’s age. Although Kinsey, who was born and educated in England, had lived in New Zealand for only fifteen years when he met the Clemenses, he already headed his own shipping firm. Clemens found in the Kinsey home a copy of Tom Sawyer, which May had read so often it was in tatters. On the inside front cover, Clemens wrote her a note, in which he said that age is “disreputable” in a human, but “when an author observes the signs of it in a book of his own in another person’s possession he recognizes that in that case age is a most pleasant & respectable thing.”
The Kinseys took the Clemenses to the Botanical Gardens, which were founded in the middle of the last century, when the Albert Edward oak was planted to commemorate the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandra of Denmark. The great oak still stands. As you might expect, the lawns and colorful flower beds are beautifully tended. What is astonishing are the superb trees, so tall that you can’t appreciate their height without human figures nearby — a stray boy from the adjoining Christ’s Church School will serve as an unconscious yardstick for you as he walks by in his gray and black striped blazer.
Boys come from all over New Zealand to attend this boarding school, whose lawns are the sort that in England are said to require two hundred years to perfect. If you enter the quadrangle at the lunch break, you will see boys who have left the refectory relaxing in the shade of the cloisters, and if you hear them talking to one another, you will hear an accent that would not be out of place at Eton. They say that Christchurch is the most English town outside England.
On a rainy night, their last in Christchurch, the Clemenses and Smythe boarded a train for Lyttleton, the port of Christchurch. They were scheduled to sail to Auckland, about 475 miles away on the North Island, via Wellington and New Plymouth. Mr. Kinsey and his daughter, who accompanied them to the port, gave them Maori artifacts and a stuffed platypus. In a thank-you note written from Auckland, Mrs. Clemens said that her husband held the creature himself when moving from train to ship to train. “He says it is his most treasured possession. He does not think even his wife beater surpasses it.”
The Clemenses and Smythe boarded the Union Company’s Flora on Saturday, November 16. This was Anniversary Day in Canterbury Province, with its race meetings and shows, which had attracted many people from the North Island. One of the two vessels that would ordinarily have taken them back to the North Island was removed from service, so passengers for two boats had to be jammed into one. The Flora had not been built to the same standard as most Union Company vessels; the company had recently bought it, along with seven sister ships, from a financially distressed line, and regarded it not as a “Company ship” but as inferior.
“The people who sailed in the Flora that night may forget some other things if they live a good while, but they will not live long enough to forget that,” Clemens wrote in Following the Equator. The vessel was dangerously overcrowded. Had it gone down that night, he claimed, half the passengers would have perished. Mrs. Clemens and Clara and two other women shared a tiny room without towels, pillows, or bed linen, but they were better off than Clemens and Smythe, who slept in berths made up in the lounge. “I had a cattle-stall in the main stable,” Clemens wrote, “a cavern” in which two long files of double-decker bunks, separated by a calico curtain, had been set out, with the males on one side and the females on the other. “The place was as dark as the soul of the Union Company.” In her thank-you letter to Mr. Kinsey, Mrs. Clemens wrote that “we comfort ourselves now that if we should at any time be compelled to go steerage it could bring us little of experience that would be new.”
“When the vessel got out into the heavy seas and began to pitch and wallow,” Clemens wrote, “the cavern-prisoners became immediately sea-sick, and then the peculiar results that ensued laid all my previous experiences of the kind well away in the shade. And the wails, the groans, the cries, the shrieks, the strange ejaculations — it was wonderful.”
Clemens’s English publisher, probably fearful of a lawsuit, cut more than half the author’s account of that voyage, with its colorful excoriation of both the Union Company and the Flora. The American edition gives a more complete version, in which we see a master of invective at work. The Union Company would remember his scalding condemnation for the next hundred years.