THEY REACHED GISBORNE the next day, but heavy seas prevented them from landing. Their vessel, the Rotomahana, anchored in Poverty Bay, a mile from shore, and waited for a launch to bring twenty-five passengers to the ship. The launch, wrote Clemens, “was an object of thrilling interest; she would climb to the summit of a billow, reel drunkenly there a moment, dim and gray in the driving storm of spindrift, then make a plunge like a diver, and remain out of sight until one had given her up, then up she would dart again, on a steep slant toward the sky, shedding Niagaras of water from her forecastle — and this she kept up, all the way out to us.”
Passengers were transferred to the Rotomahana by means of a “primitive basket-chair,” which was hoisted above the ship and then lowered onto the deck, “seldom nearer level than a ladder.” A young seaman, in a sou’wester and a yellow waterproof suit, sat in the chair “to be a protection to the lady-comers,” some of whom sat in his lap as he placed his arms around them. An illustration for Following the Equator, which appeared two years later, in 1897, shows the occupants of a basket-chair as it swings over the churning water: two pretty women, wearing hats and leg-of-mutton sleeves, holding tight to a smiling sailor.
Among the incoming passengers was a constable, along with four prisoners he was escorting to jail. When Clemens learned that one of the latter faced a year-long sentence, he said “I guess it ought to be shortened to six months after that trip in the tender.”
The basket chair not only brought passengers from the tender to the Rotomahana, it also transferred passengers from the Rotomahana to the tender. Although the maneuver caused no injuries, Clara recalled years later that occasionally the basket landed upside down and that screams could be heard over the thunder of the sea. Clemens, viewing the transfer to shore as too dangerous, elected to stay on board. Smythe had to cancel the Gisborne performance.
Mrs. Clemens observed her fiftieth birthday that day. Her husband told her jokingly that she had either missed her birthday or that it had not yet occurred, because the anniversary exists as it does in America, “not here where we have flung out a day and closed up the vacancy” She was, perhaps, in need of cheering. To her sister she wrote, “I do not like it one single bit. Fifty years old — think of it; that seems very far on.”
They reached Napier early the next morning and proceeded to their hotel, where three cages of canaries on a nearby porch so irritated Clemens that he had them removed. A canary’s song, he told his journal, was “but the equivalent of scratching a nail on a window-pane. I wonder what sort of disease it is that enables a person to enjoy the canary” Perhaps the eruption of a new carbuncle contributed to his crankiness. Two physicians came to his room to examine him. After concluding that he ought to rest for a few days, they recommended that his appearance the following night be canceled. “We should have preferred that to-night’s lecture had also been postponed,” they wrote in a note to Smythe, “had it been possible to give timely notice to the public.”
According to a critic who reviewed his performance that night, the audience was grateful to their visitor “for sacrificing himself on the altar of our curiosity.” Among the audience were plenty of dogs. “At Napier,” he told his journal, there was a “sign up, ‘Dogs positively forbidden in the dress circle.’ Tacit permission to fill up the rest of the house.” Following his doctors’ advice, he canceled the following night’s show, disappointing ticketholders if not their dogs. “I wish I had been born with false teeth and a false liver and false carbuncles,” he wrote in Following the Equator. “I should get along better.”
The next day he wrote to his close friend, Joseph Twitchell, “one of the best of men,” Clemens once said, “although a clergyman.” Twitchell, handsome, athletic, and enthusiastic, who enjoyed Clemens’s profanity and off-color jokes, was the pastor of an affluent congregation in Hartford (Clemens once called Twitchell’s pulpit “the Church of the Holy Speculators”). He had co-officiated at the Clemenses’ wedding in Elmira twenty-five years earlier, in 1870, and after the Clemenses moved to Hartford the next year, they saw him often. It was a conversation with Twitchell that stimulated Clemens to prepare the series of articles that eventually evolved into Life on the Mississippi, and it was Twitchell’s companionship during a European ramble that enabled him to compose A Tramp Abroad.
Now Clemens was writing to him from a hotel bed in Napier. “I think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here at Napier instead of in some hotel in the center of a noisy city. Here we have the smooth & placidly complaining sea at our door, with nothing between us & it but 20 yards of shingle — & hardly a suggestion of life in that space to mar it or make a noise. Away down here fifty-five degrees south of the equator this sea seems to murmur in an unfamiliar tongue — a foreign tongue — a tongue bred among the ice-fields of the antarctic — a murmur with a note of melancholy in it proper to the vast unvisited solitudes it has come from. It was very delicious and solacing to wake in the night & find it still pulsing there. I wish you were here — land, but it would be fine!” Twitchell would have cheered him up. “Day before yesterday was Livy’s birthday (underworld time),” Clemens told him, “& tomorrow will be mine. I shall be 60 — no thanks for it!”
Clemens passed his birthday in Napier, which he left two days later, well in advance of the devastating earthquake and fire that destroyed the town in 1931. From Napier the Clemenses journeyed about ninety miles southwest by train to Palmerston North, where Clemens was to appear that night. Their journey was broken for a brief lunch at Waitukurau. In the restaurant Clemens mistook a framed picture to represent the death of Napoleon Ill’s son, Lulu, in 1879. He broke into the conversation: “Do you remember when the news came to Paris —” Mrs. Clemens, whose back was to the picture, replied, “Of the killing of the prince?” “Yes,” her husband asked her, “but what prince?” “Napoleon. Lulu.” Her response convinced Clemens that he had “telegraphed” a thought to her. She ought to have mentioned some recent news, he argued later, because they had been living in Paris for a long stay that had ended only seven months previously. Instead she thought of an incident from a brief visit sixteen years ago. “Here was a clear case of mental telegraphy,” he wrote in Following the Equator. “How do I know? Because I telegraphed an error… She had to get the error from my head — it existed nowhere else.”
Their hotel in Palmerston North was, as Clemens noted in his journal, memorable. Its features included a “stunning Queen of Sheba style of barmaid,” too dignified to perform any of the tasks he requested after she answered his bell; a red-faced, boorish manager who kept his hat on while talking to a lady; tiny rooms for which keys could not be found before midnight; and thin partitions that allowed him to hear an extraordinary piano concert early in the morning, “straight average of three right notes to four wrong ones, but played with eager zeal and gladness … and considering it was the cat — for it must have been the cat — it was really a marvelous performance.”
The number of uncomfortable and inconvenient hotels the Clemenses encountered during their year-long journey was probably greater than those few about which Clemens complained. They did not expect palace hotels in small towns, and besides, they were not on a pleasure excursion. Their constant travel and attention to duty was in ironic contrast to the abundance of workingmen’s holidays that Clemens noted in Australia and New Zealand.
From Wanganui, the next town on their itinerary, Mrs. Clemens wrote her daughter Susy that they had not stopped their work a single day for sightseeing. Imagine, she wrote, visiting Lucerne without traveling to Interlaken, especially if you knew that you would never again be so close to it. But they were traveling to pay their debts, she reminded Susy, and not to enjoy themselves. Even so, the trip was enjoyable and interesting.
The train ride to Wanganui, about sixty miles from Palmerston North, was slow, but the train itself was comfortable and “rationally devised.” A passenger who was not contented by the well-designed cars and by the “charming scenery and the nearly constant absence of dust,” Clemens wrote, “ought to get out and walk. That would change his spirit, perhaps; I think so. At the end of an hour you would find him waiting humbly beside the track, and glad to be taken aboard again.”
In Wanganui, Clemens saw “lots of Maoris; the faces and bodies of the old ones very tastefully frescoed.” Maoris were, he believed, “a superior breed of savages,” as evidenced by their agriculture, carpentry, ornamental arts, fortresses, and military skill. “These … modify their savagery to a semi-civilization — or at least to a quarter-civilization.”
Since even the uncivilized have the right to defend their homes, Clemens was appalled by what he recalled as “a couple of curious war-monuments here at Wanganui.” One of these was “in honor of white men ‘who fell in defense of law and order against fanaticism and barbarism.’” How mischosen is the word fanaticism, he wrote. “Patriotism is Patriotism. Calling it Fanaticism cannot degrade it; nothing can degrade it… It is right to praise these brave white men who fell in the Maori war — they deserve it; but the presence of that word detracts from the dignity of their cause and their deeds, and makes them appear to have spilled their blood in a conflict with ignoble men, men not worthy of that costly sacrifice. But the men were worthy. It was no shame to fight them. They fought for their homes, they fought for their country; they bravely fought and bravely fell; and it would take nothing from the honor of the brave Englishmen who lie under the monument, but add to it, to say that they died in defense of English laws and English homes against men worthy of the sacrifice — the Maori patriots.”
The other monument, he wrote, is an invitation to treachery and disloyalty because it was “erected by white men to Maoris who fell fighting with the whites and against their own peopled Nothing could rectify that memorial, he said, except dynamite.
The power of his rhetoric notwithstanding, Clemens remembered two monuments when there was but one. He saw it in Moutoa Gardens, a triangular two-acre park near the Wanganui River, where it stands today. The monument, a weeping woman carved in white marble, memorializes not English soldiers but Maori warriors and a Catholic lay brother, who were killed in the Battle of Moutoa Island in 1864.
Both parties to the conflict were Maori. The defenders of law and order were members of the Lower Wanganui tribe, who had established profitable trading links with the port of Wanganui, and members of other downriver tribes. The representatives of fanaticism and barbarism were members of a religious movement, Pai Marire (meaning “good and peaceful”), which arose from Maori bitterness over land confiscations. The religion, an amalgam of Christian, Jewish, and Maori doctrines combined with cannibalism, viewed the Maori as the new chosen people, whose immediate task was to expel the white invaders and regain ancestral lands. Adherents believed that shouting “Pai Marire, Hau! Hau!” in battle would shield them from the white man’s bullets, a belief that not only led to the cult’s popular name, Hauhauism, but also increased its warriors’ boldness.
The movement was founded in 1864 by Te Ua, who reported that the archangel Gabriel had visited him, an event that so moved him that he sacrificed his son to atone for the sins of the Maori people. In that year Hauhaus from the Taranaki and Upper Wanganui tribes determined to attack Wanganui township and asked the Lower Wanganui for support. The latter, reluctant to abandon their profitable trade with the settlement, refused. When the Hauhaus nonetheless moved downriver, the Lower Wanganui mobilized other downriver tribes to resist the invasion.
Hauhaus and the downriver tribes met at Moutoa Island, in the middle of the Wanganui River. Both sides faced each other in the middle of a long field, like two football teams, while spectators lined both sides of the river to watch. After a brief and bloody battle, the downriver tribes repulsed the invaders. Forty corpses were left on the field, including Brother Euloge from the nearby Catholic mission. According to one account, he was shot dead while begging the combatants to stop fighting. His name and those of fifteen dead warriors from the downriver tribes appear on the monument.
The memorial was erected fifteen months later, in 1865, to express the European settlers’ relief and gratitude. The battle of Moutoa Island, fifty miles north of their settlement, had saved them from slaughter, although the downriver tribes acted not to save the colonists’ lives nor to defend law and order, but to preserve their own interests.
As Clemens well knew, when we fight for our interests, we call ourselves patriots. When our enemies do the same, we call them fanatics, and if their beliefs and practices are different from ours, we call them barbarians, too. If Clemens’s depiction of patriotism seems old-fashioned today, when so few appeals to patriotism seem either honest or justifiable, there is nothing old-fashioned in what he wrote about the demonization of our enemies. He understood that it is hard to kill another when the victim seems no different from ourselves. War, he wrote in an essay published in 1885, is “the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.”