CLEMENS AND SMYTHE LEFT WANGANUI for one-night stands in Hawera and New Plymouth, while Mrs. Clemens and Clara remained behind. In a letter to Susy, Mrs. Clemens justified her decision to stay in Wanganui: it was a pretty place, the hotel was reasonably comfortable, although not up to New York standards, and the traveling back and forth would have been strenuous. Clemens and Smythe returned to Wanganui for the weekend, and on Monday, December 9, 1895, they all traveled one hundred miles south to Wellington, the nation’s capital. It was to be their last venue in New Zealand.
Clemens was scheduled to perform on Monday night, the night of his arrival in Wellington, but he and Smythe had misinterpreted the railroad schedule. They understood that an express train ran every day, not noticing the information in small type that limited the express to Tuesdays and Fridays only. The ten-hour journey by rail, Clemens told a reporter the next day, consisted of interminable stoppages at little stations and a “gentle, albeit sometimes jolty, ride from station to station, as though the train were out for an easy constitutional.” He seems to have underplayed the ride’s roughness, if his journal is to be trusted. There he noted that between New Plymouth and Stratford, a distance of about forty miles, “it was difficult to stay in your seat, so tremendously rough was the road.” Since the region through which he was riding was rich in creameries and butter factories, he suggested that “they ought to put the milk in the train — that would churn it.” The train arrived too late for Monday’s performance, which was postponed to the next evening.
After a late supper, Clemens received a reporter “with the urbanity of a journalist and the courtesy of a man of the world,” according to the interviewer. As Clemens paced back and forth, “shaking his vast head of wavy grey hair,” he responded to the canard that The Innocents Abroad had been cobbled together from travel books and encyclopedias. “You see there’s a Freemasonry about dealing with things you see yourself which can’t be counterfeited. There is an ease and certainty of touch in describing what you see which you can’t get artificially” When the interviewer mentioned Defoe as an exception, Clemens replied, “And how did Defoe write his plague of London? He knew London as well as you know the city of Wellington, every spot and corner of it. He had nothing in the way of local color to supply; it was all there before him. He got his details of the plague at first hand, from people who had seen. He made his studies in hospitals and by sick beds. What he saw he described; only changing here and there features of disease to suit the accounts of the plague. Defoe described what he saw, and added the equivalents which he had observed, and so he got his wonderful study. But to do a book of travel in that way, you would have know every city in the world as well as Defoe knew his London.”
The next morning Clemens told a reporter that he was trying to observe colonial character, but that the urban population in New Zealand was much like the urban population elsewhere, “for travel is reducing the world to a terrible sameness.” One of the most traveled men of his time, he was among the first to point out what has become a cliché.
Later that day Clemens called on the governor general, Lord David Glasgow, the only Australasian viceroy he met. “I was in Australasia three months and a half, and only saw one Governor,” he wrote in Following the Equator. “The others were at home.” The governors stay in England, he reported. “When they are appointed they come out from England and get inaugurated, and give a ball, and help pray for rain, and get aboard ship and go back home. And so the Lieutenant-Governor has to do all the work.” In fact, Clemens’s trip overlapped with the visits of two other governors general, Victoria’s Lord Brassey, whom Mrs. Clemens and Clara met, and South Australia’s Sir Thomas Buxton, whom he narrowly missed.
Lord David and the Countess of Glasgow attended Clemens’s first At Home, at which Clemens made a faux pas by failing to acknowledge the governor’s party as a prelude to his performance. “Didn’t know it was custom,” he later explained to his journal. In spite of this lapse, Wellington’s Evening Post gave Clemens a glowing review, which praised his “quiet power of description, and facility for putting in local colour, local character, and local scenery in a few graphic touches.” Still, he did not please everyone. A woman was overheard to remark after his performance, “Well, I didn’t think much of it; it was all jokes!”
His second and last appearance in Wellington took place the following night, after which he was entertained at supper by a group of prominent Maoris, one of whom was the Honorable J. Carroll, the cabinet minister for Maori affairs. An editorial that appeared that day mentioned the minister’s recent trip up the Wanganui River, on the occasion of the local Maoris’ agreeing to remove their fishing weirs from the river at Pipiriki. “Natives of their own volition are entrusting 16,000 acres to the Government for settlement-land around the planned new town. Gradually but surely the Government is gaining the confidence of the Native people … It is evident that this Pipiriki incident is but part of a general advance towards the final settlement of Native affairs.”
In Wellington, Clemens “spent the three days partly in walking about, partly in enjoying social privileges, and largely in idling around the magnificent garden at Hutt, a little distance away, around the shore.” The garden, a noted beauty spot to which visitors to Wellington were usually taken, was operated by a Mrs. Ross, a young widow with many children, who bought the place in the 1890s and charged admission. There you could take tea, pick flowers, gaze at monkeys and squirrels, and ride on a miniature steam railway. Apparently you could amuse yourself in other ways as well, for Clemens and Smythe played billiards, a game to which Clemens was passionately devoted. A few years later, river floods ruined the gardens, which Mrs. Ross sold in the face of contrary advice, shortly before flood-control measures substantially increased the value of her land. Today, on a portion of the site, a hospice serves the terminally ill. The patients’ families are permitted access to the grounds, to flowers and flowering shrubs, woodland paths, and a stream that flows below stately trees. The garden through which Clemens strolled gives comfort now to families of the dying.
The day after his visit to Mrs. Ross’s garden, the Clemenses returned to Australia, where Clemens would perform for two weeks before sailing to Ceylon and India. “Our stay in New Zealand has been too brief,” he wrote in Following the Equator, “still, we are not unthankful for the glimpse which we have had of it.” The next afternoon they boarded the Mararoa, which had brought them to Bluff only thirty-nine days before.