THE CLEMENSES DOCKED at Colombo at about noon on Good Friday, April 3, 1896. Vast clouds piled up on the horizon, a harbinger of bad weather soon to come. The vessel arrived flying a yellow flag: the carrier of an infectious disease had been found on board. A passenger suffering from chicken pox was removed to a hospital ship before the flag was lowered. When Clemens learned that there was a strong probability of his ship’s being quarantined at Port Louis, Mauritius, he asked for information about the quarantine accommodations there and advised the captain that if the Clemenses were not back on board fifteen minutes before departure time on the following day, he had “better up-anchor and get off and not wait” for them.
Along with the Clemenses, other arrivals included Harmston’s Circus, which Clemens had watched embarking at Madras, where he admired its tigers. Now in Colombo a black panther was reported to have devoured a performing monkey who had come too close. “The menagerie section,” commented the Times of Ceylon, “will amuse the natives largely no doubt.”
Mrs. Clemens and Clara, leaving the menagerie and Clemens behind, went up to the hill country and spent the night in Kandy, capital of a kingdom which had resisted European domination for three hundred years. Clemens stayed in town, where he was the guest of Dr. and Mrs. Murray, a likable couple, if his notes are to be trusted, who lived in a large, cool home set in an attractive compound with many trees. The family lived on Brownrigg Road, today a leafy street of old houses and old trees, guarded at each end by soldiers at sandbagged positions to protect the high government officials who live there. The Murrays’ house, with Dutch gables at each end and a long, arched veranda, is now the police officers’ club.
Clemens performed that night at the Public Hall, where his audience was small, due to the rainy weather and Good Friday — there had been a European exodus to the hills because of the long weekend. He looked better than he did when he arrived in January, thought one reporter, “but it is evident that age is beginning to tell on him, and that the vigour and energy which once characterised him are fast losing their power.”
Apologizing for scheduling an At Home on Good Friday, Clemens claimed disarmingly to have forgotten all about it. In spite of a hacking cough that interrupted some of his routines, he kept his audience laughing throughout his performance, at the end of which he received a rapturous ovation. Nonetheless, one reporter criticized Clemens for not staying closely to the text of his stories, which “are spoiled by altering one word,” changes that some of his admirers considered to be “almost profanity.” The reporter thought the performance “ex tempore.”
The Public Theatre is now a cinema, with a projectionist’s tower built at one end. Part of the building’s exterior has been plastered over, but the remainder shows the old columned arcade. The tower supports a lurid poster advertising a Sinhala film for adults only.
Apparently the intelligence Clemens received about the quarantine facilities at Port Louis was favorable. The party boarded the vessel on Saturday evening, immediately after the second At Home, which, like the first, was thinly attended but warmly received. They sailed out of Colombo under a cloudburst.
A few days later Clara wrote to her cousin that she and her mother were sleeping on deck every night because of the heat and the enormous cockroaches in their cabins. The creatures did not bother her father, who was resigned to insects on tropical voyages. According to a journal entry, he considered the vessel quite comfortable. In a subsequent entry he wrote that “seventeen days ago this ship sailed out of Calcutta and ever since barring a day or two in Ceylon there has been nothing in sight but a tranquil blue sea and a cloudless blue sky. All down the Bay of Bengal it was so; it was so on the equator, it is still so here in the vast solitudes of the Indian Ocean; 17 days of heaven, and in 11 more it will end. There will be one passenger who will be sorry.”
The voyage to Mauritius was a welcome holiday, but it was not long enough for Clemens. “There are no sea-holidays any more,” he complained to Rogers, “the voyages are all too short, unless you take a sailing-vessel.” The speed of modern travel, he told his journal, had so shrunk the world that countries once thought remote had lost their mystery
If no countries are remote, Mauritius, a Lilliputian volcanic island in the Indian Ocean, five hundred miles east of Madagascar, is the next best thing, at least to Europeans and Americans for whom the place is little more than a name. It was better known in Clemens’s day because of the phenomenal success of the romance Paul et Virginie (1787), by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de St-Pierre, a disciple of Rousseau. The novel portrays a boy and girl of the same age brought up in a state of nature by their families in Mauritius. “It was that story,” Clemens wrote in Following the Equator, “that made Mauritius known to the world, made the name familiar to everybody, the geographical position of it to nobody.” The novel was read in Mauritius, too. “No other book is so popular here except the Bible. By many it is supposed to be a part of the Bible … It is the greatest story that was ever written about Mauritius, and the only one.”
The Clemenses anchored off Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius, on Wednesday, April 15. Clemens had expected to be quarantined. Not only had there been a passenger with chicken pox on board, but cholera had been raging in Calcutta when the ship sailed. Nonetheless, the authorities did not impose a quarantine, and the next day the Clemenses went ashore. They took a train ten miles southeast to the highland town of Curepipe, where they remained for almost two weeks. Smythe scheduled no At Homes in Mauritius, presumably to allow Clemens to rest.
After about ten days in Curepipe, Clemens wrote to Rogers that “this holiday comes very handy for me; I am very glad to have a resting spell; I was getting fagged with platform work.” Clemens went on to tell Rogers about the place. Although it rained so much that “a match that will light on anything is a curiosity,” the countryside was beautiful, “surrounded by sugar plantations and the greenest and brightest and richest of tropical vegetation.” Sugar was the dominant crop, and it remains so one hundred years later, so that a drop in price, a poor harvest, or a bad cyclone can damage the economy, although the economy is not as vulnerable as it once was. The export of manufactured goods has risen, as has the proportion of land devoted to crops other than sugar.
The island, continued Clemens, was a British possession, “but there are few English people and many French; so the French have everything their own way — and the French way is seldom a good way in this world.” Most of the population was not French, however, reported Clemens, but East Indian. When the British took over the island from the French in 1814, they permitted the French to keep their laws, language, and property French was the chief European language, and French Creole the lingua franca. When slavery was abolished in the 1830s, the British imported Indian indentured laborers, mainly Hindus, to work the sugar plantations. They remain the majority, and because Mauritius is a democracy, Hindus dominate the government. If the Franco-Mauritians, now a minuscule if rich minority, no longer have everything their own way, French is still the dominant European language and French Creole the lingua franca.
After reporting that Clara was suffering from a large carbuncle, he concluded his letter by promising that “if I think of any more facts about Mauritius that will be valuable in Wall Street I will write again.”
On April 28, the Clemenses sailed for South Africa in the Arundel Castle, which Clemens called “the finest boat I have seen in these seas,” although it retained what he considered a universal and eternal maritime defect, poor beds. Soon they passed Ile de Bourbon (now Réunion), and by the first of May they were sailing past the southern end of Madagascar. Only six months before, the Queen of Madagascar, Ranavalona III, had signed a treaty recognizing and accepting the protection of the French, who had invaded the island, the fourth largest in the world, and occupied the capital. As the Clemenses were steaming by, the French were extending their occupation over the entire island, which it would annex in a few months. “All that I remember about Madagascar,” Clemens joked in Following the Equator, “is that Thackeray’s little Billee went up to the top of the mast and there knelt him upon his knee, saying, ‘I see’ Jerusalem and Madagascar,’ and North and South Amerikee.’"
The next day they had reached the Mozambique Channel, which divides Madagascar from southeast Africa, and were sailing due west to Delagoa Bay. At the head of the bay stood the port of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in Mozambique. Although the Portuguese had controlled Mozambique in varying degrees for almost four hundred years, their “right” to Delagoa Bay had been established little more than twenty years before, in arbitration with two other armed robbers, Britain and Germany.
The Clemenses reached Lourenço Marques on May 4. Approaching the port, they saw “a bold headland — precipitous wall, one hundred and fifty feet high, very strong, red color, stretching a mile or so. A man said it was Portuguese blood — battle fought here with the natives last year. I think this doubtful.” In 1894 the Portuguese had suppressed an uprising around Lourenço Marques.
A railroad ran seventy miles northwest from the port to the border of the landlocked South African Republic, one of the two Boer Republics. Clemens observed “thousands of tons of freight on the shore — no cover. This is Portuguese all over — indolence, piousness, poverty, impotence.” Later he told a reporter in Durban that “Delagoa Bay at the time of the creation was intended for an important port in Africa — the most important port in South Africa — in energetic and intelligent hands; but to remember that it is in the hands of the Portuguese is to recognize that it is not in energetic and intelligent hands, and that its development to the importance which it ought to possess is never to be expected.”
The Clemenses spent the afternoon on shore. Clemens didn’t think much of it: “a small town — no sights. No carriages. Three ‘rikishas, but we couldn’t get them — apparently private.” He noticed the “outrageously heavy bags of freight” that the African women stevedores carried on their heads. “The quiver of their leg as the foot was planted and the strain exhibited by their bodies showed what a tax upon their strength the load was.”
The ship headed southwest along the coast. Clemens wrote that two days later, during the afternoon of May 6, “the ship slowed down, off the land, and thoughtfully and cautiously picked her way into the snug harbor of Durban, South Africa.”