Trekking overseas always has its down times -- hanging out in airports, sprawled on the ground after a day's hike, snuggled up at night in your sleeping bag with a headlamp on your forehead -- times for relaxation when reading seems the perfect complement to the day's adventures. And books about travel seem most enjoyable when I myself am a traveler.
I took three such books with me to Nepal. One I've only begun reading. One was requisitioned by Pascal to press an unusual flower he discovered. But the third -- a sizeable tome -- I read from cover to cover.
Mark Twain, among his other claims to fame ("All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.'"--Ernest Hemingway), has been praised as America's first travel writer.
Until 1867, Twain was known merely as a humorist, lecturer, newspaper writer, and author of a highly popular collection of short essays called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. But in that year, promoters organized a five-month tour of Europe and the Middle East -- perhaps the first organized American tour of foreign lands. The tour was by cruise ship -- the Quaker City -- a side-wheel steamer, with a leisurely schedule. Stops at ports of call were lengthy, allowing its seventy passengers to do extensive travel on their own before returning to the ship and proceeding to the next port.
Twain persuaded the editors of the Daily Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, to pay his costs, in exchange for his weekly column to be dispatched from overseas. His dispatches, together with some additional concluding reports to the New York Herald and the New York Tribune, became America's first travel book -- The Innocents Abroad.
Twain's book makes great vacation reading. Leisurely and humorous, Innocents Abroad evokes a world where travel was slower, and where Americans were less aware of how life was lived abroad -- even in Western nations, such as France and Italy.
Crossing the Atlantic was in itself a lengthy endeavor, and not always pleasant. Twain discusses with relish his pleasure in being the only man within sight not flattened by seasickness. The Quaker City put in at the Azores, whose somewhat slow moving (and thinking) Portuguese inhabitants were themselves the object of Twain's curiosity and ridicule, before finally reaching the European continent at Gibralter.
Twain shared many of his nineteenth century compatriots' prejudices: contempt for European customs different from those of America; dislike of most great works of art and architecture, which he often considered dusty and boring; a rather startling Protestant boosterism and accompanying contempt for Catholicism. But, as his weekly dispatches reveal, Twain also showed growth and increased tolerance for cultural differences as the trip progressed.
To us today, perhaps, the most interesting portion of the book is the final third -- covering the visit to Turkey and, especially, the Holy Land. Most of the Middle East at the time was ruled from Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire, as it had been for centuries. European influence was minimal. Britain and France had not yet acquired their mandates as the spoils of World War I. Jews were a small minority group within Arab Palestine. The area was untouristed, dirty, impoverished, sleepy, and -- to Twain, at least -- often appalling.
His party worked its way down from Damascas, through the Holy Land, and finally to Egypt. What impresses today is that -- to his group, at least -- the term "Holy Land" was not simply a geographical description. His fellow travelers, like perhaps most Westerners for years to come, were visiting Palestine as religious pilgrims as much as tourists. They were in awe to find themselves walking in the actual footsteps of Jesus himself, actually visiting places they had been reading about and viewing in illustrations since childhood.
Even Twain, the cynic -- but a cynic who generally refers to Jesus as "Our Savior" --was often impressed, even as he scoffed at the multitudes of splinters advertised as relics of the True Cross, and at the claims by religious orders to have determined the exact location of various events from the Bible, locations on which they built their churches and chapels.
Innocents Abroad captures a picture of the Holy Land at a time when it had changed little physically since Biblical times; it also captures an image of Americans who, whatever their professed religious beliefs at the time of the trip, were profoundly moved by a visit to this legendary part of the world, Americans who almost universally had been strongly influenced by Protestant childhoods and years of attendance at Sunday School.
Finally, the book is interesting as marking Twain's transition from a popular humorist to a serious literary writer. As Jane Jacobs, who wrote the introduction to my edition of the book, concludes:
Without falsifying the distinct American sensibility that singled out Twain, then and now, as the quintessential American author, he stepped from -- or alongside -- his culture into a larger and different context. The Mark Twain who, by upbringing was Tom Sawyer and a Connecticut Yankee, became the mature Mark Twain who could inhabit both Huck, the orphaned redneck, and Jim, the runaway slave.
Mark Twain's mental growth, observable throughout his five months of newspaper essays, is emblematic of America's own similar growth and increased maturity in the nearly century and a half since Innocents Abroad was published.
It also suggests an excellent reason to encourage travel abroad by all Americans.
A year after his return, Twain concluded the book with a retrospective newspaper account of the trip, expressing sentiments with which all travelers can sympathize:
Nearly one year has flown since this notable pilgrimage was ended, and as I sit here at home in San Francisco thinking, I am moved to confess that day by day the mass of my memories of the excursion have grown more and more pleasant as the disagreeable incidents of travel which encumbered them flitted one by one out of my mind -- and now, if the Quaker City were weighing her anchor to sail away on the same cruise again, nothing could gratify me more than to be a passenger.
Mark Twain is always a good travel companion, and never better than when sharing his own thoughts and feelings while he himself is traveling.
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