“I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.” — Mark Twain, “Following the Equator”

Truth or lies? There's probably some of each in Mark Twain's “Following the Equator” (1897), although I was more concerned with what was interesting and what was not. And most of Twain's account of his trip around the world is not that interesting, at least not to 21st century readers. There's a lot of stuffing — copied material from other sources, dull stories told by fellow travelers and memories from previous journeys not special enough for other books, for example.

Yet it is a long, long book, and Twain strikes gold here and there. Some of the better portions consist of his diary entries, such as this one: "Sailed in the Rosetta. This is a poor old ship, and ought to be insured and sunk." That sounds like the Mark Twain we love. I was fascinated by his long list of odd town names in Australia, such as Goondiwindi, Tungkillo and Woolloomooloo.

He goes into much detail in describing Thuggee and suttee practices in India. The former involved a religious cult of murderers and the latter widows who burned themselves with the bodies of their husbands. The British had mostly eliminated these practices by the time Twain visited.

Although Twain made the journey with his wife and daughter, he hardly mentions his family at all in his book, and never by name.

Much in the book will shock today's readers. He brags about killing 16 tigers in India. About South Africa, he writes, "The great bulk of the savages must go," and suggests humane ways of "diminishing the black population." Elsewhere he writes, "The world was made for man — the white man." One wonders why Adventures of Huckleberry is controversial, while Following the Equator isn't. Perhaps it's because few people still read the latter. And for good reason. ( )

Twain's house in Hartford, around the corner from Harriet Beecher Stowe's smaller one, was a half hour south from where I grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts— not to mention Dickinson’s and Frost’s houses in Amherst, a half hour north. (I've also visited Twain's summer cottage octagon where he typed Tom Sawyer on the Elmira College campus, New York.)
As an over-read Ph.D. in English, with a dozen post-doctoral seminars mostly at the Ivies, I still have many volumes of Twain unread from the complete edition inherited from my wife’s grandmother, Iva Grapes (Mohl), a Hamline College grad in WWI. Twain wrote many volumes of travel, from A Tramp Abroad, both volumes, and Tom Sawyer Abroad, all of which I’ve recently reviewed on GoodReads.

Now I'm in Volume 1 of Following the Equator, which starts from France, returning shipboard to U.S., then off on a world tour. He just crossed the Pacific equator southward, and left the constellation Big Bear behind (a failed name, he says, until Congress renamed it the Big Dipper). Looking for the Southern Cross, he renames it the Southern Kite (p.75).
As for re-naming, I’ve been calling “Shuffleboard” wrong all my life, it’s Shovel-board, also called, Horse-billiards (61). Lots of Hawaiian words, like “lanai” for a large open reception room. Molokai Island is a leper colony, their one great innovation, at death “a band salutes the freed soul with a burst of glad music”(58). Rather like a Jazzman’s funeral, “When the Saints go marchin’ in.”
Twain recalls an earlier visit, “In my time, ice was seldom seen in Honolulu [though] it sometimes came in sailing vessels from New England as ballast”(55). Fall River, MA produced so much ice they shipped to NYC and Panama; the Arctic Ice House is still there, on North Watuppa Lake. There’s no roadside sign, though I proposed one to the parks people who said it would encourage vandalism. The large granite icehouse has open 8’ slits—floorless doors for every level, to move large blocks of ice on top of others, with sawdust between. Now those slits are filled with trees, hardly visible.
We learn we should all have vices—smoking, swearing, alcohol, gambling— that we can give up to improve our health. He admits he cannot cut back, but he can give up entirely. When he meets a woman with no vices, he concludes she cannot be cured (22).
On the way to Fiji, they see the only free independent commercial American ship, from Duluth!

Fiji, 224 islands originally among nine kings—all bigger than commoners— had been turned over to Britain to avoid a huge debt to America. Identified by “a broad belt of clean white coral sand around the island”(90), Fiji sand is not used as in Stevenson’s Samoa, a literal outhouse, flushed by ocean tide. Twain admires the natives, “Handsome, great dusky men they were, muscular, clean-limbed, and with faces full of character and intelligence”(91).
The Fijians even have n idea of immortality, at odds with Christianity:’s, too sweeping: their friends had been eaten by sharks “caught and eaten by men.” How then could the particles of the original men be searched out and put together again? But the Christian missionaries kept one Fijian immortality: flowers that die rise on the winds and flourish in heaven (97).
Australia is so depopulated--one native per 25,000 acres-- that "Recruiters" steal natives from far islands and leave them in Australia for 3 years, to "civilize" them. Slave trading, really, resisted by the missionaries. A writer on Sydney, Mr Gane, has "caught the panegyrics" as if praise is a disease (127). The local language, "A tyble for a lydy," actually British working-class. The English settlers refer to England as "at home"; the Governor of New South Wales is always "at home."(137) though the Governor's palace on a height of land, with a great view of the sea.

Vol II begins, “The steamer Oceana. A Laskar crew, the first that I have seen. White cotton petticoat and pants; barefoot; short straight black hair. Mild, good faces; capable, too; but are said to go into hopeless panics when there is danger. They are from Bombay and the coasts thereabouts….This Oceana is a stately big ship. Spacious promenade decks. Large rooms, a surpassingly comfortable ship. The officers’ library is well selected; a ship’s library is not usually that. For meals, the bugle call, man-o-war fashion. Pleasant change from the terrible gong. Three large cats; the white one follows the chief steward around like a dog. [Cats are required by British law.] Conversational items at dinner. A man said, ‘There is no market in Australia for Australian wines. But it goes to France , then comes back with a French label on it, then they buy it.’ I have heard that most of the French-label wine in New York is made in California”(12).

Ceylon/Sri Lanka:
"Dear me, it is beautiful! And most sumptuously tropical, the foliage and the opulence of it. 'What though the spicey breezes blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle'-- an eloquent line, an incomparable line; it says little, but conveys whole libraries of sentiment, and Oriental charm and mystery, and tropic deliciousness--a line that quivers and tingles with a thousand unexpressed and inexpressible things, things that haunt one and find no articulate voice....Colombo, the capital. An Oriental town, most manifestly; and fascinating....
I was in Cairo years ago, and that was Oriental, but there was a lack. [but here in Colombo} the juggler was there, with his basket, his snakes, his mongoose, and his arrangements for growing a tree from seed to foliage and ripe fruitage before one's eyes...and out a little way in the country were the proper deadly snakes, and the wild elephant and the monkey. And there was that swoon in the air which one associates with the tropics, and that smother of heat, heavy with odors of unknown flowers, and that sudden invasion of purple gloom fissured with lightnings,--then the tumult of crashing thunder and the downpour--and presently all sunny and smiling again (p.19)

Twain admires Indian dress, "The stuffs were silk--thin, soft, delicate, clinging; and, as a rule, each piece a solid color: a splendid green, a splendid ruby, rich with smouldering fires--they swept continuously by in crowds and legions and multitudes, glowing, flashing, burning, radiant.."(21) The great dissonance of Western dress, first of schoolgirls, then business men. "Then I looked at my own clothes, and was ashamed to be seen in the street with myself."
Hearing the Indian Blackbird, raucous chatter when he gets to Bombay (Try Indian Blackbird on xeno-canto.org) . "In the matter of noise it amounted to a riot, an insurrection...crows squawking, and deriding, cursing, canaries screeching..Peace lasted until 5(AM). Then it broke loose again, The Bird of Birds, the Indian crow...Yes, the cheerfulest, and best satisfied with himself. In the course of his reincarnations ha has been a dissolute priest, a fussy lady, a swindler a meddler, and intruder...The incredible result is he does not know what care is, what sorrow is, what remorse is...Nothing escapes him, and he brings out his opinion...At the other end of the porch, they talk about my clothes, how I came to India, and how I happened to go unhanged for so long...When I would shoo them away, they would circle around laughing and deriding" Their number is beyond estimate (33). ( )

A great slog of a bathroom book. Casual 19th century racism of a genial sort.
But great travel insights from another time. ( )

Twain's observations on humanity -- near the equator or otherwise -- are astute enough to easily weather the years. ( )

Frist edition, first print, tight binding and bright gilding on spine, slight wear marks on full-color cover illustration, spine tips a little bit frayed, no foxing. "First State" first edition confirmed by identifying markers listed in the Bibliography of American Literature (BAL 3451): signature mark of "11" on page 161, and single publisher noted on title page.

In 1894, Mark Twain was famous but almost broke due to bad investments in futuristic technology unfeasible at the time, eight million dollars alone was sunk into a machine designed to automatically set its own type like a computer. As debt relief, he agreed to another of his famous worldwide tours, this time to far-flung locations within the Victorian British Empire including Australia, India and South Africa. This entailed a hugely profitable series of speaking engagements and this third volume of darkly humorous foreign travelogues, after his greatly successful The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad. The aging Twain disliked the trip, lamenting he couldn't stay home with his family. The result was the exquisite 1897 Following the Equator, a grand return to his youthful irreverent form, a series of subversive dispatches on the idiocy of the human race regardless the location.

From the The Rare Book Collection of the CCLaP (Chicago Center for Literature and Photography) at Bookworks, Chicago, August 2015.