To Jane Lampton Clemens and Family
1–2 September 1867 • Constantinople, Turkey
(MS: NPV, UCCL 00146)

Constantinople, Sept. 1.1

Dear Folks—

All well. Do the Alta’s come regularly? I wish I knew whether my letters reach them or not. Look over the back papers & see. I wrote them as follows:2

1—Letter from Fayal, in the Azores Islands.

1 from Gibraltar, in Spain.

1 from Tangier, in Africa.

2 from Paris & Marseilles, in France.3

1 from Genoa, in Italy.

1 from Milan——

1 from Lake Como ——

1 from some little place in Switzerland—have forgotten the name.

4 concerning Lecco, Bergamo, Padua, Verona, Battle-field of Marengo, [Pastachio], & some other cities in Northern Italy.4 (over)

2 from Venice.

1 about Bologna

1 from Florence.

1 from Pisa.

1 from Leghorn.

‸1 from Rome & Civita Vecchia.‸

2 from Naples.

1 about Pozzuoli, where St Paul landed, the Baths of Nero, & the ruins of Baia, & Virgil’s tomb, the Elysian Fields, the Sunken Cities & the spot where Ulysses landed.

1 from Herculaneum & Vesuvius.

1 from Pompeii.

1 from the island of Ischia.

1 concerning the Volcano of Stromboli, the city & Straits of Messina, the island of Sicily, Scylla & Charybdis &c.

1 about the Grecian Archipelago.

1 about a midnight visit to Athens, the Piraeus & the ruins of the Acropolis.

1 about the Hellespont, the site of ancient Troy, the Sea of Marmora, &c.

1 2 about Constantinople, the Golden Horn & the beauties of the Bosphorus.

1 about from Odessa & Sebastopol in Russia, the Black Sea, &c.

2 from Yalta, Russia, concerning a visit to the Czar.

And yesterday & ◇ I wrote another letter from Constantinople and

1 to-day about its neighbor in Asia, Scutari. I am not done with Turkey yet. Shall write 2 or 3 more.

I have written to the New York Herald 2 letters from Naples, (no name signed,) & [1 ]from Yalta. Constantinople [in margin: ov (over)]

To the New York Tribune I have written

1 from Fayal.

1 from Civita Vecchia in the Roman States.

And 2 from Yalta, Russia.

And 1 from Constantinople.

I have never seen any of these letters in print except the one to the Tribune from Fayal, & that was not worth printing.

We sail hence to-morrow, perhaps, & my next letters will be mailed at Smyrna, in Syria. , the I hope to write from the Sea of Tiberius, Damascus, Jerusalem, Joppa, & possibly other points in the h Holy Land. The letters from Egypt, the Nile & Algiers (Africa,) I will look out for, myself. I will bring them in my pocket.

They take the finest photographs in the world here. I have ordered some. They will be sent to Alexandria, Egypt.5

You cannot conceive of anything so beautiful as Constantinople, viewed from the Golden Horn or the Bosphorus. I think it must be the handsomest city in the world. I will go on deck & look at it for you, directly. I am staying on the ship, [to-night]. I generally stay on shore when we are in port. But yesterday I just ran myself down. Dan Slote, my room-mate, is on shore. He remained here while we went up the Black Sea, but it seems he has not got enough of it yet. I thought Dan had got the stateroom pretty full of rubbish at last, but a while ago his dragoman arrived with a bran new, ghastly tomb-stone of the Oriental pattern, with [ him- his name ]handsomely carved & gilded on it in Turkish characters. That fellow will buy a Circassian slave, next.

I am tired. We are going on a trip, tomorrow.6 I must to bed. Love to all.

I don’t prepay postage. Letters are too uncertain.

Yrs

Sam.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1The dates of Clemens’s notebook entries for 28–31 August and 1–2 September are behind by one day, indicating that he was confused about the date while in Constantinople (N&J1, 410–13). His comment below that the ship would “sail hence to-morrow, perhaps,” together with his mention that he was also planning a trip “tomorrow,” imply that the letter may have been written on 2, rather than 1, September: the Quaker City departed Constantinople on the evening of 3 September, the same day that a party of excursionists, which probably included Clemens, took a trip to Scutari (see note 6; Nesbit, entries for 30–31 Aug, 1–3 Sept).

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2Out of the thirty-seven letters to the Alta listed below, only twenty-three were published. Dewey Ganzel has speculated that the fourteen missing letters were lost in the mails, and that Clemens discovered their loss when he reached Egypt (Ganzel 1968, 102, 139, 147–48, 157, 167, 178). But it is unlikely that mail losses account for even half the missing letters, or that Clemens knew how many had been lost before he arrived in New York, if then. By February 1868 he seemed only vaguely aware that some had not reached San Francisco: see 21 Feb 68 to JLC and family. In 1904, however, he remembered that “six of them miscarried, and I wrote six new ones to complete my contract” (SLC 1904, 75). It therefore seems more likely that in listing letters here he was reconstructing rather than remembering exactly what he had done, perhaps because he had lost his own written records, and that in fact he never wrote any dispatch from some of the places on his list. Clemens’s notebook for the period 3 July through 10 August has long been missing and may well have been lost even before he wrote this letter. Certainly it is suspicious that many of the cities for which no letter was published are places Clemens did not visit for any significant length of time. For instance, he passed through the cities of northern Italy between Lecco and Venice in a single day, stopping only occasionally for a meal or a short walk. It seems unlikely that he would have written as many as four letters in close succession, describing places he had not seen; certainly none of the surviving letters is about such a place. Moreover, at the rate of two letters per week (his agreed-upon rate for the Alta), the letters he claimed here to have written would have put him thirteen ahead of schedule only one week after he complained in his notebook about being behind schedule for both the Alta and the Tribune (26 Aug 67 to JLC and family, n. 7). The notes below give detailed information about Clemens’s list, which is summarized in the following chart:

Location	No. listed	No. published	SLC citation
Fayal	1	1	1867 [MT00555]
Gibraltar	1	1	1867 [MT00557]
Tangier	1	2	1867 [MT00558], [MT00559]
Paris etc.	2	1	1867 [MT00560]
Genoa	1	1	1867 [MT00562]
Milan	1	1	1867 [MT00563]
Lake Como	1	1	1867 [MT00566]
Switzerland	1	0
Lecco etc.	4	0
Venice	2	1	1867 [MT00572]
Bologna	1	0
Florence	1	1	1867 [MT00567]
Pisa	1	0
Leghorn	1	0
Rome etc.	1	0
Naples	2	1	1867 [MT00569]
Pozzuoli etc.	1	1	1867 [MT00570]
Herculaneum etc.	1	1	1867 [MT00571]
Pompeii	1	1	1867 [MT00568]
Ischia	1	0
Stromboli etc.	1	0
Grecian Archipelago	1	0
Athens etc.	1	1	1867 [MT00573]
Hellespont etc.	1	1	1867 [MT00574]
Constantinople etc.	2	2	1867 [MT00575], 1867 [MT00577]
Odessa etc.	1	2	1867 [MT00579], 1867 [MT00581]
Yalta	2	2	1867 [MT00582], 1867 [MT00584]
Constantinople	1	1	1867 [MT00578]
Scutari	1	0
alta subtotal	37	23
Naples (Herald)	2	2	1867 [MT00553], [MT00554]
Constantinople (Herald)	1	1	1867 [MT00564]
Fayal (Tribune)	1	1	1867 [MT00548]
Civitavecchia (Tribune)	1	1	1867 [MT00561]
Yalta (Tribune)	2	1	1867 [MT00565]
Constantinople (Tribune)	1	1	1867 [MT00576]
total	45	30

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3Clemens forgot to list a second letter from Tangier, even though he correctly recorded both in the notebook he kept from the start of the trip through 2 July (N&J1, 328). The Alta published only one letter from Paris (none from Marseilles), and it is possible that he simply transposed the correct numbers for this and the previous entry.

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4The Alta never published a letter from the “little place in Switzerland” (possibly Chiasso, just across the border from Como), nor from Lecco, Bergamo, Padua, or Verona. No town in Italy was named “Pastachio.” Clemens may have meant Peschiera (on the railway line he traveled between Bergamo and Venice) or, more likely, Piteccio or Pistoia (both of which were on the railway line he traveled from Venice to Florence) (Baedeker 1879, 147, 171, 312–13). When Clemens wrote up this part of the trip in The Innocents Abroad, he reported traveling by steamer from Como to Bellagio and from Bellagio to Lecco, then by carriage from Lecco to the train station at Bergamo, and by train from there to Venice, passing through Verona and Padua along the way. (Marengo is not in this area, but farther west.) He dismissed this day’s journey, saying he would “not tarry to speak of the handsome Lago di Gardi [i.e., Garda] ... nor yet of ancient Padua or haughty Verona” but would “hurry straight to the ancient city of the sea,” Venice. And when he described the trip from Venice to Florence, he reported that “we rattled through a good deal of country by rail without caring to stop. I took few notes. I find no mention of Bologna in my memorandum book.... Pistoia awoke but a passing interest” (SLC 1869, 199, 207, 215–16, 244).

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5Clemens and at least seven other excursionists—two of whom have been certainly identified, Van Nostrand and Slote—had their photographs taken in Constantinople by Abdullah Frères, official photographers to his imperial majesty the sultan of Turkey, Abdul-Aziz (1830–76). Clemens’s photograph is reproduced below; for his comments on it see 8 Jan 68 to Beach. (The location of Van Nostrand’s is not known, but its existence is established by Alta California Bookstore, description of lot 90; Slote’s photograph is privately owned, but is reproduced in Ganzel 1968, following page 66; L. H. S. Robson to Cyril Clemens, 12 Mar 1935, PH in CU-MARK, mentions the existence of eight photographs of Quaker City passengers taken in Constantinople, possibly by Abdullah Frères, among Jackson’s effects.) Clemens also purchased photographs of public figures which he later used to illustrate The Innocents Abroad. Four of these survive (the first three at CtY-BR, and the last at NN-B): Abdul-Aziz (chapter 13); Aleksandr II (chapter 37); Ismail Pasha (chapter 57); and Abd-el-Kader (1807?–83), an Arab leader imprisoned by the French in 1847 and freed in 1852 by Napoleon III (chapter 57).

Carte de visite photograph of Clemens taken at the studio of Abdullah Frères, Constantinople. Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library (CU-MARK).

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6The planned trip was probably to Scutari on 3 September, the morning of the same day the Quaker City departed Constantinople at 10:00 p.m. If an Alta letter about Scutari was indeed already written and not simply anticipated, Clemens must have made an earlier visit there, either during his first sojourn in Constantinople on 17–19 August or sometime after his return there on 30 August.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).

Previous publication: L2, 87–91; MTB, 1:335, excerpt; MTL, 1:134–36, with omission.

Provenance:see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 512–14.

Emendations and textual notes:

Pastachio • [possibly ‘Pestachio’]

1 • 1 | 1

to-night • to-|night

him- his name • his m- | name