To
Whitelaw Reid
9 April 1873 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS and transcript: DLC and New York Tribune,
11 Apr 73, UCCL 00898 and UCCL 00899)
Private.
9th Mch. Apl.
My Dear Reid—
Thanks for check & also the promised notice.1
I wish you would step on board a steamer & refresh your memory as to how a ship’s boats look & how useless such things are in a heavy sea. You know that in such a sea if your ship were going down you would not dream of such folly as taking to a ship’s boat if you could get a life-raft. A few editorials on this subject might draw attention to it & accomplish something, but I can’t do anything with communications. I mean to go & worry Mr. Plimsoll or get somebody else to do it, when I get to England—he can get the life-raft adopted.
Ys
Clemens
P. S. I might not have the cheek, only he gave me a pretty high-toned compliment in one of his London newspaper letters on my Humane Society letter.2
[enclosure:] 3
To the Editor of The Tribune.
Sir: When the Mississippi was burned at sea some time ago, [& ] nearly all her boats were smashed in the effort to cast them loose, or were swamped the instant they struck the water, I wrote you a private letter (which you published) suggesting that ships be provided with life-rafts instead of these almost useless boats.4 I did not expect that the Government would jump at the suggestion, & I was not disappointed. The Government had business on hand at the time which would benefit not only our nation but the whole world—I mean the project of paying Congressmen over again for work which they had already been paid to do; that is to say, the labor of receiving Crédit Mobilier donations & forgetting the circumstance.5 But that shining public benefit being accomplished, why cannot the Government listen to me now?
The Atlantic had eight boats, of course—all steamers have. Not one of the boats saved a human life. The great cumbersome things were shivered to atoms by the seas that swept over the stranded vessel.6 And suppose they had not been shivered, would the case have been better? Would not the frantic people have plunged pell-mell into each boat as it was launched & instantly swamped it? They always do. But a life-raft is a different thing. All the people you can put on it cannot swamp it. Nobody understands davit-falls but a sailor, & he don’t when he is frightened; but any goose can heave a life-raft overboard, & then some wise man can throw him after it. The sort of life-raft I have in my mind is an American invention, consisting of three inflated horizontal rubber tubes, with a platform lashed on top. These rafts are of all sizes, from a little affair the size of your back door, to a raft 22 feet long & six or eight feet wide. As you remember, no doubt, two men crossed the Atlantic from New-York to London, some years ago, on one of these rafts of the latter size.7 That raft would carry 120 men. Nine such rafts would have saved the Atlantic’s 1,000 souls, & these rafts (fully inflated & ready for use) would not have occupied as much room on her deck as four of her lubberly boats; hardly more than the room of three of her boats, indeed. Her boats were probably 30 feet long, seven feet deep, & seven or eight feet wide at the [gunwales ].
You could furnish a ship with medium & full-sized rafts—an equal number of each—& pile them up in the space now occupied by four boats, & then you could expect to save all her people, not merely a dozen or two. They would sail away through a storm, sitting high & dry from two to four feet above the tops of the waves. In addition to the rafts, the ship could carry a boat or two, for promiscuous general service, & for the drowning of old fogies who like old established ways. You could attach a raft to a ship with a ten fathom line & heave it overboard on the lee side in the roughest sea (& it can’t fall any way but right side up), & there it will lie & ride the waves like a duck till it receives its freight of food & passengers—& then you can cut the line & let her go. But if you launch a boat, it usually falls upside down; & if it don’t, the people crowd in & swamp it. Boats have sometimes gone away safely with people & taken them to land, but such accidents are rare.
I am not giving you a mere landsman’s views upon this raft business; they are the views of several old sea captains & mates whom I have talked with, & their voice gives them weight & value. Our Government has so many important things to attend to that we cannot reasonably expect it to bother with life-rafts, & we cannot reasonably expect the English Government to bother with them because this admirable contrivance is a Yankee invention, & our mother is not given to adopting our inventions until she has had time to hunt around among her documents & discovered that the crude idea originated with herself in some bygone time—then she adopts it & builds a monument to the crude originator. England has our life-raft on exhibition in a museum over there (the raft that made the wonderful voyage),8 & heaps of people have gone in every day for several years & paid for the privilege of looking at it. Perhaps many a bereaved poor soul whose idols lie stark & dead under the waves that wash the beach of Nova Scotia may wish, as I do, that it had been on exhibition on board the betrayed Atlantic.
Mark Twain.
Hartford, Conn., April 8, 1873.
[letter docketed:] I have marked the article minion, must. WCW9 [and in unidentified hand:] 1873
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
It is to be hoped that the admirable appeal for
the use of Life-Rafts, which we published yesterday from the pen of
Mark Twain, will not be permitted to fall without response. The
general apathy is astonishing in relation to a matter so full of
vital interest to every one. The questions of ship-building, of the
education of officers, of the training and organization of crews,
are all highly important in respect to their influence upon the
safety of travel by sea. But these are all matters of time, and
discussion, and experiment. The adoption of Life-Rafts suggested by
our valued correspondent as a portion of the indispensable equipment
of every sea-going vessel, is a thing to be tried at once, without
the least delay. It would cost little, in expense or in space. It
need not necessarily exclude the present provision of life-boats,
but every vessel should be forced to carry rafts enough to save all
the lives on board, and then, as Mr. Clemens magnanimously observes,
“the ship could carry a boat or two for promiscuous
general service, and for the drowning of old fogies who like old
established ways.” (New York Tribune, 12 Apr 73, 6) On 20 August 1873, Reid remarked to Charles Henry Webb: Mark Twain has always been remarkable until of late
for the care with which he avoided wearing out his welcome with the
public, and it seemed to me one of the elements of his
success[.] I should like to suggest another point in
which Twain has made a big success. The best things he has done have
seemed to have some definite good end in view. For instance his
letter about rafts instead of lifeboats attracted more attention and
brought him more praise than any thing he has done of late years.
The letter about the Cunarders in the same vein was equally
successful. (Correspondence of Charles Henry Webb, DLC, TS in CU-MARK)
This raft is a thing made of three cylinders, 25
feet long, each, and 26 inches in diameter, made fast together, side
by side. We have all heard of shipwrecked men drifting for days and
days together, in mid-ocean, on such contrivances not very
dissimilar to this, but why any man should want to start for Europe
on one, when he could travel in a ship and still have a reasonable
hope of never getting there, is a mystery to me. . . . The Captain
rigged five sails on his little hen-coop, and took forty
days’ rations of water and provisions for himself and his
two men. He expects to reach Havre in twenty-five to thirty days,
but somehow the more I looked at that shaky thing the more I felt
satisfied that the old tar was on his last voyage. He is going to
run in the usual route of the ships, and somebody will run over him
some murky gray night, and we shall never hear of the bold Prussian
any more. (SLC 1867) The raft (which was actually 12½ feet wide)
first attempted to leave New York on 4 June, but was delayed until 12
June; it made the crossing to Southampton in forty-three days without
serious incident (“Arrival of the American
Liferaft,” London Times, 26 July 67,
10; “The Voyage of the Life-Saving Raft
‘Nonpareil,’” New York Times, 3 Dec 67, 3).
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L5, 335–339.
Provenance:The Whitelaw Reid Papers (part of the Papers of the Reid Family) were donated
to DLC between 1953 and 1957 by Helen
Rogers Reid (Mrs. Ogden Mills Reid).
Emendations and textual notes:
& • and [here and hereafter]
gunwales • gun-|wales
