SS. Henry Chauncey,
At Sea, 18th, P.M.
To
Mary Mason Fairbanks
18 March 1868 • SS Henry Chauncey en route from New York, N.Y., to Aspinwall, Panama
(MS: CSmH, UCCL 00202)
Click to add citation to My Citations.
Dear Mother—
We shall reach the Isthmus tomorrow morning.1 It is getting very hot. Cuba was such a vision!—a perfect garden!
We have twelve hundred passengers on board—half of them in the cabin. But we are not unpleasantly crowded at all. It would crowd the little Quaker City, though, wouldn’t it? This is a magnificent ship—my stateroom is twice as large as No. 102 (but the other staterooms ain’t,.) I haven’t anything to write, but [nonsense. ]—which I am furnishing you to let you know we haven’t gone down.
Good bye & good luck
The Reformed
Prodigal
Sam L. Clemens
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Click to add citation to My Citations. 1
Clemens and his fellow passengers left the Henry
Chauncey at Aspinwall on the morning of 19 March and traveled
across the Isthmus in one day, mainly by train (see John P. Vollmer to
A. B. Paine, 26 Dec 1911, Davis 1967, 3, for an account of this trip). The
travelers boarded the Sacramento at Panama City
on the evening of 19 March and arrived in San Francisco on 2 April
(“Arrivals” and “Arrival of the
Sacramento,” San Francisco Alta
California, 3 Apr 68, 1).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 2
The number of the stateroom that Clemens and Slote had shared on the Quaker City.
Source text(s):MS, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call no. HM 14225).
Previous publication:
L2, 204–205; MTMF 24.
Provenance:see Huntington Library, p. 512.
Emendations and textual notes:
nonsense. • [deletion implied]
