The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Kevin Mac
Donnell.

~~~~~


_Twain at Sea: The Maritime Writings of Samuel Langhorne Clemens_. Edited
by Eric Paul Roorda. University Press of New England, 2018. Pp. 263.
Hardcover $65.00. ISBN 9781512602722. Paperback $19.95. ISBN 9781512601510.
Ebook. ISBN 9781512602739.


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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by
Kevin Mac Donnell


Copyright (c) 2018 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.


Mark Twain was a man of the waters. His nom de plume signifies two
fathoms--safe water when navigating out of the shallows--dangerous water
under other circumstances. He spent his boyhood just a few blocks from a
steamboat landing, dreamed of becoming a steamboat pilot (or else a pirate)
and realized that dream for a time. He lost childhood friends to drownings
and lost a beloved brother in a steamboat accident. His first piece of
writing to be published in a nationally recognized publication was about a
disaster at sea, his first best-selling book was the result of a four
months voyage with stops on several continents, and his literary
masterpiece takes place on the dangerous waters and shores of the
Mississippi River. When his second daughter died (in water) and he was
suffering from late stage congestive heart failure (edema), he lit out for
the island of Bermuda for his last months of life, and when Paine was
bringing him home to die he begged for a fatal dose of morphine to end his
life while at sea.


Mark Twain may have been the most widely travelled man of his times. He
travelled by foot, train, automobile, stagecoach, horse, wagon, donkey,
donkey cart, steamboat, ocean steamer, sailboat, yacht, and motorboat. He
paddled his own canoe at Lake Saranac and even rode a bicycle--very
briefly. He spent more time on land than on water, but he travelled more
miles on water. He crossed deserts and climbed in the Alps, and traversed
several oceans, and he once flirted with the notion of writing a novel
while staying on board a ship the entire time, going back and forth across
the Atlantic Ocean. He never visited the north or south poles, but seems to
have visited just about everywhere else in between. It is a challenge to
think of any author or explorer who saw as much of the world in the
nineteenth century as Mark Twain. From his childhood to his final days,
water was a presence in Twain's life and a metaphor in his writings.
Metaphorically he could be explicit: In an 1887 letter to Howells he echoed
an 1885 entry in his notebook when he compared his writings to water,
admitting that great literature was fine wine, and that what he wrote was
merely water, "but everybody likes water."


Twain's travel writings have attracted a steady stream of readers and
scholars since the beginning. _The Innocents Abroad_ (1869) was quickly
imitated by Twain's Hartford neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner, and a host of
others. Others retraced his steps during his lifetime, including his
official biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, and wrote travel narratives of
their own, a tradition that has continued to the present. While most
readers think of _The Innocents Abroad_, _A Tramp Abroad_, and _Following
the Equator_ as Twain's trio of "travel books," travel is a critical
element in many of his other writings: _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_, _A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_ (time travel), _Roughing It_,
and many shorter works.


Writings about Twain's time in foreign lands (England, Europe, Australia,
Bermuda, India, the Middle East) are too numerous to enumerate here, as are
the book-length treatments of his major travel books. More general accounts
of his travels and travel writings form an entire genre. A representative
sampling of the latter are Charles Neider's _Travels of Mark Twain_ (1961),
Arthur L. Scott's _Mark Twain at Large_ (1969), Robert Cooper's _Around the
World With Mark Twain_ (2000), Jeffrey Melton's _Mark Twain, Travel Books,
and Tourism_ (2002), Peter Kaminsky's _Chicago of Europe and Other Tales of
Foreign Lands_ (2009), Gribben and Melton's _Mark Twain on the Move_
(2009), and Roy Morris's _American Vandal: Mark Twain Abroad_ (2015).


Into this crowded genre comes Eric Roorda's _Twain at Sea_, an anthology of
Mark Twain's maritime writings. The title evokes oceanic writings, but
Roorda begins with Twain's accounts of his experiences on "brown" (fresh)
water before moving to "blue" (salt) water writings. The excerpts are
arranged more or less chronologically, moving from the Mississippi River to
Hawaii and the Pacific, then on to New York and the _Quaker City_
excursion, followed by letters from his trans-Atlantic trips and side-trips
of the 1870s and 1880s. Finally comes his round the world tour, which is
then followed by shorter extracts from throughout his life at sea. The
familiar and expected travel writings are all included, but even a
well-read Twainian will find pleasant surprises and some unfamiliar pieces.
Roorda casts a wide net that yields a harvest of letters, maxims,
autobiographical writings, and forgotten short extracts. His introduction,
notes, and afterward are both well-informed and informative, and his map of
most of the routes followed and the appendix listing the ships (not
steamboats) upon which Twain sailed are excellent, but the book suffers for
lack of an index. Roorda's assessment of Twain's relationship with the sea
reflects both his familiarity with Twain's writings and his own maritime
expertise, which transforms what otherwise could have been just one more
anthology of Twain's writings into a valuable contribution to Twain studies.


The selections in this book capture Twain's lifelong joyful fascination
with the sea as well as his terrifying existential dread, but let's leave
Twain at a moment that exemplifies the former. On February 7, 1910, two
months before his death, while staying with the Allen family in Bermuda,
Twain wrote to Paine (in a letter not quoted by Roorda) to tell his
biographer that Mr. Allen had taken Twain and some others on an excursion
aboard a "big motor boat." Twain described the experience as "several hours
swift skimming over ravishing blue seas under a brilliant sun . . . ."
 Even near the end of his life Twain's love of the sea surfaced and found
expression.