The native language is soft and liquid and flexible and in every way efficient
and satisfactory--till you get mad; then there you are; there isn't anything
in it to swear with. Good judges all say it is the best Sunday language there
is. But then all the other six days in the week it just hangs idle on your hands;
it isn't any good for business and you can't work a telephone with it. Many
a time the attention of the mssionaries has been called to this defect, and
they are always promising they are going to fix it; but no, they go fooling
along and fooling along and nothing is done.
- Mark Twain's Speeches, 1923 ed. "Welcome Home"
In 1897 a joint
resolution was introduced in the United States Congress to annex the Sandwich
Islands.
This cartoon, which ridiculed the natives as missionary-eating savages,
appeared in the Omaha World-Herald on June 27, 1897, reprinted from the
New York World.
The cartoon featured a statement from Mark
Twain's lecture on the Sandwich Islands.
Nearby is an interesting ruin--the meager remains of an ancient temple--a place
where human sacrifices were offered up in those old bygone days...long, long
before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make [the natives]
permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place
heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed the poor
native how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily liberal facilities
there are for going to it; showed him how, in his ignorance, he had gone and
fooled away all his kinsfolk to no purpose; showed him what rapture it is to
work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared
with fishing for a pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal summer,
and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature. How sad
it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their gaves in this beautiful
island and never knew there was a hell.
- Roughing It
For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun;
the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping
cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating
like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes,
I hear the plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of
flowers that perished twenty years ago.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
Adultery they look upon as poetically wrong but practically proper...Kanakas
will have horses and saddles and the women will fornicate--two strong characteristics
of this people.
- quoted in Mark Twain in Hawaii, Walter Francis Frear
This is the most magnificent, balmy atmosphere in the world--ought to take dead
men out of grave.
- quoted in Mark Twain in Hawaii, Walter Francis Frear
The missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently
miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is,
and how nearly impossible it is to get there.
- Roughing It
Charles Warren Stoddard has gone to the Sandwich Islands permanently. Lucky
devil. It is the only supremely delightful place on earth. It does seem that
the more advantages a body doesn't earn here, the more of them God throws at
his head. This fellow's postal card has set the vision of those gracious islands
before my mind again, with not a leaf withered, nor a rainbow vanished, nor
a sun-flash missing from he waves, & now it will be months, I reckon, before
I can drive it away again. It is beautiful company, but it makes one restless
& dissatisfied.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 26 Oct. 1881
|
Frank Moeller's Masonic Hotel Dear Mr. Whitney: -- Your long-delayed letter has reached me today, and I was very glad to hear from you, and know that you are still hale and hearty -- which I am not; it exasperates me to have to say. I was perishing to get ashore at Honolulu, and talk to you all, and see your enchanted land again, and be welcomed and stirred up. But it was not to be, and I shall regret it a thousand years; for of course I shan't get another chance to see the islands again. At least, I am afraid I shan't, life is so uncertain now-a-days. I have had a very delightful time in Australia and New Zealand, notwithstanding my poor health. Do please remember me most cordially to any of my old-time friends that still survive the thrity years interval since I was with them in Honolulu. I thank you ever so much for your beautiful "Tourist Guide Through Hawaii, which arrived by recent mail. Sincerely yours, - "Letter from Mark Twain," reprinted in Hawaiian Gazette, 7 Jan 1896, p. 6. [for more info on Henry W. Whitney, see Twain's column in the Galaxy, November 1870.] |
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