The Life of Mark Twain by Gary Scharnhorst

Author:Gary Scharnhorst
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826274007
Publisher: University of Missouri Press

As U.S. minister to China, Sam noted, Burlingame had even ruled that “a Chinaman’s oath” was “as good as a foreigner’s.” As late as 1906 he recalled that Burlingame “was not a petty politician, but a great and magnanimous statesman,” a “great citizen and diplomat,” and a “charming man.”30

Coincidentally, Sam was en route from Kawaihae to Honolulu when the survivors of a maritime disaster landed on the Big Island. On May 3, while en route to San Francisco, the clipper ship Hornet burned and sank in the mid-Pacific. After a voyage of forty-three days and four thousand miles, one of its three lifeboats—twenty-one feet long, six feet wide, and three feet deep—finally touched land on June 15 at Laupahoehoe, a fishing village on the north shore of Hawaii.31 The first reports of the fifteen survivors arrived in Honolulu, two hundred miles away, on June 22, and Sam appended the news to his letter to the Union written the same day.

The shipwrecked men were admitted on June 24 to a Honolulu hospital, where they were treated for exposure and malnutrition. Sam was still so saddle sore from riding around the Big Island that Burlingame arranged for him to be carried on a stretcher there to interview them. The ambassador canceled dinner invitations with “princes and foreign dignitaries” and neglected “all sorts of things to accommodate me,” he wrote his family. The sailors, particularly the third mate, John Thomas, told a harrowing tale in some respects similar to reports of the explosion of the Pennsylvania years earlier. Both the Pennsylvania (turpentine) and the Hornet (kerosene) carried barrels of flammable liquids in their cargo holds that fueled the blazes on board. As soon as the Hornet accidentally caught fire, the fifty-three-year-old captain Josiah Mitchell ordered the three lifeboats to be launched. The crew had only forty minutes to stock them with provisions, which were

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.