14 and 16 February 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (New York World, 18 February 1877, UCCL 01406)
Sir: I see by your report of a lecture delivered in your neighborhood very recently, that a bit of my private personal history has been revealed to the public.1explanatory note The lecturer was head-waiter of the Quaker City Excursion of ten years ago. I do not repeat his name for the reason that I think he wants a little notoriety as a basis for introduction to the lecture platform, &Ⓐemendation I don’t wish to contribute. I harbor this suspicion because he calls himself “captain” of that expedition.
The truth is, that as soon as the ship was fairly at sea, he was degraded from his captaincy by Mr. Leary (owner of the vessel) & Mr. Bursley (executive officer.)2explanatory note As he was not a passenger, & had now ceased to be an officer, it was something of a puzzle to define his position. However, as he still had authority to discharge waiter-boys—an authority which the passengers did not possess—it was presently decided, privately, that he must naturally be the “head-waiter;” & thus was he dubbed. During the voyage he gave orders to none but his under-waiters; all the excursionists will testify to this. It may be humorous enough to call himself “captain,” but then it is calculated to deceive the public.
The “captain” says that when I came to engage passage in the Quaker City I “seemed to be full of whiskey, or something,” & filled his office with the “fumes of bad whiskey.” I hope this is true, but I cannot say, because it is so long ago; at the same time I am not depraved enough to deny that for a ceaseless, tireless, forty-year public advocate of total abstinence the “captain” is a mighty good judge of whiskey at second-hand.
He charges that I couldn’t tell the Quaker City tea from coffee. Am I a god, that I can solve the impossible?
He charges that I uttered a libel when I said he made this speech at a Fourth of July dinner on shipboard: “Ladies & gentlemen, may you all live long & prosper; steward, pass up another basket of champagne.”
Well, the truth is often a libel, & this may be one; yet it is the truth nevertheless. I did not publish it with malicious intent, but because it showed that even a total-abstinence gladiator can have gentle instincts when he is removed from hampering home influences.
The “captain” charges that when I came to his office to engage passage I represented myself to be a Baptist minister cruising after health. No; Mr. Edward H. House told him that, without giving me any warning, that he was going to do it.3explanatory note But no matter, I should have done it myself if I had thought of it.Ⓐemendation Therefore I lift this crime from Mr. House’s shoulders & transfer it to mine. I was without conscience in those old days. It had been my purpose to represent that I was a son of the captain’s whom he had never met, & consequently hadn’t classified, & by this means I hoped to get a free passage; but I was saved from this great villainyⒶemendation by the happy accident of Mr. House’s getting in his milder rascality ahead of me. I often shudder to think how near I came to saddling an old father on to myself forever whom I never could have made any use of after that excursion was finished. Still, if I had him now, I would make him lecture his head off at his customary 25 cents before I would support him in idleness. I consider idleness an immoral thing for the aged.
Certain of my friends in New York have been so distressed by the “captain’s” charges against me that they have simply forced me to come out in print. But I find myself in a great difficulty by reason of the fact that I don’t find anything in the charges that discomforts me. Why should I worry over the “bad whiskey?” I was poor—I couldn’t afford good whiskey. How could I know that the “captain” was so particular about the quality of a man’s liquor? I didn’t know he was a purist in that matter, & that the difference between 5-cent & 40-cent toddy would remain a rankling memory with him for ten years.
The tea & champagne items do not trouble me—both being true & harmless. The Baptist minister fraud does not give me any anguish, since I did not invent it.
What I need, now that I am going into print, is a text. These little things do not furnish it. Why does the “captain” make no mention of the highway robbery which I committed on the road between Jerusalem & the Dead Sea? He must have heard of it—the land was full of it. Why does he make no mention of the fact that during the entire excursion I never drew a sober breath except by proxy? Why does he conceal the fact that I killed a cripple in Cairo because I thought he had an unpleasant gait? Why is he silent about my skinning a leper in Smyrna in order that I might have a little something to start a museum with when I got home? What is the use of making “charges” out of a man’s few little virtuous actions when that man has committed real indiscretions by the dozen?
But where is the use of bothering about what a man’s character was ten years ago, anyway? Perhaps the captain values his character of ten years ago? I never have heard of any reason why he should; but still he may possibly value it. No matter. I do not value my character of ten years ago. I can go out any time & buy a better one for half it cost me. In truth, my character was simply in course of construction then. I hadn’t anything up but the scaffolding, so to speak. But I have finished the edifice now & taken down that worm-eaten scaffolding. I have finished my moral edifice, & frescoed it & furnished it, & I am obliged to admit that it is one of the neatest & sweetest things of the kind that I have ever encountered. I greatly value it, & I would feel like resenting any damage done to it. But that old scaffolding is no longer of any use to me; & inasmuch as the “captain” seems able to use it to advantage, I hereby make him a present of it. It is a little shaky, of course, but if he will patch it here & there he will find that it is still superior to anything of the kind he can scare up upon his own premises.
Postscript—Two Days Later.
The following paragraph, from the New York Times, has just reached my hands:
the ship-owners and mr. duncan.
The Ship-owners’ Association have sent a long communication to the Senate Committee on Commerce, in support of the “Ward Amendments” bill. It recites that the old law gives no right of appeal from the Shipping Commissioner’s decision except to the appointing power. It charges Commissioner Duncan with appropriating to his own use large amounts received as fees, in direct violation of the law, and says that it was decided that the law contains no provision to compel him to refund. It accuses him of paying salaries to his four sons and others, grossly in excess of the services rendered; of being arbitrary and unjust in his decisions; of refusing to recognize exemptions specified in the law, and of renting his offices from the Seamen’s Association, of which he is President, at a price four times greater than is just, the amount paid being exactly the sum required to pay the interest on the mortgage and unpaid taxes and assessments of the building owned by the Seamen’s Association. It quotes a number of contradictory decisions given by courts in various localities as to the spirit of sections of the law, and mentions several points of the Amendatory bill, which give assurance that its passage will overcome all future troubles.—New York Times.5explanatory note
They do say that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Mr. Duncan has neglected his own character of to-day to hunt down mine of ten years ago. What my character was in that day can be a matter of importance to no one—not even me; but what the present character of the Shipping Commissioner of the great port of New York is, is a matter of serious importance to the whole public. What the character of the President of the Seamen’s Association & master of the Sailors’ Savings Bank connected with it is, is matter of similarly serious ‘ ’ importance to the public.6explanatory note That character—Mr. Duncan’s character—is vividly suggested by the charges recited in the above extract. I have known & observed Mr. Duncan for ten years, & I think I have good reason for believing him to be wholly without principle, without moral sense, without honor of any kind. I think I am justified in believing that he is cruel enough & heartless enough to rob any sailor or sailor’s widow or orphan he can get his clutches upon; & I know him to be coward enough. I know him to be a canting hypocrite, filled to the chin with sham godliness, & forever oozing & dripping false piety & pharisaical prayers. I know his word to be worthless.
It is a shame & a disgrace to the civil service that such a man was permitted to worm himself into an office of trust & high responsibility. It is a greater shame & disgrace that he has been permitted to remain in it after he was found out & published, more than three years ago (for the present charges were made against him & printed as long ago as that).
If any one imagines that I am moved to speak in this way by Mr. Duncan’s “charges” against me, I beg that he will dismiss that idea. A charge made by Mr. Duncan must naturally fall dead, for the source it emanates from is amply sufficient to sap it of effect.7explanatory note
Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain)Ⓐemendation.
Hartford, February 16.
Clemens refers to a report of a lecture given on 11 January by Charles C. Duncan, the former captain of the Quaker City and the organizer of the June–November 1867 excursion chronicled in The Innocents Abroad (15 Apr 1867 to JLC and family, L2, 24 n. 2). The lecture took place at the Tompkins Avenue Congregational Church in Brooklyn, before an audience that had paid twenty-five cents apiece. Duncan had recently joined the Tompkins Avenue church, having abandoned Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church after Beecher’s trial for adultery (“Dr. Helmer’s New Charge,” Brooklyn Eagle, 4 Mar 1876, 4). Duncan’s comments about Mark Twain made up the bulk of the newspaper’s report of his lecture:
“One of the first persons,” said the Captain, “who made application for a berth in the Quaker City, when in the spring of 1867 I organized this grand excursion, was a tall, lanky, unkempt, unwashed individual, who seemed to be full of whiskey or something like it, and who filled my office with the fumes of bad liquor. He said he was a Baptist minister from San Francisco and desired to travel for his health. I knew him at once, it was Mark Twain, and I said, ‘You don’t look like a Baptist minister or smell like one either.’ I don’t intend to say much of Mark Twain, but I will just relate a single incident. We used to breakfast at 8 o’clock every morning, and everybody was always punctual except Mark Twain; he was always late. One morning he came straggling in tardy as usual, and picking up his cup began to abuse the coffee. He blamed the steward, he blamed everybody, and after all it turned out that the coffee he had found fault with for being so weak was an excellent cup of tea. In relating this experience in his book he says ‘that passenger made an egregious ass of himself,’ and I think as much.” This cut appeared sufficient for the Captain, and he proceeded to pure history, only once more attacking Mr. “Twain,” and this for an outrageously libelous paragraph in “Innocents Abroad,” wherein it is stated that Captain Duncan, at the great 4th of July dinner, made the following speech: “Ladies and gentlemen, may you all live long and prosper; Steward, pass up another basket of champagne.” “There is no truth in it,” said the libelled Captain; “it was the speech Mark Twain was hankering for me to make, but if I had made any I would have said something sensible.” (Applause.) “I used to be proud of ‘Innocents Abroad,’” added the Captain, “until I discovered how unreliable it is.” (“About Mark Twain. His Entirely Disreputable Conduct Aboard the Quaker City,” New York World, 12 Jan 1877, 5)
Mark Twain told the coffee story in The Innocents Abroad, chapter 60. The “champagne” toast is in chapter 10 (30 Dec 1867 to the Brooklyn Eagle, L2, 139–43).
Clemens’s memory ten years after the Quaker City excursion that Duncan had been “degraded from his captaincy” by one of the owners, Daniel D. Leary, and the ship’s sailing master and executive officer, Ira Bursley (1825–81), is an exaggeration at best. No evidence has been found that Duncan was stripped of his authority as captain. Rather it is likely that he never had authority over “management of the ship” (which was Bursley’s responsibility) apart from deciding when to sail or put into port, much the way (as Clemens knew) a steamboat captain worked with his pilot. Duncan’s log and much other evidence show that he retained a captain’s responsibilities throughout, obtaining pratique at each port, negotiating with the health and customs authorities about port fees, determining the ship’s location and distance sailed, and so forth. As part owner (with his brothers Arthur and Charles C. Leary), Daniel Leary did have some say about where the Quaker City went: he was solely responsible for authorizing the excursion to Yalta, where he hoped to find a buyer for the ship, and for which two dozen passengers (including Clemens and Charles Langdon) formally thanked him. But eighteen-year-old Langdon, at least, was persuaded at the time that Duncan’s proper role had been usurped. He wrote his mother in late August:
Of him (Mr Leary) I would say that he is by the passengers considered the meanest, most selfish & ungodly man on the ship. I cant bear the sight of him, & as the matter now stands we find out much to our surprise & disgust that “Dan Leary” has Cap Duncan entirely under his command instead of Cap Duncan being “Commander” as was supposed when we left New York. (Charles J. Langdon to Olivia Lewis Langdon, 21 and 22 Aug 1867, CU-MARK)
Langdon’s “surprise & disgust” at this revelation was probably shared by others, but they too were probably unaware of the business arrangements between the Leary brothers and Duncan, which gave the owner some power over the itinerary.
“Mark Twain on His Muscle,” New York World, 18 February 1877, 5.
Neider 1961, 173–76; SLC 2014, 99–103.