Stowaways Will Be Prosecuted
Mark Twain was born on this day in 1835. In American Vandal: Mark Twain Abroad, biographer Roy Morris Jr. presents an unfamiliar Twain: not the bred-in-the-bone Midwesterner we associate with Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer but a global citizen whose exposure to other peoples and places influenced his evolving positions on race, war, and imperialism, as both he and America emerged on the world stage. Here is a brief excerpt from the book chronicling Twain’s visit to Tasmania and New Zealand.
Brushing past the coast of Tasmania, the family spent a pleasant few hours in the island capital of Hobart. Livy and Clara shared “a glass of wine & a piece of cake (or kike as the Australians say)” with a local hostess, while Twain indulged his lifelong fascination with jails and convicts, visiting a refuge for the indigent. Reflecting the fact that Tasmania had been a “convict-dump,” the refuge included 263 ex-convicts, 81 of them female. The brief glimpse of Tasmania induced Twain to decry the total extermination of the island’s native population by “fugitive gangs of the hardiest and choicest human devils the world has seen.” The local convict-hunters, called “blackgrabbers,” had managed to reduce Tasmania’s aborigine population to three hundred men, women, and children, and the government herded them behind a sort of human rabbit-proof fence in an isolate corner of the island. Civic leaders, noted Twain, had spent thirty thousand pounds to contain a grand total of sixteen tribesmen. “These were indeed wonderful people, the natives,” wrote Twain. “They ought not to have been wasted. They should have been crossed with the Whites. It would have improved the Whites and done the Natives no harm.” The last surviving Tasmanian aborigine, a woman named Truganini, died and was buried with great ceremony in 1876. A year later members of the Royal Society of Tasmania dug up her skeleton and exhibited it in a museum. In 2002, hair and skin samples from the un- fortunate woman were discovered in the collections of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. They were returned.
Moving on to New Zealand, the party landed at Blu , on the extreme southern end of South Island, and proceeded up the east coast. They made landfall on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, when England and her colonies traditionally celebrate the foiling of a plot by Catholic militants to blow up the House of Lords and assassinate King James I. Twain wondered about the absence of a similarly grand celebration in America. “In America we have no annual supreme day; no day whose approach makes the whole nation glad,” he wrote. “We have the Fourth of July, and Christmas, and Thanksgiving. Eight grown Americans out of ten dread the coming of the Fourth, with its pandemonium and its perils, and they rejoice when it is gone — if still alive. The approach of Christmas brings harassment and dread to many excellent people. They have to buy a cart-load of presents, and they never know what to buy to hit the various tastes; they put in three weeks of hard and anxious work, and when Christmas morning comes they are so dissatisfied with the result, and so disappointed that they want to sit down and cry.” As for Thanksgiving, he observed, “The Thankfulness is not so general. Two-thirds of the nation have always had hard luck and a hard time during the year, and this has a calming effect upon their enthusiasm.”
In New Zealand, Twain found himself in a land of “Junior Englands,” towns that competed with each other to be the most English. Christchurch, home to a famous boys’ school, was said to be the most Anglicized city outside the Mother- land, while Dunedin was Scottish to the core. “The people are Scotch,” wrote Twain, confusing the citizens with his favorite drink. “They stopped here on their way from home to heaven — thinking they had arrived.” Much of the New Zealand scenery, as glimpsed from his train, was similarly celestial: six thousand-foot-high mountains, called the Southern Alps, lakes, waterfalls, fjords, and the greenest countryside in the world, all snowed over with sheep. The entire country, he said, was English to the core. “If it had an established Church and social inequality it would be England over again with hardly a lack.”
As usual, Twain, Livy, and Clara were well received by the local aristocracy. In Dunedin their hosts were Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Moreland Hocken and their eleven-year-old daughter, Gladys, to whom Twain joked upon meeting, “My how you’ve grown since I last saw you.” Not only was Hocken the city’s leading medical practitioner, he was also the discoverer, or re-discoverer, of a national treasure — the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi between the Crown and the native Maori chieftains — a discovery that Twain scholar Robert Cooper likens to a modern-day American uncovering the original Declaration of Independence. Through Hocken, Twain was introduced to the glories of Maori culture, including their ritualized facial tattoos. Unlike the native Australian and Tasmanian tribesmen, said Twain, the Maori had “nothing of the savage in the faces . . . these chiefs looked like Roman patricians.” The tattoos themselves were “so flowing and graceful and beautiful that they are a most satisfactory decoration. It takes but fifteen minutes to get reconciled to the tattooing, and but fifteen more to perceive that it is just the thing. After that, the un- decorated European face is unpleasant and ignoble.”
The Maoris had an even more important distinction from their Australasian cousins: unlike the aborigines, they had not been hunted and harried to extinction. “It is a compliment to them that the British did not exterminate them, as they did the Australians and Tasmanians, but were content with subduing them, and showed no desire to go further,” Twain noted. Instead, the government allowed the Maoris to keep their choicest land, protected them from rapacious land-sharks, and even accorded them representation in the legislature and universal su rage — half a century before American women finally acquired the right to vote.
Two war monuments in Moutoa Gardens attracted Twain’s attention. The first, the Weeping Woman monument, personified Grief, in this case grief over the deaths of fifteen loyalist Maori warriors who fell at the Battle of Moutoa Island in May 1864 fighting against guerrillas aligned with the Pai Marire freedom movement. Twain objected to the honoring of Maoris who had died fighting other Maoris. “It is an object-lesson to the rising generation,” he fumed. “It invites to treachery, disloyalty, unpatriotism. Its lesson, in frank terms, is ‘Desert your flag, slay your people, burn their homes, shame your nationality — we honor such.’” The second monument, called the Sleeping Lion, commemorated slain members of the Eighteenth and Fiftieth British regiments who had died at the Battle of Nukumanu in June 1865. This provoked another outburst of anti-colonialism in Twain, who quibbled with the description of Pai Marire members as fanatics and barbarians. “Patriotism is Patriotism. Calling it Fanaticism cannot degrade it; nothing can degrade it,” he wrote. “The presence of that word detracts from the dignity of their cause and their deeds, and makes them appear to have spilt their blood in a conflict with ignoble men, men not worthy of that costly sacrifice. But the men were worthy. It was no shame to fight them. They fought for their homes, they fought for their country; they bravely fought and bravely fell; and it would take nothing from the honor of the brave Englishmen who lie under the monument but add to it, to say that they died in defense of English and laws and English homes against men worthy of the sacrifice — the Maori patriots.” Twain felt that only dynamite could rectify the situation.
