HISTORY
Below: Twain, photographed in 1907 Facing: Kihei, Hawaii
Introducing
MARK TWAIN’S HAWAII
Mark Twain’s Hawaii: A Humorous Romp
unaccustomed to. In place of the grand mud-
roofed rear additions or in bedroom windows,
through History (TwoDot, July 2022) combines
colored brown fronts of San Francisco, I saw
I saw luxurious banks and thickets of flowers,
Twain’s timeless wit and wisdom in his own
dwellings built of straw, adobes, and cream-
fresh as a meadow after a rain, and glowing with
writings on Hawaii with personal reminiscences
colored pebble-and-shell-conglomerated coral,
the richest dyes; in place of the dingy horrors
by others who met him at that time, and traces
cut into oblong blocks and laid in cement; also a
of San Francisco’s pleasure grove, the “Willows,”
his journey through the region just as he
great number of neat white cottages, with green
and the painful sharp-pointed shrubbery of
experienced it in 1866.
window-shutters; in place of front yards like
that funny caricature of nature which they
billiard-tables with iron fences around them, I
call “South Park,” I saw huge-bodied, wide-
In this extract, Twain reflects on his first
saw these homes surrounded by ample yards,
spreading forest trees, with strange names and
impressions of Honolulu.
about like Portsmouth Square [in Chinatown,
stranger appearance—trees that cast a shadow
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San Francisco], thickly clad with green grass,
like a thunder-cloud, and were able to stand
and shaded by tall trees, through whose dense
alone without being tied to green poles; in place
The further I traveled through Honolulu
foliage the sun could scarcely penetrate; in
of those vile, tiresome, stupid, everlasting gold-
the better I liked it. Every step revealed a
place of the customary geranium, calla lily, etc.,
fish, wiggling around in glass globes, assuming
new contrast—disclosed something I was
languishing in dust and general debility on tin-
countless shades and degrees of distortion
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