When Mark Twain was traveling on the Quaker City, the ship stopped twice in Constantinople (now the city of Istanbul) in Turkey. In Chapter 34 of The Innocents Abroad, Twain mentions the local English-language paper (actually bilingual, as it was printed in both English and French), The Levant Herald.
Twain mentions the paper and others in the city that were fighting censorship, in particular in their coverage of the revolt of Crete against Turkish rule (one of several revolts by Crete that eventually led to its brief period of independence between 1898 and 1913, when Crete became part of Greece).
The Levant Herald, however, also wrote about the Quaker City. As common to papers at the time, it announced the arrival of ships, including the Quaker City on August 17, 1867:
After a few days the Quaker City left for its journey to the Black Sea, where the excursionists visited Odessa and Sebastapol, and Yalta where they met Czar Alexander II in his summer palace, Livadia. The paper certainly mentioned the departure (as mentioned in the next clipping) but that was probably on August 21, and that issue of the paper isn’t available online. The ship returned to Constantinople on August 30, which was mentioned in detail the next day in the paper:
A fascinating look at the journey of the Quaker City while it was going on, and amazingly in sync with what Twain wrote about the event in The Innocents Abroad. For all we know, Twain was the person who informed the newspaper about their journey. Certainly someone on the Quaker City relayed the details to the paper.
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