Who traveled with Mark Twain on the Quaker City? While some of his fellow passengers became well-known through their association with Twain, or through their own self-promotion after the cruise, the list of who traveled with Twain is hard to pin down exactly due to inaccuracies in some published lists.
There are five published lists of passengers from different places and times. Those are described and linked to below.
On November 8, 1867, the day the Quaker City departed New York, The Brooklyn Daily Union published a list of the passengers on the ship. However, that list was clearly provided to the Union before it was finalized, as it includes at least a dozen names of people who did not go on the trip. You can see this list in a clipping here: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-brooklyn-union-1867-06-08-the-medite/143538848/
The next day, November 9, 1867, The New York Times published essentially the same list as The Brooklyn Union (although with many copy errors). It’s not clear if both papers received the same list, or if the Times copied the list printed the day before in Union. You can view this list on the New York Times archive (with a subscription): https://nyti.ms/3Pvew2n.
When the Quaker City was almost back in New York at the end of five months of traveling, it stopped in Bermuda. While there, on November 11, 1867, a list of passengers on the Quaker City was published. This is probably the most reliable list as it was published by the passengers, and includes everyone who traveled on the Quaker City, even if they had departed the ship early. You can see this list on the web site of The Shapell Manuscript Foundation: https://www.shapell.org/manuscript/quaker-city-passenger-list/.
On the same day the Quaker City arrived in New York, November 19, 1867, a list of passengers was published in The Brooklyn Union. This list also includes those who left early, and as it matches the Bermuda list almost exactly, it was likely based on it. You can see this list in an online clipping here: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-brooklyn-union-1867-11-19-arrival-of/143545592/. This list also includes a short list of officers on the ship. This list was the one used in an article in 1910, after the death of Mark Twain, that interviewed surviving passenger Stephen M. Griswold.
Finally, the day after the Quaker City returned to New York, November 20, 1867, a list was published in The New York Herald. This list was published together with an article written by Mark Twain, although he was unacknowledged as the author when it was published. That article, however, was used for most of Chapter 61 in Twain’s book based on the Quaker City trip, The Innocents Abroad. That list can be found on the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America web site: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030313/1867-11-20/ed-1/seq-7/print/image_681x648_from_2903%2C1408_to_3933%2C2389/
There are also various other partial lists, such as a letter written to the owner of the Quaker City on August 26, 1867, signed by twenty-seven passengers, thanking him for arranging their meeting with Czar Alexander II (see https://www.marktwainproject.org/xtf/view?docId=letters/UCCL09123.xml;style=letter). On the day the ship left New York there was a very short list, mostly of officers and celebrities, that was published in the New York Tribune. However, like the New York Times list, it lists at least one person who did not go on the journey (the actress Maggie Mitchell), and gets the name of the executive officer incorrect (John Bussby instead of Ira Bursley). You can also see this article on the Chronicling America web site: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1867-06-08/ed-1/seq-8/print/image_681x648_from_937%2C3370_to_2667%2C5018/
There is also an almost complete list of passengers in the journal of one of the passengers, Robert Bell, who collected signatures of almost all of the passengers who were still on the ship when he collected them, towards the end of the trip. This list is not yet published, but may be soon. More on that at a future date.
Do you know of any other Quaker City passenger lists out there? If so, post a comment below.
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