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Tag: Quaker City

  • Will the real Miss Langdon please stand up?

    On the journey across the Atlantic Ocean, at the end of the Quaker City’s five month journey with Mark Twain, the ship stopped in Bermuda for a few days. While there, the excursionists published a list of passengers, including those who had already left the trip earlier. At the bottom of the list, the total…

  • Different views of the Quaker City Mock Trial

    Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad described the five month journey of dozens of passengers on the Quaker City ship traveling from New York to Europe and the Middle East. While cruising across the Atlantic Ocean out of New York, the Quaker City passengers needed activities to take up the many days it took before they…

  • Who was Blucher in The Innocents Abroad?

    Mark Twain uses a fictional character in The Innocents Abroad to help him tell representative stories based on different passengers on the Quaker City. In his original Alta letters, he used a character named Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown shows up roughly twenty one times in the Alta letters (roughly because it depends how you divide…

  • Quaker City Passenger Lists

    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…

  • From Janesville to the Holy Land, Letters by Julia Newell

    In other posts we’ve provided links to the letters written to newspapers during the Quaker City voyage by Mark Twain and Moses S. Beach. Another passenger, who wrote 14 letters to her hometown newspaper, the Janesville Gazette, was Julia Newell. Newell does not always identify the excursionists by their real names. For example, she called…

  • Mediterranean Bound, Letters by Moses S. Beach

    As mentioned in other posts, Mark Twain was not the only correspondent writing articles from the Quaker City (see Twain’s articles here). While Twain’s 50+ letters to the Daily Alta California formed the foundation of his book The Innocents Abroad, many other passengers were also writing to newspapers across the United States. The person who…

  • Mark Twain’s Quaker City Letters

    Mark Twain’s book The Innocents Abroad was based on his trip on the Quaker City side-paddle steamship. Twain’s ticket was paid for by the Daily Alta California newspaper in San Francisco, which paid the $1250 ticket price (roughly $25,000 in today’s dollars) in exchange for 50 letters during the journey which would be published in…

  • Can you trust a transcription?

    While Mark Twain’s book The Innocents Abroad is the most famous record of the tourist cruise in 1867 on the Quaker City paddle steamer, it wasn’t the only one. Many passengers on the ship, like Twain, corresponded with newspapers across the United States. One other passenger, Mrs. Louisa Griswold, also published a book of the…

  • The Quaker City in the Levant Herald

    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…