America's First Gonzo Journalist

Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain’s big break came in 1867, when he convinced the owners of a San Francisco newspaper, the Daily Alta California, to pay his fare on the world’s first cruise ship. This voyage would establish him as the voice of America. His irreverent letters and articles to the Daily Alta and other newspapers eventually resulted in a travelogue, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims Progress. 

“The gentle reader will never never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak of course in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad. And therefore is not already a consummate ass.”

After the Civil War, Americans really needed something to laugh about, and that may be one reason why The Innocents Abroad sold so phenomenally. For many buyers, it was the first book they ever owned. Americans in the mid-19th century still had a strong inferiority complex about Europe, and Europe was happy to reinforce it. Twain’s best-seller would take Europe and the Middle East down a peg, although Twain shows himself to be as prudish as his fellow pilgrims, who are the targets of much of his humor.

On June 8, 1867, Twain boarded the Quaker City in New York Harbor, embarking on what was billed as “The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion.” The trip, funded by the Daily Alta California in exchange for twice-weekly dispatches, promised a five-and-a-half-month journey to Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Holy Land. Twain’s fellow passengers, numbering around seventy-seven, were largely pious, middle-aged Protestant Americans, eager to visit biblical sites. Twain, a 32-year-old journalist with a skeptical bent and a penchant for irreverence, saw the trip as both an adventure and a chance to satirize the earnestness of his companions and the romanticized travelogues of the era, such as William C. Prime’s Tent Life in the Holy Land.

The journey began with a transatlantic crossing to the Azores, where Twain’s dispatches captured the travelers’ initial excitement and seasickness. In the New York Herald dispatch of June 1867, Twain described his fellow passengers’ provincial arrogance and naïveté, oblivious to their own ignorance. The dispatch’s raw tone reveals Twain’s early delight in mocking his fellow pilgrims, a theme that persists but is softened in the published text.

From the Azores, the Quaker City sailed to Gibraltar, Tangier, and then Marseille, where the group embarked on a train excursion to Paris for the 1867 Paris Exhibition. In a dispatch to the Daily Alta California, Twain described his first encounter with non-European cultures in Tangier, where the Quaker City stopped briefly. The dispatch included a vivid description of local men bathing in the sea, noting, “They stood in the surf, stark naked, splashing about like children, their dark bodies glistening under the sun”. In the book, Twain would instead focus on Tangier’s exotic architecture and the “Moorish” character of the streets, avoiding any mention of nude bathers.

Twain’s dispatches from France, particularly his July 1867 letters to the Alta California, contained sharp critiques of French culture and the travelers’ attempts to navigate it. One passage described a French barber as a “demon” whose aggressive shaving left Twain feeling “scalped.” Twain’s Parisian observations also included jabs at the city’s overrated grandeur, which were moderated in the book to avoid offending readers enamored with European sophistication. At the Paris Exhibition, he wrote of how “our holy rollers bought trinkets like heathens at a bazaar, all while preaching temperance.”

During the Quaker City passengers’ time to Paris, Twain attended a performance at a French theater, likely the Folies Bergère or a similar venue. In his Alta California dispatch, he described the can-can dancers, writing, “The girls kicked their legs so high you could see nearly all of creation, and the crowd roared like heathens.” His fellow passengers, meanwhile, “gasped at the dancers’ legs but stayed glued to their seats, praying for their souls while ogling the stage.” 

The journey continued through Italy, with stops in Genoa, Milan, Venice, and Rome. Twain’s dispatches from Italy, such as those published in August 1867, were particularly irreverent about Catholic relics and art. In a letter to the Alta California, he described a Roman guide’s insistence on the authenticity of a relic as “a lie so transparent that only a fool would believe it,” yet “our devout friends knelt before every splinter, sure it was the True Cross, yet scoffed at Catholic ‘superstition’.”

His Italian chapters also lampooned the group’s souvenir-chipping habits, a critique retained in the book but softened to avoid portraying the travelers as vandals, as he described them in a dispatch. “They chipped at St. Mark’s as if it were a quarry, yet called the locals idol-worshippers.”

After Italy, the Quaker City sailed through the Mediterranean, stopping at Constantinople, Smyrna, and Ephesus. Twain’s dispatches from these ports, published in the Alta California in August 1867, included biting commentary on Turkish culture that was significantly revised for the book. For example, in a dispatch, Twain described the Ottoman Emperor as the “representative of a people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, and superstitious.” Twain’s bias against non-European cultures was evident throughout. In the book, he reframes such observations with humor, as when Twain mocks the “barbaric” pomp of Constantinople’s streets, but omits the dispatch’s venomous tone.

In Constantinople, Twain visited a Turkish bathhouse, an experience detailed in a New York Herald dispatch. He wrote, “They stripped us bare as Adam and scrubbed us till we shone, with no regard for modesty or shame”. This candid description of communal nudity in the bathhouse was excluded from The Innocents Abroad, where Twain briefly mentions the bathhouse but focuses on its architecture.

From Smyrna, the Quaker City proceeded to Beirut, arriving in early September 1867. This marked the start of the Holy Land leg, the journey’s centerpiece for many passengers. Twain’s dispatches from Beirut, published in the Alta California and New York Tribune, expressed skepticism about the region’s romanticized image. One omitted passage from a September 1867 Tribune dispatch described Palestine as “teeming with indigenous people” but dismissed their presence as insignificant compared to biblical expectations, stating, “The fairy land was modified too much…this has incensed us against all our Holy Land authors.” In The Innocents Abroad, this passage was revised to emphasize the landscape’s barrenness, aligning with Twain’s broader theme of disillusionment but omitting the dispatch’s direct attack on travel literature’s exaggerations.

From Beirut, the group undertook an overland journey by horse and camel through Syria to Jerusalem, with stops at Damascus, the Sea of Galilee, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. This segment, covered in chapters 41–55 of The Innocents Abroad, is where Twain’s dispatches and the book diverge most significantly due to his irreverent treatment of sacred sites. In a September 1867 dispatch to the Alta California, Twain described the Sea of Galilee as “a miserable little puddle” and mocked pilgrims who expected to sail across it, noting, “We did not sail on Galilee—nobody does.” Actually, his fellow passengers, who had wanted so much to hire a boat to float them on the sea where Jesus is said to have walked, tried to haggle with the local boatmen over the latter’s already reasonable offer, and the boatmen sailed away, ignoring the pilgrims’ calls to return.

In Damascus, Twain’s dispatch to the New York Herald included a scathing remark about the city’s inhabitants: “The people here are lazy, filthy, and utterly devoid of ambition.” His encounters with Bedouin shepherds and local guides also drew sharp commentary in the dispatches, such as a Tribune passage where he called a guide “a swindling rascal who’d sell his own mother for a piastre.”

In 1867, the population of Jerusalem was composed of Muslims, Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Catholics and Protestants. Twain’s disillusionment peaked in Jerusalem. A Tribune dispatch from October 1867, omitted from the book, stated, “The kings of these nations might have ruled over fewer people than you’d find in a Missouri hamlet.”

Jerusalem elicited some of Twain’s most caustic dispatches. On September 28, 1867, he visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and wrote in his journal, later published in the Alta California, “The rock faces in a wall on Via Dolorosa that cried Hosanna! are as authentic as the guide’s mustache.” In The Innocents Abroad, Twain instead offers a more restrained critique of the church’s relics, noting their questionable authenticity with humor rather than outright mockery. Another dispatch passage, from the New York Herald, described the pilgrims’ fervor as “a theater of the absurd, with every stone peddled as a piece of the True Cross.”

The last straw for Twain was coming upon what was billed as “the grave of Adam. How touching it was. Thanks to friends and all who cared for me, thus was I to discover the grave of a blood relation. True, a distant one, but still a relation.” Twain enacted a fit of weeping, the likes of which some of his devout fellow passengers had done at other holy spots, at the obviously bogus “tomb of Adam.”

After Jerusalem, the group visited Ramle and Jaffa before reboarding the Quaker City for Egypt. Twain’s dispatches from this leg, particularly those from Jaffa in October 1867, included a passage mocking the local market: “They sell dirt as if it were gold, and the fools buy it thinking it’s from Bethlehem’s fields”. In Egypt, Twain’s awe at the Pyramids was tempered by his disdain for local guides, whom he called “thieves in turbans” in an Alta California dispatch.

In Alexandria, Twain visited a public market and described local laborers in an Alta California dispatch: “Men carried loads on their heads, wearing naught but a cloth about their loins, their bodies glistening with sweat”. In The Innocents Abroad, Twain focuses on the market’s chaos and the “picturesque” costumes of the locals.

The Quaker City then sailed back through the Mediterranean, stopping at intermediate ports before returning to New York via Bermuda in November 1867. Twain’s final dispatch, published in the Alta California on November 20, 1867, called the trip “a funeral excursion without a corpse,” a phrase retained in the book’s conclusion but stripped of its original context: a scathing Herald passage where Twain wrote, “I deny that a party more ill-suited for skurrying around the world on a giddy picnic ever went to sea…Their pilgrims progress is ended, and they know more now than it is lawful for the gods themselves to know.”

Twain’s Holy Land journey reveals a writer grappling with the tension between his skeptical worldview and the expectations of his pious companions and readers. The dispatches to American newspapers were raw, xenophobic, or irreverent—Twain’s unfiltered voice, shaped by his American perspective and the era’s prejudices. The Innocents Abroad polishes these observations into a cohesive satire that critiques both the Old World’s romanticized history and the New World’s naive tourism.

The journey itself, spanning June to November 1867, covered over 20,000 miles. Twain’s dispatches, written on the fly, capture the immediacy of his reactions, while the book, revised over 1868–1869, refines these into a narrative that sold over 70,000 copies in its first year, becoming Twain’s best-selling work during his lifetime. The edited passages reveal the evolution of Twain’s voice from a brash journalist to a polished satirist, navigating the fine line between humor and offense.

A decade later, former President Ulysses S. Grant would take a world tour, a Bible in one hand, a tour book and Twain’s The Innocents Abroad in the other. Like other visitors to the Holy Land, he wanted to find the exact spot “where Mark Twain wept.”

Twain wrote Letters from the Earth between 1904 and 1909, but it was not published due to objections from his daughter, Clara, who feared its controversial content. A collection of Twain’s satirical writings, primarily narrated by Satan, who observes humanity with biting wit, the work reflects his deepening disillusionment with American Christianity, a skepticism rooted in his 1867 Quaker City journey. That early encounter with sanctimonious pilgrims shaped his lifelong critique of Christian contradictions.

In Letters from the Earth, Satan writes to archangels, marveling at humanity’s absurdities, particularly the American Christians’ blind adherence to biblical literalism. Twain targets people’s belief in a benevolent God who permits suffering, mocking the “fly” analogy—God creating humans to torment them as boys torment insects. He ridicules the Bible’s inconsistencies, like Noah’s Ark, questioning how animals survived post-flood, and skewers Christians’ moralizing while they ignore their own greed and cruelty. Twain’s Satan finds their heaven—a place of eternal hymn-singing—comically dull, reflecting his view that Christians’ ideals are disconnected from human nature.

This disillusionment, seeded during the Quaker City trip if not during childhood, grew through Twain’s life as he saw American Christians justify slavery, imperialism, and inequality with scripture. His dispatches’ raw satire evolved into Letters’ darker, more philosophical critique. Twain’s works remain a scathing indictment of religious hypocrisy, exposing the gap between professed faith and lived reality.

Twain displays disbelief in biblical miracles and/or Christian morality in at least 12 works. His skepticism varies in intensity: The Innocents Abroad uses humor to question relic veneration and pilgrim hypocrisy, while Letters from the Earth and The Mysterious Stranger offer scathing, philosophical critiques of miracles and moral dogma. Works like Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson focus more on moral hypocrisy, particularly in the context of slavery, while A Connecticut Yankee and Christian Science directly challenge miraculous claims. Twain’s disillusionment grew darker over time, fueled by personal tragedies and societal injustices, culminating in the unrestrained satire of his later works.

Samuel Clemens’ later years were marked by profound personal and physical trials that shaped his increasingly somber writings, yet his resilience and wit endured. The deaths of his wife, Olivia, and three of his four children—especially his daughter Susy’s devastating death from meningitis in 1896—deepened his disillusionment with the notion of a benevolent God, fueling his satirical attacks on Christian hypocrisy and biblical absurdities, such as Noah’s Ark or heaven’s monotony. Financial ruin from failed investments forced him into a grueling worldwide lecture tour to recover, mirroring the relentless critique of greed and moral posturing he observed in American Christians since his 1867 Quaker City dispatches.

Clemens coped with his losses by using Mark Twain as a vessel to either write his loved ones into his novels, or simply through compiling his autobiography, which allowed him to shape his memory and understanding of his life. Writing after his daughter Jean’s death at age 29, in 1909, he said: “Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again? Yes. And soon. For I know my temperament. And I know that the temperament is master of the man, and that he is its fettered and helpless slave and must in all things do as it commands. A man’s temperament is born in him, and no circumstances can ever change it. My temperament has never allowed my spirits to remain depressed long at a time.”

Although Twain still made public appearances, those who were close to him knew that he was extremely lonely. He surrounded himself with young girls towards the end of his life, who served as surrogate grandchildren. This loneliness slipped into the writings of Twain. Never again would his writings be the popular hits that lighthearted travel narratives had been. Instead, the writings began to take a dark turn. Many stories were deemed so negative in topic that they were not published until after his death. The lights had gone out of Clemens’ life one by one, and Twain’s writings reflected that, even if many writings had, in fact, helped him to cope with tragedy.

Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain was born when Haley’s Comet passed through our solar system in 1835 and died, as he had predicted, when it returned in April, 1910. In August of 1910, his only surviving child, Clara, gave birth to her only child, Nina Gabrilowitsch. Clara finally allowed Letters from the Earth to be published shortly before her death in 1962. Nina died childless in 1966, so no future descendants would feel compelled to warp their own lives trying to measure up to a genius like Mark Twain.