Mark Twain visited Bermuda on the wooden steamer SS Quaker City in 1867 with 73 other travelers. It was at the end of a five-month cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. A San Francisco newspaper furnished his ticket in return for a regular series of travel stories about all of the places he visited. They became the basis for his popular book The Innocents Abroad.
His stop there began his long love affair with the island nation, which sits about 775 miles southeast of New York and 1,000 miles east of Jacksonville in the Atlantic Ocean. After that first four-day visit, Twain visited Bermuda seven more times, including a 95-day stay in 1910 shortly before his death.
Before our cruise ship stopped in Bermuda for a 23-hour visit over two days this week, I read everything I could find of Twain’s observations about the place. I wanted to see if his experiences and mine bore any similarities, taking into account that all of them were over a century apart.
Because this was Twain, one of the funniest people who has ever walked this planet, this was mostly a humorous exercise. When I read Twain’s description of how the passengers for his trip had to be “rigidly selected” by “a pitiless. . . selecting committee,” I knew this would be a fun project.
“I rejoiced to know that a few staterooms were left,” Twain wrote. “I did avoid a critical personal examination into my character by that bowelless committee, but I referred to all the people of high standing I could think of in the community who would be least likely to know anything about me.”
Twain obviously made it on the passenger list, although it should be noted that he had yet to achieve the fame at that point that he would achieve later. Even so, he traveled under his real name, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, to avoid recognition. All the real celebrities who were expected to go – Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Lieutenant General William Tecumseh Sherman, “a popular actress” and the “Drummer Boy of the Potomac” – declined, and Clemens, as the only newspaper reporter onboard, grew in celebrity as his reports were widely distributed.
As isolated as it is, Bermuda wasn’t widely visited in those days, when circulars for his trip advertised the last stop as a visit with “our friends the Bermudians.” Twain seemed to get a kick out of that and used that description several times in his reports. He helped to popularize Bermuda in his writings, particularly with a series of articles he wrote for The Atlantic in 1877 that became Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion.
At one point, he wrote that visitors who come here will “find a green, kind-hearted people.”
And this:
“We never met a man, or woman, or child anywhere in this sunny island who seemed to be unprosperous, or discontented, or sorry about anything. This sort of monotony became very tiresome presently, and even something worse. The spectacle of an entire nation groveling in contentment is an infuriating thing.”
His kidding aside, our seven-person travel party found the people on Bermuda delightful and always willing, or even anxious, to answer a visitor’s question or help with any problem that might arise. Friendly people aren’t a novelty to those who live in the Midwest. It’s incredible how many people who have moved to Ohio from other parts of the country talk about how friendly and helpful people are here, which is why our own repeated comments about the Bermudians’ friendly nature seem so illuminating. Bermudians make us look like a state populated with 12 million grumpy, old men.
Our bus rides from the Royal Naval Dockyard where our cruise ship was docked to the historic village of St. George are a case in point:
Six of us boarded our city bus bound for Hamilton (where we had to transfer to another bus to St. George), a 15-mile ride that should have taken 38 minutes. We had gone only about 100 feet, when the bus driver hit the brakes and pulled over without explanation. He began searching through tickets that had been deposited by about 30 passengers in two or three different containers near the driver’s seat.
This frantic search went only for probably ten minutes, and no one had any idea what was going on. He finally found the specific tickets he apparently sought, then handed them to a couple of American tourists in their 20s sitting near the front. He told them that they would be better off if they got off the bus and walked back to the bus stop. Another bus should arrive there in about five minutes, one that would get them to their destination much quicker than this one. They departed, he climbed back in his seat, and we were on our way.
It took a few minutes to process what had just happened here. The bus driver could have continued on his way without saying a word, the tourists would have never known and he wouldn’t have risked the ire of the other passengers. Instead, he stopped the bus and searched and searched for those tickets.
Ah, our friends the Bermudians.
The main roads in Bermuda consist of two narrow lanes, each just wide enough for a city bus to pass. The roads twist and turn and are crowded with scooters and small motorcycles, all of which make for a harrowing journey. We had gone maybe halfway to Hamilton and had made a half-dozen stops to pick up and drop off passengers when the bus rounded a sharp corner and traffic came to a sudden stop. There on the road a couple of cars ahead of lay a motorbike on the road. The legs of a body were visible from where our seats. They weren’t moving.
The driver jumped out of the bus and ran to the scene of the accident. He hovered over the victim, paced around and at one point appeared to be talking to him. Traffic on the other side of the road completely stopped at first, then moved slowly past the accident. Our side couldn’t move, obviously. A tanned, graying guy in a tee-shirt who must have come from the neighborhood began directing traffic. He ran from one side of the accident to the other, holding up traffic one direction, so traffic on both sides could get moving. This eventually created space for a screaming police car to reach the spot.
The car in front of us eventually slipped into the other lane and left, and we could now see that a man in his fifties had been lifted into a sitting position and appeared to be suffering excruciating pain. An ambulance and then a fire truck arrived. They could barely squeeze in between our bus and the accident. The bus driver saw this and he walked back to the bus, inched it backwards a few feet and then returned to the injured man.
Because of the man alternating traffic, it had mostly cleared. But thirty of us were still in a bus without a driver, who started back toward us, and then turned and went back to the place where paramedics were trying to lift the injured man.
Over thirty minutes has passed, and for the first time, a twenty-something female passenger said in a quiet voice, almost to herself, ‘C’mon, driver, I’ve got to get to work.’ A few minutes later, another, older woman said more loudly “I’ve got to get off this bus.” She did just that and started walking. She has passed the accident and was probably a quarter of a mile away when the driver finally returned, drove around the accident and started on his way.
The entire scene seemed remarkable to me. The driver jumping out to help the injured man and leaving thirty passengers sitting there for more than 30 minutes. The passengers sitting there patiently and not grousing about the long wait, even though the driver appeared to be of little help to the injured guy on roadway. The police and the firemen saying nothing to the bus driver, even though the bus was clearly bottling up traffic and blocking a fire truck which was having trouble parking.
Again, I thought of Twain and one of his Bermuda experiences:
“The island is not very large. Somewhere in the interior a man ahead of us had a very slow horse. I suggested that we had better go by him, but the driver said the man had a little way to go. I waited to see, wondering how he could know. Presently, the man did turn down another road. I asked. ‘How did you know he would?’
“‘Because I knew the man, and where he lived.’”
“I asked him, satirically, if he knew everybody in the land; he answered, very simply, that he did. . . “
Did our bus driver know the injured guy on the motor bike? Maybe. That could explain why he jumped out and ran when he saw the damaged vehicle laying in the road. But his behavior fit with what we saw everywhere here. Our friends the Bermudians. It seems like everybody wants to help.
We got to Hamilton, the capital and largest city in Bermuda, and took the bus all the way to the terminal, as a nice lady on the bus had suggested. No one seemed troubled or even acknowledged that the bus was 45 minutes late. Another kind mother with a young boy carrying a soccer ball (“He doesn’t play, he just likes to take the ball with him everywhere he goes . . .”) had told me that we could change to the 3, 10 or 11 bus to get to St. George. All of those busses were sitting there when we arrived, so I asked a guy in the parking lot if he could tell me which of the three would get my party there sooner. He looked at me with a serious expression.
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t help you.” he said solemnly. Then he broke into a wide grin. “Just kidding! It’s No. 10!”
We climbed aboard the 10 for a 30-minute drive to St. George. At the first stop there, only one woman got off. The woman driving the bus called back to us and asked if we were sure we also didn’t want to get off here. She said the next stop was three blocks ahead.
The guts of the old village appeared to lie a couple of blocks down the hill ahead, so we told the driver to go ahead. We got off there and stared off in space for several seconds, looking like a group of small children who had lost their mother at the shopping mall. The driver had started to pull away, saw us and put her bus in park. She got off and asked where we were going and if she could help direct us there.
I mentioned the Globe Hotel – a 1699-1700 hotel where Twain and his traveling companion (Rev. Joseph H. Twichell) had stayed and eaten in 1877 that is now a museum – and she had never heard of it. She called to another woman on the bus and asked, and she hadn’t heard of it, either. But then the bus driver ticked off the names of other places and said that the town square was back a couple of blocks as she has first suggested. All the while she was trying to help, there were probably 20 people waiting patiently on the bus. Near as I can tell, no one cursed at her, recorded a video of her to post on the Internet or send to her boss, or even uttered a soft, feeble “C’mon, driver, I have to get to work.”
The Globe Hotel
The town was just as picturesque as described; quaint, old buildings with narrow. winding streets and a beautiful little harbor. Because I had seen pictures of the Globe Hotel, I quickly found it in the same place Twain had, and snapped a few photos of it.
On May 22, 1877, “S. Langhorne” and “J.H. Twichell USA” were registered guests. Langhorne was Samuel Clemens’ middle name. Here is what Twain wrote about the place:
“At the principal hotel in St. George’s, a young girl, with a sweet, serious face, said we could not be furnished with dinner because we had not been expected and no precaution had been made. . . I said we were not very hungry; a fish would do. My little maid answered, it was not the market day for fish. Things began to look serious; but presently, the boarder who sustained the hotel came in, and when the case was laid before him, he was cheerfully willing to divide. So we had a much pleasant chat at the table about St. George’s chief industry, the repairing of damaged ships, and in between we had a soup that had something in it that seemed to taste like the hereafter, but it proved to be only pepper of a particularly vivacious kind. And we had an iron-clad chicken that was deliciously cooled, but not in the right way. Baking was not the thing to convince his sort. . . No matter; we had potatoes and a pie and a social good time. Then a ramble through the town, which is a quaint one, with interesting, crooked streets, and narrow, crooked lanes, with here and there a grain of dust.”
We couldn’t even get an “iron-clad chicken” there on this day. The building was closed, and unfortunately, so were all of the businesses except the historic White Horse Inn, where a hamburger was priced at $28. (With no boarders “cheerfully willing to divide” it with us, we passed.) We thought about at least getting a drink there, but we had been hoping to catch the ferry back to the Royal Naval Dockyard, a much faster trip that would avoid another long, adventurous bus ride, and there was no ferry in sight. Better to make sure we didn’t miss the ferry before we did anything else.
The rest of the journey can be summarized this way: The last ferry had already left, we had minutes to catch the next bus to Hamilton, which was the only one which could get us to the last ferry from there to the dockyard, and we made it, again because “our friends,the Bermudians” included another driver who got out of her bus to direct us.
When we were back on our ship that evening, it almost felt as if this day could have been lifted from a bad novel. But I think Twain would have protested if we told him our story and said that it couldn’t happen in real life.
One of his famous quotes about Bermuda is sold on tee-shirts all over the islands:
“You go to heaven if you want to. I’d rather stay here.”
The Globe Hotel today
