Mark told the story of sugar,
but, as was his wont, threw in a lot of extraneous matter that had
nothing to do with sugar. It was the extraneous matter, and not the
sugar, that won him a wide audience on the Pacific Coast. During these
months of "luxurious vagrancy" he described in the most vivid way many
of the most notable features of the Sandwich Islands. Nowadays such
letters would at once have been embodied in a volume. In his 'My Debut
as a Literary Person', Mark Twain has described in admirably graphic
style his great "scoop" of the news of the Hornet disaster; how Anson
Burlingame had him, ill though he was, carried on a cot to the hospital,
so that he could interview the half-dead sailors. His bill--twenty
dollars a week for general correspondence, and one hundred dollars a
column for the Hornet story--was paid with all good will. On the
strength of this story, he hoped to become a "Literary Person," and sent
his account of the Hornet disaster to Harper's Magazine, where it
appeared in December, 1866.
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