The Quaker City cruise that inspired Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad was a pleasure cruise designed to take its seventy-three passengers on a tour of the Holy Land. Most of the passengers were prominent both in New York society and in their respective churches. The cruise left New York in June, 1867 and stopped at Horta (on Fayal Island, Azores), Gibraltar, Tangier, Marseilles, Paris, Versailles, Genoa, Milan, Lake Cuomo, Venice, Florence, Pisa, Leghorn, CivitaVecchia, Rome, Naples, Athens (under cover of darkness since the ship had been quarantined), Constantinople, Sebastopol, Odessa, Yalta, Smyrna, Syria, Palestine. They went from Beirut to Jerusalem by horseback in summer heat, then Egypt, Spain, and Bermuda, returning to New York in November.
NINA LARROWE
Nina was born in Dubuque, Iowa, and named after the heroine in Bulwar-Lytton’s novel Rienzi. Her brother, Ney, was a year older. Their father, James Churchman, was a politician. When gold was discovered in California, James went there on a steamer that was wrecked off the coast of Mexico. He and a couple of friends walked from Mexico City to California, arriving penniless. He was gone a year before his family heard from him. In 1851, Nina’s mother, Samantha (featured in my novel The River Remembers) was told by a relative how dangerous a trip to California would be for the children. Samantha left her oldest daughter, Emily, from her first husband, with her brother in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Nina and Ney stayed with their mother’s sister in the south. Samantha traveled to New York, where she took the steamer Gold Hunter to California, joining James in Nevada City, California.
Nina and her siblings joined their parents in California shortly thereafter. They alternated between living in San Francisco and Nevada City. James was a lawyer.
Nevada City had a good theater and the best talent came there. The first play Nina attended was “Pizarro,” a tragedy. The first scene had a fierce combat with swords. The fight and loud applause at the end frightened Nina. She cried and had to be taken out. After that, though, she loved the theater. By the time she was fifteen years old, Nina had read all Shakespeare’s plays, and she knew novels of Walter Scott, Bulwar-Lytton, and Dickens.
In 1861, James Churchman went to Washington, D.C. to see the inauguration of President Lincoln, a friend of his. Lincoln appointed him to the position of consul in Valparaiso, Chile. His wife accompanied him, as well as Nina and Ney. Nina’s stepsister, Emily, was already married by that time. After his four-year term, the family returned to the United States, settling in Austin, Nevada.
Samuel Clemens arrived in Virginia City in the fall of 1861. His outlandish stories of vice, alleged hauntings, and even extravagant, made-up stories caught the attention of everyone in town, if not the region entirely. It was during this time that he, for the very first time, signed one of this stories, “Yours Dreamily, MARK TWAIN.” Clemens was a reporter for the “Territorial Enterprise” during the first constitutional convention in Nevada. Marcus Larrowe, a lawyer, was a member of that convention.
In August of 1864, Nina Churchman married Marcus Larrowe (pictured at left) in Virginia City, Nevada. For several months, Marcus was involved with making Nevada a state and the presidential election. The newlyweds went to Europe on honeymoon and settle in New York upon their return.
Marcus Larrowe was a member of the first constitutional convention in Nevada in 1863. Mark Twain reported on the convention for the “Territorial Enterprise,” and was said to have written, “The prayer was dispensed with because no one listened to it anyway.” In January of 1864, Marcus was appointed to the Nevada Supreme Court, and when Nevada became a state in October, Marcus Larrowe was elected to the state senate. He did not serve his complete term, leaving in 1866. Marcus married Nina Churchman in 1864. They were living in New York when his father died and she went on the cruise. The Larrowe family farm in New York became General Mills under his brother’s stewardship.
The cruise to the Holy Land took place in 1867. Nina is known to have said, “I knew Mark Twain in Nevada. He is too well known for me to add a word. He drove the guides nearly crazy with his slow, deliberate, apparently serious but exceedingly humorous questions.” The years from 1867 to 1895 are pretty well covered in the novel.
At the turn of the century Nina reinvented herself as a ballroom dance instructor. She purchased the Esquire Theater as a dance hall. The papers are full of notices for dance parties and recitals. She eventually became ‘the’ dancing mistress for Portland’s elite. Ney died in 1911, and with him went her staunchest supporter. She had a large and growing business at the time, but sold her dance hall building and retired.
In about 1917 Nina privately published an account of her life. She titled it, An Account of My Life’s Journey So Far: Its Adversity; Its Sunshine and Its Clouds. The book was privately printed and undated. It was apparently published and sold to raise funds for the Oregon National Guard unit which was either preparing for or engaged in the First World War. While researching her novel, Linda was able to visit the Oregon Historical Society, which still has its copy of Nina’s book.
When she died in 1921, Nina’s obituary stated that she was the last survivor of the Quaker City cruise. That was an error, since Emma Beach didn’t pass away until 1924.
EMMA BEACH
Moses and Chloe Beach had two sons and three daughters, including Emeline, called Emma by her family, born in 1849. The family was descended from the Mayflower Pilgrims on her father’s side. Emma’s great- grandmother, Mary Day, had Elder Brewster’s chest, upon which the Mayflower Compact was signed, but her father’s uncle Benjamin sold it.
The night before the Quaker City cruise in 1867, Moses Beach gave a party at his home for the passengers. The paper reported, “Newspaper publisher Moses Beach gave a reception at his beautiful Brooklyn home. The evening was passed delightfully and the 65 passengers made thoroughly at home and were generally introduced the night before their departure.”
Emma met Samuel Clemens on the cruise and fell in love. He was much older (31 to her 17) and most likely saw her as a friend. He did, however, write to her on their return. While her letters to him have been lost, his still survive in Mark Twain’s Letters.
Abbott Thayer was born the same year as Emma Beach. He married Kate Bloede, Emma’s friend. Abbott considered Kate Bloede his feminine ideal, an innocent soul—poetic, graceful, fond of philosophic reading and discussion. Upon Kate’s death, Abbot married Emma Beach. Emma never had any children of her own. The Smithsonian Archives have quite a collection of family papers, including the diary of Abbott’s daughter Mary. Abbot and George deForest Brush obtained a patent for their idea in 1902, titled “Process of Treating the Outsides of Ships, etc., for Making Them Less Visible”, in which their method is described as having been modeled on the coloration of a seagull.
Emma assisted her husband and his son, Gerald, in illustrating his theories of concealment for his groundbreaking and thought-provoking work on wildlife and animal camouflage Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909).
This is one of her paintings for the book. Can you see the Jagged Leaf Edge Caterpillar along the bottom? Although challenged by some, Thayer’s theories influenced the later development of military camouflage. Abbott pitched the idea of disruptive or Dazzle coloring to the Allied powers during World War 1. By 1918, the loss of young men to the influenza epidemic and to World War I affected Abbott profoundly. That sadness informs this 1918 painting, Boy and Angel.
It was too much even for Emma. Inj 1918 she fled to her sister in Peekskill, New York. Thayer took refuge in a hotel in Boston, then took himself to a sanatorium. From there he wrote Emma, “I lacked you to jeer me out of suicide and I got into a panic.” By 1919 they were together again. She needed another extended break in 1920 before Abbott passed away from a stroke in 1921. On hearing of Thayer’s death, John Singer Sargent said, “Too bad he’s gone. He was the best of them.”
Emma died in 1924.