Linda Ulleseit

The steamship Quaker City at the port of Naples, 1867, Tommaso de Simone

In 1867, Mark Twain took a five-month journey to the Holy Land aboard the Quaker City steamship. That voyage became the basis for his first major work, the novel Innocents Abroad. The book was the first of its kind, a novel about traveling. It was universally accepted as irreverent, sacrilegious, and manifesting all of the moral indignation typical of Mark Twain. About the ship itself, Mark Twain said, “I was a passenger in the excursion tub Quaker City, and on one occasion in a level and glassy sea it was claimed that she reeled off two hundred and eleven miles between noon and noon, but it was probably a campaign lie. That little steamer had seventy passengers, and a crew of forty men, and seemed a good deal of a beehive.”

The Quaker City was built in 1854 and bought by the navy in 1861. The ship was one of the most effective blockaders, stationed off Chesapeake Bay, in the Union Navy during the Civil War. Registered at nineteen hundred tons, the Quaker City was an early ocean paddle-wheel steamer with a top speed of twelve knots over short distances. She couldn’t rely on steam power alone for long distances, so she carried three fully rigged masts for sailing.

At the time of the cruise to the Holy Land, the Quaker City was nineteen years old and freshly painted. She carried 70 passengers on that cruise in large but not luxurious cabins. A transatlantic pleasure cruise on a steamship had never been attempted before. Mark Twain, at that time in California, heard about the trip and asked the San Francisco newspaper the Alta-California to send him as their correspondent. The paper paid hims $20 for each letter he sent home. Later, those letters became the basis of Twain’s novel, Innocents Abroad. The novel became the most popular travel book of its time.

After the five-month cruise, the Quaker City was sold and renamed Columbia. She was sold in 1869 to the Haitian Navy, and sold again in 1871. That year she was lost at sea off Bermuda.

My novel, Innocents at Home, features two women, both related to me, who were on that cruise with Mark Twain. It relates what happened to them in New York as a result of the trip.