By Mark Twain

OUR ARRIVAL ELABORATED
A LITTLE MORE

We came in sight of two of this group of islands, Oahu and Molokai (pronounced O-waw-hoo and Mol-loki), on the morning of the 18th, and soon exchanged the dark blue waters of the deep sea for the brilliant light blue of “sounding.” The fat, ugly birds (said to be a species of albatross) which had skimmed after us on tireless wings clear across the ocean, left us, and an occasional flying-fish went skimming over the water in their stead.
Oahu loomed high, rugged, useless, barren, black and dreary, out of the sea, and in the distance Molokai lay like a homely sway-backed whale on the water.

THE HAWAIIAN FLAG

As we rounded the promontory of Diamond Head (bringing into view a grove of cocoanut trees, first ocular proof that we were in the tropics), we ran up the stars and stripes at the main-spencer-gaff, and the Hawaiian flag at the fore. The latter is suggestive of the prominent political elements of the Islands. It is part French, part English, part American and is Hawaiian in general. The union is the English cross; the remainder of the flag (horizontal stripes) looks American, but has a blue French stripe in addition to our red and white ones. The flag was gotten up by foreign legations in council with the Hawaiian Government. The eight stripes refer to the eight islands which are inhabited; the other four are barren rocks incapable of supporting a population.

THE KING

Captain Fitch said, “There’s the King! That’s him in the buggy! I know him far as I can see him.”

I had never seen a King in my life, and I naturally took out my note book and put him down: “Tall, slender, dark; full-bearded; green frock coat, with lappels and collar bordered with gold band an inch wide—plug hat—broad gold band around it; royal costume looks too much like a livery; this man isn’t as fleshy as I thought he was.”

I had just got these notes entered when Captain Fitch discovered that he had got hold of the wrong King – or, rather, that he had got hold of the King’s driver or a carriage-driver of one of the nobility. The King was not present at all. It was a great disappointment to me. I heard afterward that the comfortable, easy going King Kamehameha (pronounced Ka-may-ah may-ah) V had been seen sitting on a barrel on the wharf, the day before, fishing; but there was no consolation in that; that did not restore to me my lost King.

Mark Twain is the pen name for Sam Clemens, America’s greatest man of letters. This column was first printed in the Sacramento Daily Union 140 years ago. Twain spent several months in Hawaii in 1866. This piece excerpts his reports of that visit.