In the second part of 19th Century San Juan River has been very busy  due to  the famous GOLD RUSH , The river  was use by the pioneers to cross the Central America Isthmus... Much easier in these days than to cross all the USA.  They were going from New York to San Juan Del Norte in large " steamer'' then Up San Juan River aboard smaller boats , then across the Nicaragua Lake to San Jorge, then San Juan Del Sur or Corinto on the Pacific coast, a big steamer again and then San Francisco California...

What is amazing and almost unbelievable when you are in the area now is to think than more than a 100 000 Pioneers past there...aboard the boats of Mr. Vanderbilt...among them Mark Twain , he wrote a description of the area:

 Dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars, towers, pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in endless confusion of vine-work -- no shape known to architecture unimitated -- and all so webbed together that short distances within are only gained by glimpses. Monkeys here and there; birds warbling; gorgeous plumaged birds on the wing, Paradise itself, the imperial realm of beauty -- nothing to wish for to make it perfect.   Mark Twain  1866...

During all these times there have been a lot of conflict in the area , Obviously to take control of it ... Walker and its Filibusters is one of the example...

At the end of 19th Century several project of Transoceanic canal had been establish. Even a mile has been built from San Juan Del Norte....there is still some heavy machinery around...Then Decision had been taken to stop and to built the transoceanic canal in Northern part of Colombia who became Panama...

The first part of 20th century is characterized by a very agitated political history in Nicaragua, in witch USA has been involved, Sandino take over , then came  the Somosa Family  who has been in power for long..... Then came the Sandinista  revolution, ( see Arts  in Solentiname, Ernesto Cardenal ) the Contra ....

Nowadays  the country is quiet , four  presidential Elections has been held   in  respect from All parts of Democratic rules.. Nicaraguans people who have been suffering so much now want peace....

 Tourism is more than welcome, Authorities or simple Citizen are  really very friendly and helpful.

Following are some texts I found on the Net concerning history in the area...

Nicaragua & Gold Rush

The discovery of gold in California drew additional attention from American and European powers who wanted to establish and control routes across Panama and Nicaragua. Americans, French and British were among the contenders, and in a move to control a route from the sultry, swampy Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, the British occupied the Eastern seaboard port of San Juan del Norte between 1848 and 1850, renaming it Greytown.

In spite of an extraordinary rainfall (236 inches a year), Cornelius Vanderbilt established a highly profitable route across Nicaragua by waterway and carriage road. In 1851, he developed the route in competition with the Pacific Mail Line, which had joined the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans via the overland Panama route. The Panama route was laborious until the railroad was completed across the Isthmus in 1855

Vanderbilt’s route was easier in that once passengers reached San Juan del Norte, on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, most of the journey between the oceans was covered in small boats (bungoes) and steamers. The bungoes ferried passengers and cargo up the San Juan River through 125 miles of jungles filled with howling monkeys and exotic birds, to Lake Nicaragua, then across Lake Nicaragua via steamer to La Virgen (Virgin Bay) near Rivas.

     http://www.maritimeheritage.org/ports/centralamerica/nicara.html

Daily Alta California, July 1, 1853

FROM CENTRAL AMERICA

Guatemala, January 1, 1853
Everything which tends to the development of commerce and new trade on the Pacific coast, must always be interesting to your California readers. There are few countries so little known to Americans as this; and in fact there is not one in a thousand that has an idea of the immense advantages Central America possesses for traffic and trade with California.

      http://www.maritimeheritage.org/newtale/goods.htm#trade  

           http://malakoff.com/goldcountry/history.htm

http://www.stfrancis.edu/ba/ghkickul/stuwebs/bbios/biograph/vanderbi.htm

Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), industrial estadounidense nacido en Staten Island (Nueva York). Se inició en el negocio de los transportes a los 16 años, creando un servicio de transporte por barco de mercancías y pasajeros entre Staten Island y Manhattan. Consiguió una flota de goletas durante la guerra de 1812, para en 1818, iniciarse en el negocio del transporte fluvial con barcos de vapor, comprando su primer barco de vapor en 1829. Amplió sus servicios con gran rapidez, y se convirtió en un importante competidor, pues podía reducir sus tarifas al tiempo que modernizaba su flota. Pronto consiguió controlar la mayor parte del comercio fluvial del río Hudson hasta el punto que sus rivales en el sector le pagaron para que montase su negocio en otro río, por lo que creó nuevas rutas entre Long Island Sound y Providence, Rhode Island y Boston. En 1851, durante la fiebre del oro en California, abrió una línea marítima y terrestre que iba desde el estado de Nueva York hasta la ciudad de San Francisco (California) permitiendo a los del cuarenta y nueve disponer de un transporte rápido con mínimos costes. En 1855 inauguró una línea para pasajeros y mercancías entre la ciudad de Nueva York y El Havre.

Vanderbilt vendió sus barcos de vapor en 1862 para introducirse en el negocio de los ferrocarriles; en cinco años logró controlar los ferrocarriles del estado de Nueva York. Continuó con su política de calidad en los servicios y siguió adquiriendo líneas férreas. Aunque en 1868 fracasó cuando intentó controlar la empresa de ferrocarriles Erie Railroad, consiguió en 1873 establecer una línea entre Nueva York y Chicago.

Al final de su vida entró en los círculos financieros y se convirtió en un gran filántropo. Entre sus donaciones destaca la que otorgó a la Universidad Vanderbilt, de un millón de dólares. Se estima que, cuando murió, su fortuna superaba los 100 millones de dólares.

HORACIO NELSON

In 1779 Nelson was promoted to captain, at the age of 20. He was given command of a frigate, the Hinchingbrook, and took part in operations against Spanish settlements in Nicaragua, which became targets once Spain joined France in alliance with the American Revolutionaries. The attack on San Juan was militarily successful

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/terrace/adw03/c-eight/nelson.htm

http://www.aboutnelson.co.uk/chronology.htm

Concerning the Canal

3,089 sq mi (8,001 sq km), c.100 mi (160 km) long and up to 45 mi (72 km) wide, SW Nicaragua; the largest lake of Central America. It is drained into the Caribbean Sea by the San Juan River. Lake Nicaragua, along with Lake Managua (which drains into it from the northwest), occupies part of the Nicaragua Depression, an extensive lowland region stretching across the isthmus. Once part of the sea, the lake was formed when the land rose. There are several islands in the lake (the largest is Isla de Ometepe); and small volcanoes rise above its surface. The freshwater of Lake Nicaragua contains fish usually associated with saltwater,  including tuna...  ( Personal comment ( Philippe )  we have a lot of fish here but SORRY NO TUNA IN THE LAKE !!! ) and sharks, which have adapted to the environmental change. The lake is a transportation route; Granada is its chief port. Located only 110 ft (34 m) above sea level, the lake reaches a depth of 84 ft (26 m). It was to be an important link in the proposed Nicaragua Canal.

   http://www.bartleby.com/65/ni/NicrguLk.html

English Version of MarkTwain’s Travels with Mr. Brown

At the end of 1866, Mark Twain traveled to Nicaragua and the San Juan River. A traveler for nearly a decade of his adult life, Twain needed to go from San Francisco to New York City. Instead of crossing the United States by land, he chose to make his way to New York City via Nicaragua and the San Juan River.

In a series of letters to the Alta California newspaper, Twain describes his travels through Nicaragua and down the San Juan River. Not published in book form until 1940 as Travels with Mr. Brown, Mark Twain’s commentary on Central America has remained relatively unknown
to a good many historians and even readers of Twain.

Here is the original English text  which includes  introduction and textual notes to his travels
over what was commonly called in the nineteenth century the Nicaraguan Route.

At the end of 1866, Mark Twain traveled from San Francisco to New York via Nicaragua and the San Juan River. He went aboard the steamer America from San Francisco to San Juan del Sur and journeyed by wagon across the twelve-mile stretch from San Juan del Sur to the Lake of Nicaragua. Then at Virgin Bay, he crossed the Lake of Nicaragua by steamer and at Fort Castillo, on the southeastern tip of the lake, made his way down the San Juan River to Greytown (San Juan del Norte), caught another steamer and, after a short layover in Key West, followed the eastern seaboard to New York City.

The trip took eleven days to arrive at San Juan del Sur, three days to cross the isthmus, and eleven more days to sail from Greytown to New York City. Twain, who spent nearly a decade on the road and once said that, if he had his way, he “would sail on forever and never go live on solid ground again,”1 wrote an account of his journey via Nicaragua to New York for a San Francisco newspaper called the Alta California (Rodney v.). He wrote seven letters describing the sea trip from San Francisco to New York. These letters were not collected in book form until 1940 and then published as Travels with Mr.
Brown, which includes all his letters to the Alta California—some twenty-six in total—dealing with his sea voyage from San Francisco to New York as well as his six-month stay in New York City and a few weeks in his native Missouri and elsewhere in the Midwest.
Mark Twain loved traveling and rivers. When he was only 23 and had not yet stepped outside of the United States or traveled much even in the United States, he said about traveling on the Ohio River:
I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration. I was a traveler! A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before. I had an exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant climes which I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since. I was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed out of me, and I was able to look down and pity the untravelled with a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it. (Twain 1945: 25)
Although near the end of his life MarkTwain denied that he had ever enjoyed traveling, and he even claimed, “That there is no man living who cares less about seeing new places and peoples than I,” there obviously was something in travel that brought out the best in this man, that permitted him to see and feel life in all its complexity, and that no doubt complemented, if not cultivated, his literary skills (qtd. in Neider 23).
As a young man, Twain had wanted to go to Brazil—to participate in the ongoing explorations of the Amazon. He traveled to New Orleans to find passage south. He never made it. No ships. No money (Rodney 1993: 54). In spite of the fact that he had once wanted to go to Brazil, and that he traveled and circumnavigated the world, Twain never traveled, after the crossing of the Nicaraguan route, in Mexico or the rest of Latin America. Nor did he ever travel much in Africa, other than the northernmost countries.

When he traveled in Central America, it was to get somewhere quickly and to avoid the treacherous stagecoach ride across the continental United States. He crossed the isthmus three times on his way toand from New York and San Francisco. He did it via Nicaragua the first time and then, a few
years later, he crossed the isthmus twice again by taking the easier route via Panama—by train
from Panama to Colon (Aspinwall). The more rugged Nicaraguan route apparently cured Twain
of any desire to repeat it. He never took on the Nicaragua route again, and he only wrote an
account of his Nicaragua crossing—never of the two Panama crossings by train.

One year prior to the trip to Nicaragua, in 1866, Twain boarded a steamer and went off to the Sandwich Islands (present day Hawaii) under the condition that he would write a series of letters detailing his four-month trip to the readers of the Sacramento Union (Rodney1993: 4).

He would go to the Sandwich Islands for four months and “describe their people,recount their history, and report on whatever advantages they might have in the way of trade opportunities and economic development” (Rodney 1993: 4). The trip to Hawaii was the first of a long series of journeys outside of the continental United States that would eventually take him around the world. He would go on to record those travels meticulously in a vast corpus of works, Letters from Hawaii, Roughing It, Innocents Abroad, Following the Equator, A Tramp Abroad, Travels with Mr. Brown.
When he returned to California after his four months in Hawaii, at the behest of a friend who worked at the Alta California, Twain gave a lecture on the Sandwich Islands, and his career as a raconteur and public speaker was set in stone (Rodney 1993: 21). His lecture on the Sandwich Islands was so warmly received that he went on to give some fifteen lectures in numerous cities in California (Rodney 1993: 21). These lectures set the foundation for hundreds of more appearances on the lecture circuit that would keep Mark Twain busy as a public speaker in the United States and abroad for the rest of his life.
Twain eventually came up with an idea to travel the world and be paid for his travels by continuing the practice that he had begun with the Sacramento Union: He would write a series of letters describing his travels, beginning with New York, then Europe and the rest of the world (Rodney 1993: 22).

He convinced the editors of the Alta California to underwrite this venture,and he set off for New York City, where he would cross the Atlantic and commence his travels(Rodney 1993: 22).

The problem was getting to New York City. He had already once taken the overland route by stagecoach across the Midwest with his brother Orion, who, in 1861, had  been named Secretary of the Nevada Territory (Johnson 1974: 216), and the trip was filled with problems: Indians, rough riding, and the frequent breakdowns of stagecoaches (Johnson 1974: 43-61). Aside from the dangers of crossing the lands of Native Americans and the cumbersome nature of stagecoach travel itself, Twain knew that it would take him some sixteen days to get to St. Louis, and then he would have to take a long, tedious train ride to New York City Rodney 1993: 22).

He chose the Nicaraguan route instead. He would sail to Nicaragua, cross the isthmus via wagon and steamer, and arrive in New York City within a month. His choice was a common one. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the Nicaraguan route was how most people traveled from San Francisco to New York if they opted not to weather the hazardous crossing of the continental United States by stagecoach (Rodney 1993: 22).
Twain’s journey through Nicaragua and down the San Juan River was not without incident. He and his fellow passengers faced an outbreak of cholera, which killed a good many of his fellow shipmates (Twain 1940: 64-68). Cholera on steamships was common and traveling on a Vanderbilt steamship was not easy.3 When his ship arrived in San Juan del Sur on the Pacific coast, an epidemic of cholera, as Twain says, was “raging among a battalion of troops just arrived from New York” (Twain 1940: 38). Although no infection occurred in Nicaragua, cholera did break out on the New York leg of the trip, and his steamer San Francisco became, as Twain himself describes it, “a floating hospital” and “not a single hour passes but brings its new sensation—its melancholy tidings” (Twain 1940: 66). Passengers were “sheeted and thrown overboard,” and Twain remained sober about the whole affair, noting the responses of his fellow passengers and his own to the epidemic and its toll on human life (Twain 1940: 64).Filología y Lingüística XXXI (1): 82 79-115, 2005 / ISSN: 0377-628X
 

The Nicaraguan route itself was established by Cornelius Vanderbilt. There was already one route to California via the isthmus at Panama—bongos up the Chagres River to the village of Gorgona and then mule-back to the western coast of Panama4 (Folkman 1972: 2)—which had been set up by William Henry Aspinwall and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Vanderbilt opened the Nicaraguan route for wide commercial use in 1851, and it was done to ferry people to California to “pick nuggets.” After gold was discovered at Sutter’s mine in California, and after President James Polk’s curt but consequential comment before the United States Congress (“Recent discoveries render it possible that these mines are more extensive and valuable than was anticipated”), nothing could stop the stampede to California(Lewis 1949: 3).

Vanderbilt had already made a fortune building and operating steamships, and he took note of the mad rush to California (Folkman 1972: 16). He had conceived the idea of creating a passage to California via Nicaragua to compete with the Panama route, and the California gold rush made his plans to traverse the isthmus all the more economically enticing (Folkman 1972: 23-7).

The trip across the isthmus at Nicaragua was difficult in places. On a trip from New York to San Francisco (the directional inverse of Twain’s trip), a passenger once at Greytown (San Juan de Norte) had to go 120 miles up the San Juan River to the Lake of Nicaragua and then another 100 miles across the Lake of Nicaragua to Virgin Bay (Lewis 164),5 traverse the land portion of the route to the Pacific coast by wagon or mule, some twelve miles, and then catch still another steamer to San Francisco. While the isthmus was wider at Nicaragua (165 miles) than at Panama (60 miles), a passenger who opted for this route would nevertheless shorten the trip to the eastern or western coasts of the United States by 1,000 miles (Lewis1949: 163). While often uncomfortable, especially the land portion of the trip, the journey was short in time (it could be done in a few days), and this route was better than taking the long sea voyage around Cape Horn, a total of 15,000 miles, which would take some five months to complete (Lewis 1949: 133).

Since the Panama crossing proved to be remarkably profitable, Vanderbilt wanted a piece of this lucrative transportation business (Folkman 1972: 16). Aspinwall’s Pacific Steamship Line was charging “Argonauts,” as the California gold diggers were called, 600 dollars to cross the isthmus through Panama (Folkman 1972: 16). Vanderbilt knew that the route through Nicaragua was shorter and faster, and it offered significant savings in time and distance for travelers who were desperate to get to California before all the gold could be panned and carted home.

After the British and the United States governments signed the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, which resolved territorial claims between the two countries over an interoceanic trade route, the Nicaraguan route quickly became the competitor to the Panama crossing, and it was a vastly superior alternative to get to California than the long way around,via Cape Horn (Folkman 1972: 18-21).

By the time Mark Twain took the route in 1867, some sixteen years after its inauguration, it had not changed much. The route had endured, during the intervening sixteen years, the changing of hands, William Walker’s meddling, the United States Navy's shelling and burning of Greytown, and the territorial disputes between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. But the route that Vanderbilt had marked out in 1851 was still essentially the same in 1867: A steamship to San Juan del Sur, mule or wagons to the Lake of Nicaragua, another steamer to cross the Lake of Nicaragua, and then a riverboat steamer down the San Juan River to Greytown on the Atlanticcoast.

That Mark Twain loved ships and rivers is a cardinal fact of American literature, and he no doubt wanted to see both the Lake of Nicaragua and the San Juan River. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the quintessential American robber baron, made all that possible with his explorations and commandeering of the Nicaraguan route across the Central American isthmus.

In his Life on the Mississippi, looking back on his experiences as a cub-pilot and as a full-fledged pilot on the Mississippi River, Mark Twain details his wonder at life on the  Mississippi River, and his singular admiration for the men who piloted ships up and down the river. Mark Twain took his name from the measurements or the soundings of the depths of a river—“mark twain” meant two fathoms deep, and he would convert those two little words into a name known both at home and abroad.6

Twain piloted steamers on the Mississippi for four years until the American civil war brought to an end his career as a pilot. Much of Life on the Mississippi, written years later, concerns both his experiences and the characters that he met on the river. Twain’s reputation as a humorist and raconteur, and as the author of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Prince and Pauper, has overshadowed his skills as an observer of nature. We seldom think of Twain as a writer of nature; indeed some critics argue that Twain’s descriptive passages often border on being “purple passages” (Rodney 1993: 10). Yet when Twain is writing at his best about a landscape—be it the Mississippi, his stagecoach crossing of the United States, or Nicaragua— his descriptive powers are noteworthy, if not remarkable.
In Life on the Mississippi, Twain seldom speaks of the river itself except in relation to piloting although he warns us precisely of this fact:

That a river pilot’s eye is not that of a naturalist’s and, once you see a river through the eyes of a pilot, you will never see it again inquite the same way:
Now when I have mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature
that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet I had made a valuable
acquisition. But I had lost something too. I had lost something that could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! (Twain 1945: 48).

When Twain does speak of the Mississippi in aesthetic terms, as an artist looking out at nature, he speaks of the beauty of the river in the language that made T.S. Eliot understand the full significance of the river in Huckleberry Finn: The river in the novel is God; the river is character (Clemens 1977: 332). It was a boy’s story to be sure but, as Eliot argued in his now famous essay on Huckleberry Finn, it was a river’s story as well. And in Life on the Mississippi, Twain’s language and ability to conjure the beauty of the Mississippi is surpassed by few writers in American letters:

I still kept in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold,through which a solitary log came bloating, black and conspicuous; in one place a log, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water, in another the surface was broken by boiling tumbling rings, that were as manytinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it every passing monument with new marvels of coloring. (Twain 1945: 48)

In one of his most celebrated and quoted passages from Life on the Mississippi, Twain describes rivers as watery manuscripts that erase themselves and then reappear:

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the
uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secretsas if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with ever reperusal. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface (on rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether); but to the pilot that was an italicized passage; indeed it was more than that, it was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at theend it, for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. It is the faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilot’s eye. In truth, the passenger could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading-matter. (Twain 1945: 47)

And, here, in Roughing It, describing the mountains and deserts of Nevada, thelanguage is exquisite, the description sumptuous and wondrous:

From Virginia’s [Virginia City] airy situation one could look over a vast, far-reaching panorama of mountain ranges and deserts; and whether the day was bright or overcast, whether the sun was rising or setting, or flaming in the zenith, or whether night and the moon held sway, the spectacle was always impressive and beautiful. Over your head Mount Davidson lifted its gray dome, and before and below you a rugged cañon clove the battlemented hills, making a somber gateway through which a soft-tinged desert was glimpsed, with the silver thread of a river winding through it, bordered with trees which many miles of distance diminished to a delicate fringe; and still further away the snowy mountains rose up and stretched their long barrier to the filmy horizon—far enough beyond a lake that burned in the desert like a fallen sun, though that, itself, lay fifty miles removed. Look from your window here you would, there
was fascination in the picture. At rare intervals—but very rare—there were clouds in our skies, and then the setting sun would gild and flush and glorify this mighty expanse of a scenery with a bewildering pompof color that held the eye like a spell and moved the spirit like music. (qtd. in Neider 76)

In Travels with Mr. Brown, looking out on the Lake of Nicaragua, Mark Twain is equally eloquent and struck by the momentary beauty of the world—moments where, in the words of Wordsworth, “the burden of the mystery, / In which the heavy and weary weight / of
all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened [...]” (164):
 

Out of the midst of the beautiful Lake Nicaragua spring two magnificent pyramids, clad in the softest and richest green, all flecked with shadow and sunshine, whose summits pierce the bil lowy clouds. They look so isolated from the world and its turmoil—so tranquil, so dreamy, so steeped in slumber and eternal repose. What a home one might make among their shady forests, their sunny slopes, their breezy dells, after he had grown weary of the toil, anxiety and unrest of the bustling, driving world. (Twain 1940: 46)
 

 There is as much Keats as Wordsworth in this passage —Twain had read his British poets, and he at times sounds, as many people have noted, like the last Romantic. He sees beauty everywhere—and he loves it when he sees it. From the deck of his river steamboat, on the San Juan River, he stares out at the passing beauty of Central America, which he finds no
less enchanting than a Nevadan desert:

The character of the vegetation on the banks had changed from a rank jungle to dense, lofty, majestic forests. There were hills, but the thick drapery of the vines spread upward, terrace upon terrace, and concealed them like a veil. We could not have believed in the hills, except that the upper trees towered too high to be on the bank level. And everywhere in these vine-robed terraces were charm ing fairy harbors fringed with swinging garlands; and weird grot toes, whose twilight depth the eye might not pierce; and tunnels that wound their mysterious course none knew whit her; and there were graceful temples—columns—towers—pyramids—mounds—domes—walls—all the shapes and forms and figures known to architecture, wrought in the pliant, leafy vines, and thrown together in reckless, enchanting confusion. (Twain 1940: 49-50)

At times Twain is genuinely impressed with tropical landscape and, like so many travelers to the tropics, the flora and fauna of Central America is seldom mentioned without noting the birds and, dare I say, the beasts—a few distant members of the human family in the trees:
 

Now and then a rollicking monkey scampered into view, or a bird of splendid plumage floated through the sultry air, or the music of some invisible songster welled up out of the forest depths. The changing vistas of the river ever renewed the in toxicating picture; corners and points folding backward revealed new wonders beyond, of towering walls of verdure—gleaming cataracts of vines pouring sheer down a hundred and fifty feet, and mingling with the grass upon the earth— wonderful waterfalls of green leaves as deftly overlapping each other as the scales of a fish—a vast green rampart, solid a moment, and then, as weadvanced, changing and opening into Gothic windows, colonnades—all manner of quaint and beautiful figures! Sometimes a limbless veteran of the forest stood aloof in his flowing vine-robes, like an ivy-clad tower of some old feudal ruin. (Twain 1940: 50)

And his references, as one would expect from one of the world’s greatest humorists, are not without jests and comical asides: [...] parrots flew by us—the idea of a parrot flying seemed funny enough—flying abroad, instead of swinging in a tin ring, and stooping and nipping that ring with its beak between its feet, and thus displaying itself in most unseemly attitude—flying, silently cleaving the air—and saying never a word!
When the first one went by without saying ‘Polly wants a cracker,’ it seemed as if there was something unnatural about the bird, but it did not immediately occur to me what it was. (Twain, 1940: 51)
A great deal of humor could be had from Mark Twain’s desire to transform these poor tropical parrots into polyglots (pun intended); to have these parrots mimic his native English.
But Twain’s humor, and the intervening passages and phrases describing the wonder of flight, of land and animal, tree and blossom, speak to a man who is deeply moved by the beauty of the natural world—even if he often wants to remake it after his own cultural image.
Surprisingly, for a man so keenly in touch with his surroundings, not a single person from Central America ever speaks in Mark Twain’s account of his crossing of Nicaragua.7
While a good many of his fellow passengers speak, never once does Twain record a direct encounter with a Nicaraguan. No one utters a word to Twain or Twain to them. Not one
Nicaraguan is spoken to, be it in English or through a translator. Nicaraguans seem to have no language or voice that might coax Twain out of his sheltering silence. No doubt the trip was short and Twain was corralled amid hundreds of Americans who wanted, like Twain, to get somewhere quickly and, by all accounts, Twain knew little, if no Spanish.
Yet, when Twain does mention Nicaraguans, he describes them as “half-clad yellow natives” (Twain 1940: 39), and the Nicaraguan men, whom he mistakes for soldiers, are “barefooted scoundrels” (39). The Nicaraguan driver of the wagon that facilitated getting Twain and his fellow passengers across the land portion of the trip, “commenced by beating and banging his team,” and the driver rants, according to Twain, not unlike “a furious maniac, in     bad Spanish.” (39-40). In addition, when fellow female passengers point out a “dear, dear little baby” (40), Twain calls this Nicaraguan child a “vile, distempered, mud-colored native brat” (40). The gap between what the women and what Twain sees is funny to be sure. His sarcasm is brilliant, and his humorous undercutting of whatever the female passengers saw in the baby, pokes fun at the mawkishness of the women—more than at the “vile, distempered, mud-colored
native brat making dirt-pies in front of an isolated cabin” (40).

Yet Twain, who will be deeply moved by the poverty of New York City’s tenement houses, here seems to see Nicaraguan
poverty as wholly acceptable and fitting in with the landscape. The poverty of Nicaraguans is not appalling, or tragic, as poverty is later in New York City. When Twain encounters Nicaraguan women on his trip, it is impossible for him to
remain silent:

About every two hundred yards we came across a little summer-house of a peanut stand at the roadside, with raven-haired, splendid-eyed Nicaragua damsels standing in attitudes of careless grace behind them—damsels buff-colored, like an envelope—damsels who were always dressed the same way: in a single flowing gown of fancifully figured calico, ‘gathered’ across the breast (they are singularly full in
the bust, the young ones), and ruffled all round, near the bottom of the skirt. They have white teeth, and pleasant, smiling, winning faces. They are virtuous according to their lights, but I guess their lights are a little dim. Two of these picturesque native girls were exceedingly beautiful—such liquid, languishing eyes! such pouting lips! such glossy, luxuriant hair! such ravishing, incendiary expression! such grace! such voluptuous forms, and such precious little drapery about them! such— (Twain 1940: 41)
 

Mark Twain’s praising of Nicaraguan women is in line with his comments concerning
other women around the world.8 These are standard comments from Twain as he travels from
country to country—the traditional representation of unabashed masculine lust mixed with
plaintive exuberance. That Nicaraguan women are viewed by Twain as having “dim” virtuous
“lights” does not end the matter there.
His imaginary travel companion, Mr. Brown, who had already accompanied Mark Twain
on his excursion to the Sandwich Islands and would later accompany him to Europe in the so-called
Quaker City letters, and who, as Walker and Dane state in their introduction to Travels with Mr.
Brown, serves as “Mark Twain’s Sancho Panza,” makes a comment about Nicaraguan women that
might make blush even Mark Twain’s normally brazen public self (Twain 1940: 5). Mr. Brown is
an “infernal bore,” as Twain himself notes (52). He serves as a foil and utters whatever untoward
thoughts that Twain would not utter himself to his readers back in San Francisco. After Twain’s
reference and description of Nicaraguan “damsels,” Mr. Brown rejoins: “But you just prospect
one of them heifers with a fine-tooth” (41). Humor and imaginary characters aside, the image of
Nicaraguan “damsels” reduced now to filthy “heifers,” dirty both physically as well as morally
(dim virtuous lights), should not go unnoticed by even the most sympathetic readers of Mark
Twain, who should ask themselves whether this comment would have ever been made about Italian
women or any other European or American women that Twain so much admires physically.
And here, in Nicaragua, the language is that of desire without touching. Apparently
Twain feels some wistful misgivings at his own desires—not at the objectification of women,
but at his own yearnings for these women who, however stunning from afar, might lead one
to the heart of moral darkness, a world of contamination where dirt and filth (and cholera?)
become transmitted through a perceived dark “ravishing” woman unless, in the words of Nick
Carraway, one has “interior rules that act as brakes on [. . .] desires” (Fitzgerald 1925: 59).
“Interior rules” here mean moral fiber, and moral fiber exists only in relation to the Other—
resisting the wanton, the inferior, the Bunuelean object of desire.
In his book The Rhetoric of Empire, David Spurr traces twelve tropes common to
colonial discourse through a wide array of writings, and Twain hits a few of them in his
account of traveling through Nicaragua. Spurr describes the trope of debasement, where
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“the Third World is symbolically constructed as a site of filth and contamination” (Spurr 88).
One need not go very far into Twain’s account of Nicaragua to find equally common associations.
Twain, who later in the Quaker City Letters would describe the countries of Central America “as
one-horse Central American Republics [. . .] with a hundred thousand inhabitants, grand officials
enough for a hundred millions, an ‘army’ of five hundred ragamuffins and a ‘navy’ consisting of
one solitary 60-ton schooner,” writes in reference to the food of Central Americans:
These groups of dark maidens keep for sale a few cups of coffee, tea or chocolate, some bananas, oranges,
pine-apples, hard boiled eggs, a dozen bottles of their vile native liquors, some or namental cups carved
from gourds of the calabash tree, a monkey or two—and their prices were so moderate that, in spite of all
orders and remonstrances to the contrary, the steerage passengers have been overloading their stomachs
with all sorts of bev erages and edibles, and will pay for it in Asiatic cholera before they are many days
older, no doubt. (Twain 1940: 42)
That the food comes from “dark maidens” reveals what Twain has already hinted at:
The covert transference of disease by the dark sexualized women of America. That Twain
would encounter cholera, which killed a good many passengers, does not take away from the
fact that disease is present here in ways and places beyond the literal. Spurr describes the fact
that often in colonial discourse, “The association of the Third World with epidemic disease
is epidemiologically sound, but metaphorically loaded” (Spurr 1993: 89). The trope here is
sexualized (“eroticized” would be Spurr’s term), and disease comes in all manner of ways and
forms, even dark and beautiful.

When one thinks, however, of the many “racist” accounts (practically all of them are) of
traveling through Central America written in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century,
the gap between what Twain says and the unabashed racist is wide enough. Mrs. Alfred Hort,
writing in 1887 of her crossing of nearly the same route as Mark Twain, and of getting down off
the steamboat to walk the short distance to the other sides of the rapids (as was customary for
passengers on the San Juan River), writes this description of Nicaraguan men:
The men had made the most of their time, however, and came on laden with oranges,
lemons, and guavas, which they had picked en route. Nude natives carried our luggage,
screaming and jabbering in an unintelligible manner. They resembled orang-ou-tangs—minus
the tails. I found them a hideous race, but a very powerful one, judging from the manner they
handled the iron-bound trunks, happily for us, in a few hours our boats reached the lake, a
vast body of water, and apparently as rough as any sea. (Holt 1887: 32)
There is some curious symmetry here with what Twain has said earlier—the nakedness,
the attention to skin color, the “screaming and jabbering” that rhymes with Twain’s Nicaraguan
driver, who “commenced by beating and banging his team and cursing like a furious maniac.” But
Mrs. Hort, an English woman who writes with all the detailed refinement of a highly educated
Victorian, a novelist like Mark Twain in her own right, is filled beyond the brim with the bile
that so much characterizes racist travelers to Central America, and Twain shows no such hostility
toward Central Americans although at times he is not particularly sympathetic either.
Yet Twain is not beyond reproach. In Key West, the first stop after Greytown, Twain
writes these remarkable sentences:
The negroes seemed to be concentrated in a single corner of the town, to leeward of the whites—so their
fragrance is wasted on the desert air, and blows out to sea. As this fragrance blows straight out from near
the lighthouse, it has it value—because the storm-tossed mariner with a delicate sense of smell could
follow it in, in case the light chanced to go out. (Twain 1940: 71)
Filología y Lingüística XXXI (1): 88 79-115, 2005 / ISSN: 0377-628X
We need not here enter the debate over Twain’s racism or lack thereof, the debate
over Jim in Huckleberry Finn has raged now for many years, but, whatever one thinks of
Mark Twain and his later adamant stance against the inhumanity of slavery, his brilliant and
sincere expressions of outrage at lynching, his friendships with Booker T. Washington and
Harriet Beecher Stowe, this seldom cited comment belies and undoes so much that the most
loyal of Twain scholars have worked to preserve. No amount of scholarship can eliminate the
stereotype of “blacks” that Twain entertains here, and no amount of resorting to injunctions
and stipulations, as does De Voto, when he warns that “the critic who for a moment forgets
that Mark was a humorist is betrayed,” can minimize this reference and make it palatable to
the modern reader (Twain 1977: 30).
It is true that Twain’s attitude in regards to blacks (and slavery for that matter)9
changed in time. What the literature on Twain consistently points out is that this was a man
who evolved and who, to his credit, righted his own wrongs, edged his way out of blindness
into light. In Satire or Evasion, Black Perspectives of Huckleberry Finn, the editors
emphasize this point: “Samuel Clemens’s boyhood letters, and even his early western
writings, contain derogatory uses of ‘nigger,’ but he reformed dramatically when he began
courting, and soon married, the daughter of abolitionist Jervis Langdon [. . . ]” (Leonard,
Tenney and Davis 1992: 7). This is early Twain writing in Travels with Mr. Brown, and the
language here reveals a man who had not yet taken a stance against the mistreatment or
verbal abuse or stereotyping of blacks either by others, or himself. The reformed racist is
often a champion of causes (as Twain would become); the unreformed racist is either proud
or unmindful of their own excursions into the world of denigration. This is the language
of barroom banter between “whites” about “blacks,” this is Twain writing, in 1867, with
a racist wink and a nod to his audience back home, a largely white audience that would
have participated in the shared tradition of the stereotyping, dismissal, and denigration of
blacks as persons so described.
Although Twain always tried to be informed about the countries that he visited,10
being informed, for him, often has a specific purpose: Commerce. At the end of his account
of his journey to Nicaragua, Twain runs through a long list of economic opportunities that
can be had in Nicaragua, a consistent theme in his early travel writings. A tireless seeker,
for most of his adult life, of money and business opportunities, Twain seems to relish the
prospect of making Nicaragua into an economic satellite of American or British capitalism.
He enumerates, for his readers back in San Francisco, company after company that is doing
business in Nicaragua—generally the extraction of raw materials like gold, silver, opal—and
informs them of what opportunities and possibilities the enterprising entrepreneur back home
might find in Nicaragua.
Twain, who often was a fervent anti-imperialist in terms of culture and values, here
seems to have no qualms engaging in a type of tooling for nascent corporate interests and
for individuals set on draining wealth from Latin America, who wanted to extract from
Nicaragua that which does not belong anywhere else. Like Gauguin in Tahiti, Twain felt
particularly angry at the intrusion of western civilization on “noble savages” (Rodney 1993:
5-18), and he developed an anti-imperialist strain to his writings that would last for the rest
of his life. But anti-imperialism apparently included for Twain only cultural imperialism, not
its nagging economic twin.
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3.
In the end, for all his love of rivers, Mark Twain never mentions the San Juan River as
a river. He stares out from the deck and is entranced by the tropical landscape and animals, the
walls of dense tropical vegetation, the frolicking monkeys, the lounging alligators, the dense
blossoming forests. The river itself goes unnoticed, but not the scenery, and no doubt Twain
probably never separated one from the other. But it would have been nice to hear Twain, this
steamboat pilot, speak of the river itself, to compare its twists and turns with those of the great
Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. The San Juan is remarkable as rivers go. But Twain seems not to
notice its oft-reported magnificence.
As Rodney notes, when Twain arrives finally in New York and is “safe at last in ‘The
States,’” he ends his letter, thinking back longingly of Central America: “I would like to go
[. . .] and see that beautiful scenery on the Lake and San Juan River again” (Twain 1940: 81).
Twain is about to enter New York City and would come to find its poverty appalling. From a
distance, the Central American landscape must have looked to him like paradise, if I might
rephrase Wordsworth, to a blindman’s eyes.
Nor does Twain mention Costa Rica. He must have stared from both sides of the
deck, and one pictures Mark Twain “surveying” (the term is Mary Louise Pratt’s) Costa Rica
and finding the landscape no doubt very much the same on one side of the ship as the other.
Twain was an informed traveler who studied in earnest the countries that he visited, but he is
remarkably silent on Costa Rica. The San Juan River is navigated on both sides—the ships no
doubt made their way along one bank and then the other. Yet Twain speaks only of Nicaragua.
Costa Rica seems not to exist, and while he apparently never set foot on Costa Rican land, he
certainly walked over its waters.11
Twain’s travel writings are filled with zest and enthusiasm. His syntax is jarring at
times, brilliantly uninterrupted, remarkably sinuous and lacy, a spiraling and spinning out-ofcontrol
style that seems at times to be similar to a man on a ledge, swerving one way and then
another, only to regain his balance with all the serenity and stability of a nun standing firmly
before an altar:
There were not a dozen good riders in the two hundred and fifty that went on horseback, but every man
seemed to consider that inasmuch as the animals belonged to ‘the Company,’ it was a stern duty to ride
them to death, if possible, and they tried hard to do it. Such racing and yelling, and beating and banging
and spurring, and such bouncing of blanket bundles, and flapping and fluttering of coat-tails, and such
frantic scampering of the multitude of mules, and bobbing up and down of the long column of men, and
rearing and charging of struggling ambulances in their midst, I never saw before, and I never enjoyed
anything so much. (Twain 1940: 43)
The last sentence is remarkable but not unique for Twain, who wrote this way with ease and
apparently with little revision. That he was hastily sending these letters back to San Francisco with
ships going in the opposite direction makes the quality of the prose all the more remarkable.
It is understandable that the man known as the American Swift never ceases getting
great pleasure at watching the Lilliputians of the world—the treachery, the sniping, the rank
stupidity—the unlimited capacity for folly of the whole damned human race. Traveling is a lifeforce
for Mark Twain; it permits the traveler to shed the dullness, the monotony, and endless
drudgery of everyday life. The world comes to life again through something as inconsequential
as an overheard phrase, a new accent, a word in a different language, a momentary landscape,
Filología y Lingüística XXXI (1): 90 79-115, 2005 / ISSN: 0377-628X
all of which might well have been ignored back home, or not even heard or seen, precisely
because they occurred within the boredom and monotony of everyday life. The traveler, in
short, sees the same old world through a new set of lenses, and no one makes better use of
those lenses than Mark Twain.
Here is both the English text of Mark Twain’s account of his travels in Nicaragua,
and the Spanish translation of that account. It is always worthwhile to hear Mark Twain in the
original. I have placed a copy of the English text directly after the Spanish translation for anyone
who wishes to enjoy his remarkable prose. I have annotated the Spanish version with footnotes,
in English. There are difficult passages and explanation is needed for many of Mark Twain’s
phrases and historical references. As in Huckleberry Finn, Twain often falls into the vernacular,
and there are obscure references that would make any reader of English take pause.
 English Text of Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown

Letter IV
San Juan and cholera
DECEMBER 29th. –One sea voyage is ended anyhow. We have arrived at San Juan del Sur, and must leave the ship and cross the Isthmus—not to-day, though. They have posted a notice on the ship that the cholera is raging among a battalion of troops just arrived from New York, and so we are not permitted to go ashore to-day. And to the sea-weary eyes of some of our people, no doubt, bright green hills never looked so welcome, so enchanting, so altogether lovely, as these do that lie here within pistol-shot of us. But the law is spoken, and so half the ship’s family are looking longingly ashore, or discussing the cholera news fearfully, and the other half are in the after cabin, singing boisterously and carrying on like a troop ofwild school children.

Ashore
GREYTOWN, January 1st. –While we lay all night at San Juan, the baggage was sent ashore in lighters, and next morning we departed ourselves. We found San Juan to consist of a few tumble-down frame shanties—they call them hotels—nestling among green verdure and overshadowed by picturesque little hills. The spot where we landed was crowded with horses, mules, ambulances and half-clad yellow natives, with bowie-knives two feet long, and as broad as your hand, strapped to their waists. I thought these barefooted scoundrels were soldiers, but no, they were merely citizens in civil life. Here and there on the beach moved a soiled and ragged  hite woman, to whom the sight of our ship must have been as a vision of Paradise; for here a vast ship-load of passengers had been kept in exile for fifteen days through the wretched incompetency of one man—the Company’s agent on the Isthmus. He had sent a steamer empty to San Francisco, when he knew well that this multitude of people were due at Greytown. They will finish their journey, now, in our ship.
Our party of eight—we had made it up the night before—being the first boat-load to leave the ship, was entitled to the first choice of the ambulances, or the equestrian accommodations that were to convey us the twelve miles we must go by land between San Juan and Virgin Bay, on Lake Nicaragua. Some of the saddle-horses and mules—many of them, in fact—looked
very well; but if there was any choice between the am bulances, or especially between the miraculous scarecrows that were to haul them, it was hardly perceptible. You never saw such harness in your life, nor such mules, nor such drivers. They were funny individually and funny in combination. Except the ghastly sores on the animals’ backs, where the crazy
harness had chafed, and scraped, and scarified—that part of it would move anybody’s pity for the poor things.
We climbed into one of the largest of the faded red ambulances (mud wagons we call them in the mountains), with four little sore-backed rabbits hitched to it, and cleared for Virgin Bay. The driver commenced by beating and banging his team and cursing them like a furious maniac, in bad Spanish, and he kept it up all through that twelve-mile journey of three hours
and a half, over a hard, level, beautiful road. We envied the peo ple who were not crippled and could ride horseback.
But we clattered along pretty lively, and were a jolly party. The first thing the ladies noticed as we lost sight of the sea, and wound in among an overshadowing growth of dewy vines and forest trees, was a “dear, dear little baby—oh, see the darling!”—a vile, distempered, mud-colored native brat, mak ing dirt-pies in front of an isolated cabin; and the first thing the
men noticed was—was—but they could not make it out; a guideboard perhaps, or a cross, or the modest grave-stone of some ill-fated stranger. But it was none of these. When we drew nearer it turned out to be a sign nailed to a tree, and it said “Try Ward’s shirts!” There was some round abuse indulged in, then, of Ward and plantation bitters men, and all such people, who invade all sacred places with their rascally signs, and mar every landscape one might gaze upon in worship,
and turn to a farce every senti mental thought that enters his brain. I know that if I were to go to old Niagara, and stand with his mists blowing in my face and his voice thundering in my ear, I would swell with a noble inspiration and say, “Oh, grand, sublime, magnificent—” and then behold on his front, “S. T. 1860 X Plantation Bitters,” and be incensed. It is a shame.
The procession under way
The bright, fresh green on every hand, the delicious soft ness and coolness of the air (it had just showered a little before we started), the interest of unknown birds and flowers and trees, the delightful new sensation of the bumping and rattling of the ambulance—everything so cheery and lively, as compared with our old dull monotony and shoreless sea on board
the ship—wrought our party up to a pitch of joyous animation and en thusiasm that I would have thought impossible with such dry old sticks. I ask pardon of the ladies—and even of the gentlemen, also. All hands voted “the Nicaragua route forever!” [N.B. –They used to do that every day or two—and then every other day or two they would damn the Nicaragua route forever. Such are the ways of passengers, all the world over.]
About every two hundred yards we came across a little summer-house of a peanut stand at the roadside, with raven-haired, splendid-eyed Nicaragua damsels standing in attitudes of careless grace behind them—damsels buff-colored, like an enve lope—damsels who were always dressed the same way: in a single flowing gown of fancifully figured calico, “gathered”
across the breast (they are singularly full in the bust, the young ones), and ruffled all round, near the bottom of the skirt. They have white teeth, and pleasant, smiling, winning faces.
They are virtuous according to their lights, but I guess their lights are a little dim. Two of these picturesque native girls were exceedingly beautiful—such liquid, languishing eyes! such pouting lips! such glossy, luxuriant hair! such ravishing, incendiary expression! such grace! such voluptuous forms, and such precious little drapery about them! such— Filología y Lingüística
“But you just prospect one of them heifers with a fine-tooth”—
This attempted interruption was from Brown, and procured his banishment at once.
This man will not consent to see what is attractive, alone, but always unearths the disagreeable features of everything that comes under his notice.
These groups of dark maidens keep for sale a few cups of coffee, tea or chocolate,some bananas, oranges, pine-apples, hard boiled eggs, a dozen bottles of their vile native liquors, some ornamental cups carved from gourds of the calabash tree, a monkey or two—and their prices were so moderate that, in spite of all orders and remonstrances to the contrary,the steerage passengers have been overloading their stomachs with all sorts of bev erages and edibles, and will pay for it in Asiatic cholera before they are many days older, no doubt.
Our road was smooth, level, and free from mud and dust, and the scenery in its neighborhood was pleasing, though not particularly striking. Many of the trees were starred all over with pretty blossoms. There was no lack of vegetation, and oc occasionally the balmy air came to us laden with a delicious fragrance. We passed two or three high hills, whose bold fronts, free from trees or shrubs, were thickly carpeted with softest, greenest grass—a picture our eyes could never tire of. Sometimes birds of handsome plumage flitted by, and we heard the bly the songs of others as we rode through the forests. But the monkeys claimed all attention.
All hands wanted to see a real, live, wild monkey skirmishing among his native haunts. Our interest finally moderated somewhat in the native women; the birds; the calabash trees, with their gourd-like fruit; the huge, queer knots on trees, that were said to be ants’ nests; the lime trees; and even in a singular species of cactus, long, slender and green, that climbed to the very tops of great trees, and completely hid their trunks and branches, and choked them to death in
its winding folds—so like an ugly, endless serpent; but never did the party cease to consider thewild monkey a charming novelty and a joy forever.
Masquerading on the road
Our four hundred passengers on horseback, mule back, and in four-mule ambulances, formed the wildest, ragge dest and most uncouth procession I ever saw. It reminded me of the fantastic masquerading pageants they used to get up on the Fourth of July in the Western States, or on Mardigras Day in New Orleans. The steerage passengers travelled on mule back, chiefly, with coats, oil-skin carpet sacks, and blankets dangling around their saddles. Some of the saddles were new and good, but others were in all possible stages of mutilation and decay. There were not a dozen good riders in the two hundred and fifty that went on horseback, but every man seemed to consider that inasmuch as the animals belongedto “the Company,” it was a stern duty to ride them to death, if possible, and they tried hard to do it. Such racing and yelling, and beating and banging and spurring, and such bouncing of blanket bundles, and flapping and fluttering of coat-tails, and such frantic scampering of the multitude of mules, and bobbing up and down of the long column of men, and rearing and charging of struggling ambulances in their midst, I never saw before, and I never enjoyed anything so much.
I never saw Brown’s equanimity so disturbed as it was that day, either. The philosopher had received a charge at San Francisco—a widow, with three children and a servant girl. Every day on the trip, he had been obliged to go down among the sweltering stenches of the ship’s hold, to pull and haul Mrs. B.’s trunks out from among piles of other baggage, and rummage among them for a shirt for Johnny, or a bib for Tommy, or a shawl for the mother or the maid, or a diaper for the baby, but these vexations were nothing to his Isthmus transportation troubles. He had to take his party horseback, and in order to keep them together amid the confusion of the procession, he tied his five mules together, end to end, and marched in single file—the forward horse’s tail made fast to the next one’s nose, and so on. He rode the leading horse himself, with the baby in his arms; Mrs. B. and the two boys came next, and the servant girl brought up the rear. It was a solemnly comical spectacle.
Everything went well, though, till the racing began, and then the philosopher’s mule got his ambition up and led the party a merry dance. Brown tried to hold him back with one hand for a while, and then triced the baby up under his left arm, and pulled back with both hands. This had a good deal of effect, but still the little detachment darted through the main
procession like the wind, making a sensation wherever it went, and was greeted with many a whack and many a laugh. Occasionally Brown’s mule stopped and fell to bucking, and then his other animals closed up and got tangled together in a helpless snarl. Of course, Brown had to unlimber the baby and straighten things out again. He swore hard, but under his breath, and sweated as no man ever sweated before. The entire procession had arrived at Virgin Bay and were stowed on the boat before he got there. But his beasts had grown tranquil enough by that time. Their heads were all down, and it was hard to tell which looked the most jaded and melancholy—them selves or their riders. It was like intruding a funeral cortege upon the boisterous hilarity of the balance of the ship’s family.
All quiet again
Comfortably quartered on the little steamer, we sat in the shade and lunched, smoked, compared notes of our jolly little scamper across the Isthmus, bought handsome mahogany walking-canes from the natives, and finally relapsed into pensive and placid gazing out upon the rippling waters of Lake Nicaragua and the two majestic mountains that tower up out
of its blue depths and wrap their green summits in the fleecy clouds.
Letter V
Steamer SAN FRANCISCO,
New Year’s Day
The twin mountains
 

Out of the midst of the beautiful Lake Nicaragua spring two magnificent pyramids, clad in the softest and richest green, all flecked with shadow and sunshine, whose summitspierce the billowy clouds. They look so isolated from the world and its turmoil—so tranquil, so dreamy, so steeped in slumber and eternal repose. What a home one might make among their shady forests, their sunny slopes, their breezy dells, after he had grown weary of the toil, anxiety and unrest of the bustling, driving world. These mountains seem to have no level ground at their bases, but rise abruptly from the water. There is nothing rugged about them they are shapely and symmetrical, and all their outlines are soft, rounded and regular. One
is 4,200 and the other 5,400 feet high, though the highest being the furthest removed makes them look like twins. A stranger would take them to be of equal altitude. Some say theyare 6,000 feet high, and certainly they look it. When not a cloud is visible elsewhere in the heavens, their tall summits are magnificently draped with them. They are extinct volcanoes,
 and consequently their soil (decomposed lava) is wonderfully fertile. They are well stocked with cattle ranches, and with corn, coffee and tobacco farms. The climate is delightful, andis the healthiest on the Isthmus.
Sandwiches, etc.
Our boat started across the lake at 2 p.m., and at 4 a.m. the following morning we reached Fort San Carlos, where the San Juan River flows out—a hundred miles in twelve hours—not particularly speedy, but very comfortable.
Here they changed us to a long, double-decked shell of a stern-wheel boat, without a berth or a bulkhead in her—wide open, nothing to obstruct your view except the slender stanchions that supported the roof. And so we started down the broad and beautiful river in the gray dawn of the balmy summer morning.
At eight we breakfasted. On the lake boat they fed us on coffee and tea, and on sandwiches composed of two pieces of bread enclosing one piece of ham. On this boat they gave us tea, coffee, and sandwiches composed of one piece of ham between two pieces of bread. There is nothing like variety.
In a little while all parties were absorbed in noting the scenery on shore—trees like cypress; other trees with large red blossoms; great feathery tree ferns and giant cactuses; clumps of tall bamboo; all manner of trees and bushes, in fact, webbed together with vines; occasionally a vista that opened, stretched its carpet of fresh green grass far within the jungle, then slowly closed again.

The grave of the lost steamer
In this land of rank vegetation, no spot of soil can be cleared off and kept barren a week. Nature seizes upon every vagrant atom of dust and forces it to relieve her over-burdened store-houses. Weeds spring up in the cracks of floors, and clothe the roofs of huts in green; if a handful of dust settles in the crotch of a tree, ferns spring there and wave their graceful
plumes in the tropic breeze. Filibustering Walker sunk a steamboat in the river; the sands washed down, filled in around her, built up a little oval island. The wind brought seeds thither, and they clothed every inch of it in luxuriant grass. Then trees grew and vines climbed up and hung them with bright garlands, and the steam er’s grave was finished. The wreck was invisible to us, save that the two great fore-and-aft braces still stood up out of the grass and fenced in the trees. It was a pretty picture.
Ancient castillo
About noon, we swept gaily around a bend in the beauti ful river, and a stately old adobe castle came into view—a relic of the olden time—of the old buccaneering days of Morgan and his merry men. It stands upon a grassy dome-like hill, and the forests loom up beyond. They say that Lord Nelson once captured it and that this was his first notable feat. It cost him sev eral hours, with 250 men, and good, hard, bloody fighting, to get it. In our time, Walker took it with25 men, without firing a shot—through the treachery of the Commandante, they say.
There is a little straggling village under the hill, a village composed of a single rank of houses, extending some three hundred yards down the shore. There is a dangerous rapid here. It is said to be artificial—formed by man in former times to keep the pirate boats from penetrating the interior. We had to get ashore here, walk around the rapids, and get on another
stern-wheeler. Every house we passed was a booth for the sale of fruits and provisions. The bananas, pine-apples, cocoa-nuts and coffee were good, and the cigars very passable, but the oranges, although fresh, of course, were of a very inferior quality. Cheap ness is the order of the day. You can buy as much of any one article as you can possibly want for a dime, and a sumptuous dinner for two or three for half a dollar. Bring along your short bits when you come this way. It is the grand base and foundation of all values, and is better received, and with less suspicion, than any other coin.
 

An unpeopled paradise
As we got under way and sped down the narrowing river, all the enchanting beauty of its surroundings came out. All gazed in rapt and silent admiration for a long time as the exquisite panorama unfolded itself, but finally burst into a conversational ecstasy that was alive with excited ejaculations.
The character of the vegetation on the banks had changed from a rank jungle to dense, lofty, majestic forests. There were hills, but the thick drapery of the vines spread upward, terrace upon terrace, and concealed them like a veil. We could not have believed in the hills, except that the upper trees towered too high to be on the bank level.
And everywhere in these vine-robed terraces were charming fairy harbors fringedwith swinging garlands; and weird grot toes, whose twilight depth the eye might not pierce; and tunnels that wound their mysterious course none knew whither; and there were graceful temples—columns—towers—pyramids—mounds—domes—walls—all the shapes and forms and figures known to architecture, wrought in the pliant, leafy vines, and thrown together in reckless, enchanting confusion.
Now and then a rollicking monkey scampered into view, or a bird of splendid plumage floated through the sultry air, or the music of some invisible songster welled up out of the forest depths. The changing vistas of the river ever renewed the in toxicating picture; corners and points folding backward revealed new wonders beyond, of towering walls of verdure—gleaming cataracts of vines pouring sheer down a hundred and fifty feet, and mingling with the grass upon the earth—wonderful waterfalls of green leaves as deftly overlapping each other as the scales of a fish—a vast green rampart, solid a moment, and then, as we advanced, changing and opening into Gothic windows, colonnades—all manner of quaint and beautiful figures!
Sometimes a limbless veteran of the forest stood aloof in his flowing vine-robes, like an ivy-clad tower of some old feudal ruin.
We came upon another wrecked steamer turned into an emerald island—trees reaching above the great walking-beam framework, and the tireless vines climbing over the rusty and blistered old locomotive boiler. And by-and-by a retreating point of land disclosed some lofty hills in the distance, steep and densely grown with forests—each tree-top a delicate green dome, touched with a gleam of sunshine, and then shaded off with Indian-summery films into darkness; dome upon dome, they rose high into the sunny atmosphere, and contrasted their brilliant tints with the stormy purple of the sky beyond.
Along shore, huge alligators lay and sunned themselves and slept; birds with gaudy feathers and villainous hooked hills stood stupidly on overhanging boughs, and startled one
suddenly out of his long cherished, dimly-defined notion that that sort of bird only lived in menageries; parrots flew by us—the idea of a parrot flying seemed funny enough—flying abroad, instead of swinging in a tin ring, and stooping and nipping that ring with its beak between its feet, and thus displaying itself in most unseemly attitude—flying, silently cleaving
the air—and saying never a word! When the first one went by without saying “Polly wants a cracker,” it seemed as if there was something unnatural about the bird, but it did not immediately occur to me what it was. And there was a prodigiously tall bird that had a beak like a powder horn, and curved its neck into an S, and stuck its long legs straight out behind
like a steering oar when it flew, that I thought would have looked more proper and becoming in the iron cage where it naturally belonged. And I will not deny that from the moment I landed on that Isthmus, the idea of a monkey up a tree seemed so consumedly absurd and out of all character, that I never saw one in such a position but I wanted to take him and chain him to a wagon wheel under the Bengal tiger’s cage, where he would necessarily feel more at home and
not look so ridiculous.

The bore
“What sort of a crooked, spready, cur’us looking tree is that out yonder?’’
I looked at the speaker. He was by nature, constitution and habit a Bore—I could see that. I said:
“I don’t know.” I wanted to say, savagely, “How the devil should I know? Do I look like I ever was in this kind of a country before?”
“Looks like it might be an oak, or a slippry ellum, or something. But I reckon it ain’t, maybe?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it is, maybe it ain’t.”
“It’s got big blossoms on it like a hollyhock—”
“I don’t know—it may be a hollyhock.”
“Oh, no—I didn’t mean that—I meant—Geeminy! see that monkey jump! What kind of a noise do they make—do they squawk?”
“Now, I don’t know anything whatever about monkeys. They may squawk, or they may not—I hope to God they do!”
“Why?”
I struck my colors. This serene simplicity where I expected to make a telling shot,completely nonplussed me. I left without saying a word.
This fellow used to corner me and bore the life out of me with trivial reminiscences out of his insignificant history; with trifling scraps of information I had possessed from infancy; with decayed, worm-eaten jokes that made me frantic, and with eternal questions concerning things I knew nothing about and took no earthly interest in. One always meets such people
on voyages, but I never met a specimen before that so completely tallied with my idea of a tiresome, exasperating, infernal bore.
On this second stern-wheel boat they gave us tea, coffee, and sandwiches formed by ingeniously secreting a slice of ham between two slices of bread. Truly, there is nothing likevariety. It gives a zest to the simplest diet.
Sandwiches, etc.
The boys smoked, sang, shot at alligators, discussed the lignum-vitae, mahogany, bastard-cocoa and other curious trees, and gazed at the bewitching panorama of the river the livelong happy day, and at night we tied up at the bank within 30 miles of Greytown. Those who had hammocks swung them, and those who hadn’t made beds of their overcoats, and soon
the two dingy lanterns, hung forward and aft, shed a ghostly glimmer over the thick-strewnand vaguely defined multitude of slumberers. As I said before, the whole boiler-deck was wide open; just before daylight a chilly shower came driving in and roused everybody out. There was some complaining of sore bones by women and certain gentlemen who were unused to sleeping on hard, bare floors, but these little troubles were soon forgotten when the galley-boys came up and the usual frenzied and famishing rushing and crowding and shouting of “Sandwiches! Sandwiches!” took place and disclosed the happy truth that we had not only the usual tea and coffee and sandwiches for breakfast, but also cheese! Verily, variety is the spice of life. Nobody said anything about sore bones any more.

A peopled paradise
We got to Greytown early on the last day of the year, and saw the steamer at anchor that was to take us to New York. The town does not amount to much. There is a good deal of land around there, and it is curious that they didn’t build it larger—but somehow they didn’t. It is composed of two hundred old frame houses and some nice vacant lots, and its comeli ness is greatly enhanced, I may say is rendered gorgeous, by the cluster of stern-wheel steamboats at the water front.
The population is 800, and is mixed—made up of natives, Americans, Spaniards, Germans, English and Jamaica negroes. Of course the spoken language is Spanish. Some of the negro babies do not wear any clothes at all, and the cows march through the public thoroughfares with a freedom which pen cannot describe. The inhabitants are not vain, and do not care for luxury and furniture. Most of them keep for sale small cigars called “poco tiempos”—ten cents a grab—and native brandy, tropical fruits and sea-grass hammocks. They sell everything cheap—even excellent foreign wines and such things, for import duties are light.
The transit business has made every other house a lodging camp, and you can get a good bed anywhere for a dollar. It does not cost much to keep a Greytown bed in order; there is nothing to it but a mattress, two sheets and a mosquito bar. The town is ornamented with cocoa-nut trees, the outskirts are bordered with chaparral, and everywhere the pink bachelor-button blossoms of the sensitive plant smile among the grass. [Smile among the grass is good.—M. T.]
The Santiago de Cuba brought the cholera to the Isthmus last trip, and thirty-five people died of it. A young man, a resident of Greytown, also died of it, which exasperated his mother very much. So the citizens got up a Board of Health, and prohibited the cholera from coming ashore there any more. While we were up town the stern-wheeler containing our
steerage and second-cabin passengers arrived, and was at once warned to anchor in the stream and let no one come ashore! Not until we had been there twenty-four hours, and were ready to take final leave, did those crowded and cursing passengers discover what bred the tabu.
It then came out that while Brown was drinking some native brandy in one of the saloons, he remarked that he had tasted milder stuff; but then, he said, he had escaped cholera on the Isthmus and smallpox among the steerage folks, and he guessed he could survive that drink. A citizen at once reported the remark to the Board of Health, and hence the order—and never a steerage passenger got a chance to go ashore at Greytown. There was some talk in the steerageof hanging Brown, but it never came to anything.

Nicaragua
The Republic of Nicaragua has some populous cities in it. Leon, 48,000; Massaye [sic], 38,000; Rivas, 30,000; Managua, 24,000; Granada, 18,000; Chinandaga [sic], 18,000; and several other towns of 3,000 and 4,000. The total population is 320,000—all in towns and cities, nearly. Only property-holders who are declared citizens can vote. Greytown is
not represented in the councils of the nation at all. The property there is held by temporary residents—foreigners—who care nothing about politics.
There are a good many gold and silver mines in the country. The Chontales—gold quartz —(English Company—cost £250,000)—is worked by rude native machinery, but has  new, modern machinery on the way. It’s first clean-up (my notes say) was £200,000. For the sake of our reputation we will consider that that was meant for £20,000—and it is unquestionably large enough, even at that.
A Company of Californians have bought two mines—the Albertin and Petaluma—and have just begun work. They paid $70,000 for one of them.
An English Company are just beginning work on a mine which they paid £30,000 for.
There are also coal, silver, copper and opal mines. One of the latter, near the road between San Juan and Virgin Bay, has produced opals which, in the rough, were as large as almonds.
The Republic also has, among its numerous attractions and sources of commercial prosperity, some lakes and rivers of sulphur, and some extinct volcanoes—(an American Company has bought one of these and are sinking on it—they think they can make it go again.)
Nicaragua exports parrots and monkeys, India-rubber, logwood, sugar, hides, cochineal, coffee, deerskins, mahogany, chocolate, gold, opals, sarsaparilla, tortoise shells (quite a heavy business), and tropical fruits.
The rubber trade is large; last year Greytown alone exported $112,000 worth. Rubber is worth 28 cents a pound when it starts—in Europe, 54.
One man does all the mahogany business that is done on the northern coast of Nicaragua. He had one log, worth $12,000, which was so large it had to lay several years before there was water enough to float it over the bar. He will clear $500,000 this year, they say.
There is a very heavy export trade in logwood. Also in cacao (chocolate). Some of the plantations are very extensive. One owned by the Menier Manufacturing Company, of France,cost $500,000.
They could export cocoa-nut oil profitably, but no one takes hold of it.
There is an ad valorem duty of ten per cent. on imports for Greytown, and a sort of incomprehensible tariff of forty per cent. for the interior.
Laborers’ wages in the interior are 20 to 40 cents a day and found. But it don’t cost anything to board them; they never eat anything but plantains, and they eat them green, ripe or wrotten they are not particular—they would as soon have them one way as the other.
There is an English steamer monthly from Greytown to Jamaica and one or two other points, and thence to Southampton.
The Transit Company’s charter has been extended to fifty years, and now it is expected that they will improve the ac accommodations on the stern-wheel boats. I don’t see any room for it, however, unless they can hatch out some more of those happy variations on the sandwiches.
The waters of the Colorado and San Juan Rivers are to be joined together, however, dykes built, and other projects instituted tending to the improvement of the Greytown harbor, that will eventually make it possible for ships to come inside the reef, no doubt, instead of pitching and charging at anchor in the open roadstead as at present.

The bore conquered
We slept ashore in Greytown, and for the want of something better to do, I suppose, Brown cornered the Bore and fell to instructing him that an alligator could not climb a tree. The Bore said he knew that before, but the philosopher went into elaborate details and demonstrated anyhow, unmindful of protests and interruptions, and finally wore out the victim and drove him  off a frantic and vanquished man. Brown may have done it for a joke, but surely there was no semblance of it in his voice or manner. If he had not really set his heart in good faith on proving that an alligator could not climb a tree, l was not able to discover it. But I never enjoyed anything better.

Notas
1. Rodney uses this phrase as the epigraph for his book on Twain’s travel writings, Mark Twain Overseas.
2. Twain did mention one of his crossings of Panama by train in a letter to the Chicago Republican, dated
August 17, 1868.
3. Folkman describes the unsanitary conditions aboard many of these ships. Although Folkman is writing
about life on ships circa 1851, his description was still apt for the short fifteen years later when Twain
boarded the steamship America bound for San Juan del Sur: “Many of the discomforts aboard ship
stemmed from the overcrowding of the vessels, this being the rule rather than the exception during the
first two years of operation. Many of the passengers did not even have a berth in the steerage and had to
find a coil of rope or plank on deck on which to lay their heads at night. Under these conditions sanitary
facilities proved totally inadequate and often as not four water closets served over 300 people. During
warm weather the steerage and even the staterooms became unbearably hot and nighttime found the
dining saloon and main deck a mass of tangled arms and legs, with men, women, and children sprawled
promiscuously throughout the ship, some swinging in hammock in the rigging and others propped up
in the companionways. Seasickness was the rule, and often passengers could not find their way through
the mass of humanity to the rail in time. The limited space allowed the ship to carry only enough water
for drinking and there were no bathing facilities. Consequently, the passengers soon found themselves
living in their own dirt and filth, particularly in the steerage. Under such conditions, any person infected
with disease soon spread it to their companions, and epidemics of yellow fever and cholera were not
uncommon” (Folkman 41-42).
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4. The crossing of Panama by train was not established until 1855 (Folkman 1972: 58).
5. The original trip, prior to Vanderbilt, was from San Juan del Norte up the San Juan River to Lake
Nicaragua, then across the lake to Granada, and from there by mule to Realejo (Folkman 1972: 5-7).
6. He first used his pen name in 1863 working as a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise. The passenger list
published by the Alta California for his trip to Nicaragua lists him as Mark Twain, not Samuel Clemens
(Twain 1940: 281).

8. He seldom fails to notice women on his travels. In Italy, in Innocents Abroad, he says of Italian women:
“I scanned every female face that passed and it seemed to me that all were beautiful. I never saw such a
perfect freshet of loveliness before . . . I fell in love with a hundred and eighty women myself, on Sunday
evening, and yet I am not of a susceptible nature” (qtd. in Rodney 42).
 

9. Twain was a member of the confederate army for a short time.
 

10. Mistakes do creep into Twain’s writings, however. When he says of Nicaraguans that they “never eat
anything but plantains, and they eat them green, ripe or rotten they are not particular—they would as
soon have them one way as the other,” to Central Americans the joke is on Mark Twain, not them (Twain,
1940, 57).

11. For a detailed analysis of the territorial boundaries between Costa Rica and Nicaragua and the role of
the San Juan River see Sibaja, Luis Fernando Nuestro Limite con Nicaragua. San José, Costa Rica:
Comisión Nacional de Conmemoraciones Históricas, 1974.
12. The section on arriving in Central America, i.e., San Juan del Sur, begins halfway through Letter IV to
the Alta California.
13. Ambulances. Twain uses the word “ambulances” throughout his narrative of the crossing of the isthmus.
The Dictionary of the American West defines ambulances as “a light, canvas-topped army wagon for
carrying personnel, wounded or healthy; might mean almost any government wagon for transporting
people. Also called a prairie wagon, it had no necessary association with hospitals or medical care”
(Blevins 5). One historian translates the term ambulances as “rustic waggons” (Rodney 24).
14. Here Twain calls the knives, “bowie knives two feet long” as opposed to the Spanish word “machetes,”
a term that he was familiar with.
15. Twain’s term is “mud wagons.”
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16. A satirical reference to Artemus Ward, whose real name was Charles Farrar Browne (1834-1867), an
American humorist and friend of Twain, whose reputation and writings would have been familiar to
many readers of the Alta California. Ward dies March 6 of that same year (1867)—some three months
after Twain was writing.
17. S.T. 1860 X Plantation Bitters. Eugene Fitch Ware, politician, poet, lawyer, soldier, and writer, wrote the
following comment on Plantation Bitters in his book, The Indian War of 1864: “That good old ancient
time was an era of drinking. There was no such thing known then in the West as ‘prohibition,’ and nearly
everybody drank a little. It was also the age of bitters. Sometime back in the early ‘50s the manufacture
of artificial bitters had been introduced. Before that time an old invention called ‘Stoughton’ had been
for a long while in vogue. In every saloon was a bottle of ‘Stoughton bitters,’ and if anybody wanted any
bitters he called for some Stoughton and put it in. It was only occasionally the Stoughton was used, but
the Stoughton bottle was always at the bar, and the synonym for an idle fellow, always in evidence and
doing nothing, was to call him a ‘Stoughton bottle.’ And frequently men were spoken of in politics or
religion or in a story as a mere ‘Stoughton bottle.’ That is, they were in evidence, but nobody paid much
attention to them. The simile survived for a lifetime after the Stoughton bottle had gone. But someone
afterwards invented ‘bitters’ as a beverage; three celebrated kinds were thrown onto market, and made
great fortunes for their inventors, as were early occupants of the field. The first in order was ‘Plantation
Bitters’; next, ‘Hostetter’s Bitters’; third, ‘Log Cabin Bitters.’ By the time the war broke out these bitters
had been advertised with an expenditure of money which at that time was thought remarkable. Plantation
Bitters appeared in 1860, and every wall and fence and vacant place in the United States was placarded
with the legend, ‘S. T. 1880 X.’ For several months everybody was guessing what the sign meant. It was
in the newspapers. It was distributed in handbills on the street. It was seen at every turn, ‘S. T. 1860 X.’
After the world had long grown tired of guessing, there appeared the complete legend, ‘Plantation Bitters,
S. T. 1860 X.’ Plantation Bitters became the bottled liquor of the age. It was made out of alcohol, water
and flavoring, and was really very attractive as to taste and results. The Hostetter and the Log Cabin
followed closely behind in popularity. The Log Cabin got into sutler tents all over the district which
the army occupied. Its principal advertisement was the strange glass bottle made in the shape of a log
cabin. At about the time I speak of, all three of these liquors were on sale at Boyer’s. The legend of the
Plantation Bitters was that it meant ‘Sure thing in ten years from 1860.’ That is, when the inventor had
made the decoction, and submitted it to a friend as an invention and marketable article, the friend, so
the story goes, told him that it was a sure thing for a fortune in ten years. So, acting on this thought, he
had billed the United States, ‘S. T. 1860 X.,’ and spent half a million advertising ‘S. T. 1860 X.,’ before
anybody knew what it was all about” (Ware).
18. Writing some ten years later than Mark Twain, in 1874, Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899) in Hard Times And
The Way Out, writes a remarkably similar passage to Twain’s. One wonders if Ingersol had read Twain’s
letter to the Alta California: “Everybody advertised, and those who were not selling goods and real estate
were in the medicine line, and every rock beneath our flag was covered with advice to the unfortunate;
and I have often thought that if some sincere Christian had made a pilgrimage to Sinai and climbed its
venerable crags, and in a moment of devotion dropped upon his knees and raised his eyes toward heaven,
the first thing that would have met his astonished gaze would in all probability have been: St.1860 X
Plantation Bitters” (Ingersoll).
19. Here is Brown’s actual phrase, “But you just prospect one of them heifers with a fine tooth.”
 

20. For anyone who knows nothing about the accomodations of passengers on ships, the nomenclature
for different classes can be bewildering. There were three main classes of passengers. Generally on a
steamboat there was first, second, and third class. The first was called cabin or saloon, the second was
called second-cabin passengers, and third class, where the majority of the passengers ate and slept, was
called steerage. For a detailed description of the differences in classes see Folkman (40-42) and Lewis
(192-195).
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21. William Walker (1824-1860).
22. “Short bits.” The American Dictionary of the West defines “short bits” as a dime (Blevins 26). Walker
and Dane mention that “In the West, the long bit was fifteen cents, the short bit ten cents. As nickels were
almost non-existent on the frontier [North American], change for a quarter nearly always left the buyer
with a short bit” (283).
23. Slippry ellum. In a Texas slave narrative, William Mathews writes, “I is old and my eyesight am gone,
but I can still ‘lect. I ain’t never forgit it. My massa, old Buck Adams, could out-mean de debbil heself.
He sho’ hard-hard and sneaky as slippery ellum.” As used by Twain, the term “slippry ellum” is probably
slang for a sugar maple.
24. “I struck my colors.” Compare Walt Whitman in Song of Myself:
“Our frigate takes fire,
The other asks if we demand quarter?
If our colors are struck and the fighting done?
Now I laugh content for I hear the voice of my little captain,
We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting.” (58)
25. “[. . . ] and everywhere the pink bachelor-button blossoms of the sensitive plant smile among the grass.”
The “pink bachelor-button” flower that Twain refers to is a cornflower (centaurea cyanus). In Spanish
it is translated as an “aciano” or “azulejo.” The entire plant is called a “febrífuga.”
26. “Milder stuff.” Twain’s irony is apparent.
27. The correct spellings are Masaya and Chinandega. Twain most likely took these spellings from maps
of Central America, done in English, in the nineteenth century. See his spelling of “Choutales” for
“Chontales” above.
28. “Laborers’ wages in the interior are 20 to 40 cents a day and found.”

29. The problems with the harbor at Greytown were serious at the time, and Twain, a exriverboat pilot, understood the difficulties all too well. The harbor was slowly being swamped by sand and to dredge it would have been costly. Folkman describes the problem of the sand build up in detail in The Nicaraguan Route: “In the years 1851 to 1857 over twenty-three feet of water flowed over the bar at the entrance to the harbor, and vessels of all sizes easily entered the port. During these years the ocean steamers anchored inside the harbor just off Point Arenas while the river steamers pulled alongside to discharge and take aboard passengers. However, by the time the company reopened the route in1862, it was apparent that the alluvial growth which had created the point of land called Point Arenas was slowly filling up the harbor. At that time the company felt confident that it could restore the harbor. Then in July of 1863 an earthquake lifted the bar at the entrance of the harbor and reduced the water depth to less than ten feet. After this occurrence the ocean sometimes caused delays of several days in transferring passengers to the river steamers. In addition, the raised bar restricted the flow of water out of the San Juan River and increased the rate of build up of sand bars in the harbor and lower river. As the silt became deeper,
the water diverted more and more through the Colorado branch flowing through Costa Rica. In 1848 some nine-tenths of the water had flowed out the lower San Juan; by 1865 eleven-twelfths of the water flowed through the Colorado branch to the ocean. Unfortunately, no harbor existed at the entrance of the Colorado branch, and the combination of silt deposit and restricted flow of water made the lower San Juan almost impossible to navigate during the dry season” (115-116).

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