“The loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean”

“The loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean.”

That’s what Mark Twain called the “Sandwich Islands” — now known as “Hawai’i” — after spending four months exploring them in 1866 as a reporter for the Sacramento Union newspaper. He wrote twenty-five letters about the Islands, and, for most Americans of his time, they provided their first information about Hawaii.  Twain’s fame as a writer may actually have begun with those letters.  Many years thereafter, he reminisced:

“No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done.  Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same.  For me the balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the spirit of its wildland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”

I’m privileged to be here right now for just a few days thanks to a quirky intersection between my teaching schedule and BYU’s Winter 2017 academic calendar, as well as to my wife’s alertness and her eagerness to travel.  I just come along for the ride.  And I don’t actually mind at all.

Posted from Waikoloa, Hawai’i