A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

In the mid-19 th century, the first travelers seeking pleasure, adventure, or health arrived;
arguably the first tourists. In 1866, the “insatiable sightseer” 225 Mark Twain spent four
months in the Islands as a reporter for the Sacramento Weekly Union. While sketching
mostly leisurely episodes in an irreverent and caricaturist way, in his description of a
Kilauea Volcano eruption he mixes the sublime with the factual, thereby reducing a
devastating event to spectacle and legend:
Shortly the crater came into view. I have seen Vesuvius since, but it was a mere
toy, a child’s volcano, a soup kettle, compared to this. […] Here was a yawning
pit upon whose floor the armies of Russia could camp, and have room to spare.
[…] You could not compass it – it was the idea of eternity made tangible – and
the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye! […] Imagine it – imagine a
coal-black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire! […] Fishes were
killed for twenty miles along the shore, where the lava entered the sea. The
earthquakes caused some loss of human life, and a prodigious tidal wave swept
inland, carrying everything before it and drowning a number of natives. […] Only
a Pompeii and a Herculeanum were needed at the foot of Kilauea to make the
story of the eruption immortal. 226
Twain always yearned to return to the islands. His 1889 confession, quoted above as
epigraph to chapter 1, inevitably creates connotations of an earthly paradise. And the
writer was banned from it; when planning to return during a world tour in 1895, a cholera
epidemic prevented the ship from docking in Pearl Harbor: His paradise was lost to
him. 227
The next famous traveler was Robert Louis Stevenson. Having read Stoddard’s
South Sea Idylls and Lepers of Molokai as well as Melville’s Omoo and Typee, 228 he was
intrigued by the ‘South Seas.’ The imminent reason to set sail in 1888, though, was his
failing health: Suffering from consumption, he sailed to the Marquesas, Paumotus, and
225 Day/Stroven 1959: 100.
226 Mark Twain, From Roughing It, in Day/Stroven 1959: 109-16, here 109-11.
227 In the 1880s, he began a novel about Hawai’i, but never completed it. Some literary scholars believe that
he transformed the theme into A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, inspired by the clash between
New England missionaries and Kamehameha’s ‘feudal court’ he had witnessed in Hawai’i. For this
assumption, see Arrell Morgan Gibson, Yankees in Paradise: The Pacific Basin Frontier, Albuquerque
1993: 394.
228 Charles Warren Stoddard, South-Sea Idylls, Boston 1873, and Lepers of Molokai, Notre Dame 1885.
Excerpts can be found in Day/Stroven 1959; Herman Melville, Typee, Omoo, Mardi, New York 1982.
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