He stayed four months in the Islands (from March to June, 1866), writing twenty-five letters for the Union that were published between April and November. His reports were widely read, and he may have tried revising them into a book in 1866-1867, even before the Quaker City excursion to Europe. He hadn't planned to use the Hawaiian experience in Roughing It, but he ran out of inspiration and material before reaching the length Bliss and subscription readers were expecting. Working either from his own scrapbook copies of the Union letters, or possibly from a book manuscript based on them that is now lost, he wound up using parts of thirteen letters in the fifteen Hawaiian chapters of Roughing It.
You can
read four representative letters here, along with an
interactive feature that will allow you to compare his 1866
newspaper reportage with his 1872 book: clicking on the
ROUGHING IT ICON (left)
whenever you see it will bring up a side-by-side comparison
of the two texts, so you can see for yourself the kinds of
revisions MT made. He relied heavily on the letters, but
there are some patterns to be noticed in his revisions. It's
especially interesting to see what he decided to omit,
including kinds of humor that may have struck him as too
coarse for a national book-buying audience. The biggest
omission is the disappearance of "Mr. Brown." He was a figure
whom MT's original newspaper readers knew well, accompanying
MT to Europe in the Alta letters of 1867 as well as to
the Sandwich Islands in these Union letters. "Mr.
Brown" was (like "Mark Twain") an imaginary persona, less
inhibited, more irascible, cruder than "Mark Twain" even at
this early stage in his career. Some readers may regret his
absence from MT's first two travel books.
