Chapter11.docx

Chapter 11

AMERICAN ONSLAUGHT

A TOUR OF THE MIDDLE EAST, ONCE REGARDED AS A reckless jaunt, had by the post–Civil War era become a thoroughly respectable excursion. The decades after 1860 witnessed a tenfold expansion in the volume of Americans sailing abroad—not only missionaries but, in vastly larger numbers, tourists as well. Nearly two thousand travel books were published in the United States in this period and luxury steamers were booked well in advance. Most of these travelers headed for Europe, but a significant share also explored the Middle East. A visitor to Syria, Dr. Jacob Freese, attested that “the number of American travelers [here] far exceeds…those of any other nation,” a fact confirmed by the artist Frederick Church, a founder of the Hudson River School. Arriving in Damascus in 1868, Church discovered that Americans had snatched up every available hotel room. “The few Englishmen here stand with their hands in their pockets and exclaim ‘most extraordinary—these Americans!’” In Egypt, too, the number of American tourists had risen from an antebellum rate of sixty per year to nearly five hundred. By the early 1870s, Bedouin guides at the pyramids were purported to be speaking American-accented English and nicknaming their donkeys Yankee Doodle.

Lured by a significant reduction in fares and the shaving of the sailing time from New York to Egypt to a “mere” seventeen days, Americans journeyed eastward. Still, the advent of this “nomadic era,” as Putnam’s Magazine called it, could not alone account for the unprecedented American exodus. Rather, Americans continued to be drawn by mythic images of the Middle East, by “the perfumes of Arabia, the colors of Paradise,” in the words of the travel writer Charles Dudley Warner, “this full-blown fantasia.” The old frontier restiveness also enticed Americans eastward, especially now that the western frontier was vanishing. Most pressing, however, was the urge, after four years of bloodshed and scarcity, to venture out into the world, to accentuate life and celebrate it. “Ah, you Americans!” Foreign Minister Nubar Pasha of Egypt told Henry M. Field, a Massachusetts correspondent, in 1878. “You are the true Bedouins!”

Americans could sate their wanderlust by roaming the Middle East, but not without risking their health, if not their lives. Tourists remained an appealing target for brigands; Americans were still encouraged to engage bodyguards and to pack personal sidearms and knives. Ignoring that warning, a certain New Yorker named Klein tried to ford the Jordan by himself but was forced by armed Bedouin to pay an “escort fee” of $7,000, a vertible fortune in 1878. Travel in the region was especially perilous for women who, alone and unveiled, often felt sexually threatened by their surroundings. The nationally acclaimed actress Rose Eytinge, on tour throughout the Middle East in the late 1860s, bristled at the need to cover her head whenever she went outdoors or to arrange a male escort—practices that she found “most irksome for an American woman…used to coming and going as she pleases.” More hazardous for American travelers than robbery or sexual harassment, however, was disease. Dysentery remained the leading killer, taking the lives of Martha and Helen Woolsey, the daughters of the president of Yale, while crossing Lebanon in 1870. The Middle Eastern climate was “unfavorable for the foreigner, and often fatal to the tourist,” according to the Damascus consul J. Augustus Johnson, who testified that “the graves of modern travelers and explorers may be seen from Dan to Beer Sheva, and from Jerusalem to Damascus.” The consul in Alexandria complained that most of his time was taken up repatriating  the remains of Americans who perished while sightseeing in Egypt.1

Undaunted by these dangers, Americans persisted in traversing the Middle East with abandon and even alacrity. The “Yankees” whom the Londoner Eliza Bush saw in Egypt in the 1870s seemed to have “few ideas between them all, except those of getting over the ground as quickly as they could,” while her countryman John MacGregor marveled how “these cousins of ours do their sightseeing so uncommon quick.” Even the American officers serving in Egypt were astounded by the immense volume of American visitors in the country, on the one hand, and, on the other, by the shallowness of their tours. “They usually come in caravans,” remarked one of them, “are packed into hotels like sardines and are led around the country like sheep.”

About the only time, it seemed, that Americans dallied in the Middle East was to desecrate or pillage its monuments. On pyramids and temples, tombs and obelisks, Americans left their mark in the form of brilliantly rendered Stars and Stripes and hieroglyphs hastily chiseled off. They also specialized in graffiti; one inscription in particular, “Powell Tucker, New York, 1870,” adorned dozens of ancient sites. And what they could not steal or vandalize, Americans were ravenous to buy. “They often think with their purses, admire with their cheque-books and appreciate with their yawns,” a former Confederate officer observed. Another expatriate in Egypt, a New Jersey merchant calling himself “Antiquity” Smith, took advantage of this craze for relics and made his fortune selling artifacts—real and manufactured—to Americans.

The disrespect that Americans displayed for the classical past of the Middle East was only exceeded by their contempt for its contemporary society. Much like antebellum visitors to the region, American tourists of the post–Civil War period continued to revile what they regarded as the inherent depravity and cruelty of Middle Eastern life. The perceived mistreatment of women, judged by Charles Dudley Warner as “the conclusive verdict against the religion of the prophet [Muhammad],” was still especially repugnant. Even while rushing through the region, Americans remained immovable in their sense of cultural superiority to the native population and in their expectation of deference from it. Blocked by a Muslim guard from entering Jerusalem’s Tomb of David, for example, the previously pacific Dr. Freeze raged at the “disgrace to the civilization of the age” shown by this “miserable fellaheen,” and called on Christian America to redress it “either by diplomacy or the sword.”

The “ugly Americans” had indeed made their appearance in the Middle East, yet not all visitors to the region from the United States were gauche, destructive, or dismissive of Middle Eastern cultures. “The people…are a perpetual study for the excellence and grace of their forms and motion,” commented Ralph Waldo Emerson, in May 1872, while cruising up the Nile. “The lateen sail is the shadow of a pyramid; and the pyramid is the simplest copy of a mountain.” Making the same journey some years later, Frederick Douglass imagined that the descendants of the pyramid builders could help “combat American prejudice against the darker colored races of mankind,” how the fiercely independent Arabs, “half-brothers to the Negro,” would serve as a model for “raising colored people…in their own estimation.”2

Such affirmative remarks about the Middle East are virtually absent from the pre–Civil War travel literature and they testify to the tolerance and broad-mindedness of these towering men of ideas. But they also intimate the deeper humility wrought by the national torment of war. That modesty, coupled with curiosity, energy, and a yearning for life, accompanied a great many Americans to the Middle East in the aftermath of Appomattox. Their ranks would include not only lawyers, writers, and the leisured rich but also, for the first time, workers, schoolteachers, and clerks—the democratization of American travel. Joining them, too, would be some of the country’s most illustrious figures, the helmsmen and heroes of the Civil War.

A Gorgeous Gleaming Pageant

To the oppressed masses,” William Henry Seward once proclaimed, “the United States is the Palestine from which comes…political salvation.” Now, at age seventy, the former secretary of state was setting out for the genuine Holy Land, making him the most prominent American ever to visit the Middle East. This would be his second trip to the region. The first, it may be recalled, took place before the Civil War, during which the then Senator Seward acquired three Arabian stallions from Baghdad, plus a box of “antiquities” and a Bedouin spear. Over the course of the next decade, Seward had achieved fame as a firebrand abolitionist, as the statesman who helped dissuade Britain and France from recognizing the Confederacy, and as the negotiator who parlayed the purchase of Alaska. He survived a serious carriage accident in 1865 only to be hideously injured in an assassination attempt—part of the Booth conspiracy—that left him bedridden for a year. His wife and daughter died during that period, but Seward rebounded and returned to office, serving until 1869. A feebler man might have retired at that juncture, but in spite of short stature and receding chin, Seward was anything but fragile. No sooner had he departed from government than he boarded a steamer for Egypt.

His reception in the land of the Nile was extravagant. A train of plumed cavalry accompanied him to the pyramids, and royal vessels conveyed him past the ruin-lined banks of the Nile and across the modern Suez Canal. Though flattered by this attention, Seward remained critical of many aspects of Egyptian society. The sight of multiple wives and Africans slaves reminded him, unfavorably, of Mormonism and the Confederacy. Still, he applauded the khedive’s attempts at political and social reforms. Addressing groups of young officers, Seward stressed the need for universal education in Egypt and for the creation of a native cadre capable of assuming the government posts that were then held exclusively by foreigners. Only then could Egypt be freed from its “double thralldom”—“first, to the Ottoman Porte, and second…to the Christian nations of Europe.”

Leaving Egypt, Seward sailed northeast until he spotted the American flag furling over the U.S. consulate in Jaffa. Muscle-bound Arab stevedores bore him from his dinghy to the shore, where an imperial proclamation welcomed him as the “former chief minister of the Government of the Republic of the United States of North America.” In the company of Ottoman horsemen, Seward proceeded up to Jerusalem, where he toured the dim and dust-choked halls of the Holy Sepulcher, the Western Wall with its clusters of Jewish worshippers, and the gleaming Mount of Olives. He reveled in the sacred scenery. Most inspiring for Seward, however, was a Jerusalem synagogue that had been built with donations from American Jews. Attending Sabbath services, he watched, mesmerized, as “a remarkable rabbi, clad in a long, rich, flowing sacerdotal dress,” intoned Hebrew prayers first “for the President of the United States” and “the deliverance of the Union from its rebellious assailants.” Though he might have revealed that the prayer had at least been partially answered, the visitor sat quietly as the congregation chanted a final benediction, for “Mr. Seward’s health, [and]…his safe return to his native land.”

Seward indeed headed back to the United States, but not before making a memorable stopover in Istanbul. On July 4, 1870, he presided over the Independence Day celebrations at Robert College. Together with the college president, Cyrus Hamlin, 150 students were there to greet him—the boys in dress whites and straw hats, the girls in linen gowns and sashes—regaling him with “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In a banquet room bedecked with crossed American and Turkish flags, after a Yankee repast of turkey, baked beans, and doughnuts, Seward spoke. “It used to be thought that all great ideas must go from the East westward,” he began, “but men have already begun to see good coming from the West to the East.” He went on to explain that Robert College exemplified the generosity that Americans were capable of exhibiting, even in wartime, and urged them to remain altruistic now that their nation was reunited. “It is not enough that the corporate existence of our country is maintained, if its national spirit is not also preserved and developed.”3 After watching a baseball game, played against the backdrop of the Bosphorus, Seward left Istanbul for a six-month spree through Europe. He returned, finally, fulfilled by his extraordinary travels, to his home in Auburn, New York, where he died the following year.

Seward’s voyage set a precedent for other Civil War–era personages eager to make semiofficial visits to the Middle East. The most acute and observant of these was George B. McClellan, the onetime commander of the Army of the Potomac and failed presidential hopeful. Arriving in Alexandria in late October 1874, McClellan embarked on a one-hundred-day cruise up the Nile, pausing to pick his way through timeless ruins and to sample Bedouin hospitality. None of these experiences thrilled McClellan more, though, than a chance encounter with two American officers, Raleigh Colston and Erasmus Sparrow Purdy, on their way to survey the wilderness of Darfur. McClellan sentimentally remarked that, though “one had fought in the war in the Federal army, the other in that of the Confederates,” the two Americans now sat amicably, “side by side on the banks [of the Nile].”

An exacting man, slight and dapper—“Little Napoleon,” critics called him—McClellan passed stern judgments on Middle Eastern society. Though the Egyptians, he maintained, were a “kindly, intelligent, and industrious race,” Islam had transformed them into a nation of dissemblers and religious fanatics. Most Muslims, he ventured, had “little but life to lose in this world, and much to gain in the other by entering it from a conflict with the unbeliever.” On the other hand, Westerners would never understand Middle Eastern peoples “so long as we…judge them by the rules we are accustomed to apply to ourselves…[rather than] weigh their actions by their own rules.” McClellan nevertheless believed that change could be effected gradually in the region, through education and widening exposure to the West.4

The American public voraciously followed the accounts of Seward’s and McClellan’s visits to the Middle East. Neither excursion, however, matched the sensation generated by the voyage of one of the Civil War’s most colorful, and controversial, commanders. In March 1872, seven years after he marched his victorious troops through Alexandria, Virginia, General Sherman landed in Alexandria, Egypt, proffering tokens of peace.

Sherman’s first impressions of the Egyptians were enthusiastic. “Their Faith in Mohamet commands respect,” he wrote his son, Tommy, a student at Georgetown. He recalled that “twenty years ago…a Jew or Christian dog was hunted and stoned…and the pious Mosselman thought they were doing an act that would entitle them to reward in the World to come.” Now, however, the Egyptians welcomed the Westerners who, “skilled as Mechanics,” bring “steam engines to help the poor laborers…railroads that skim over the dry deserts and telegraphs that carry messages from Cairo to Suez in a minute.” Modern science, the former warrior predicted, would break down all barriers between the Middle East and the West and eradicate all prejudices.

Sherman’s initial displays of amity, however, soon gave way to impatience with the Middle East and the more mercurial sides of his character. Cairo, he complained, was “a hard-looking old-adobe town” crammed with “a conglomeration of men women and children of some twenty different breeds with camels, donkeys, horses, dogs and vermin.” He claimed that “our Negroes when slaves had better houses” and that Egyptian women were “bought and sold—like animals.” Especially infuriating for Sherman were the Egyptians who thought themselves superior to the Westerners and who paid less attention to him than to his military escort, Lieutenant Frederick Grant, the president’s son. He swore to “undertake to move the pyramids” rather than show respect to “a race that…look…and talk and act just like our Indians.”

Sherman’s ire would be quelled, albeit temporarily, by a visit from Generals Loring and Stone and by the personal tour of the Suez Canal he received from Ferdinand de Lesseps. The khedive Isma’il made further amends by restaging the opera Aida for Sherman’s benefit and presenting him with a diamond brooch, at a combined cost of $200,000. But the extravagance of Sherman’s reception in Egypt was outdone by the lavishness showered on him in Istanbul. Treated as a visiting head of state by Sultan Abdul Aziz, Sherman reviewed parade after parade of royal guardsmen, all armed with Winchester rifles, and flotillas of American-made warships. He also rode in trolley cars that had been imported from the United States—a year before their debut in San Francisco—and made a perfunctory visit to Robert College.5

Like Seward’s before it, Sherman’s journey signified the continued blending of American fantasies about the Middle East with America’s rising prestige as an economic and military power. Not only private citizens like Jacob Freese and Charles Dudley Warner were visiting the region but also high-ranking officials, former and incumbent. And no tour more spectacularly demonstrated that synthesis than that of the ex-chief of all Union forces and the past president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, the most famous American of his time.

Grant had come a long way since his days as a failed farmer, firewood salesman, and real estate broker, surviving bankruptcy, bouts of alcoholism, political scandals, and some of the grisliest combat in human memory. Now, at age fifty-five and a private citizen, Grant was still an international celebrity, the first American since George Washington to have held his nation’s supreme military and civilian offices. To commemorate that triumph, as well as to escape lingering accusations of corruption during his presidency, Grant and his wife, Julia, embarked on a world tour. Starting in Europe in May 1877 and continuing eastward, the trip was billed as “the most remarkable journey in all recorded history…like a romance.”

Romance, on January 5, 1878, became reality as the USS Vandalia delivered the Grants to Alexandria. Many hours passed before they could leave the ship, however, as a seemingly limitless procession of officials came on board to salute them. Wrote Julia, “One might easily think we were bombarding Alexandria in place of making a pleasure visit.” The exuberant reception continued once the party went ashore, where the carriage route was lined with thousands of well-wishers waving torches and lanterns and hailing the “king of America.” An immense banner proclaimed “Welcome General Grant,” with the n in “Grant” turned upside down.

If Seward and Sherman received exclusive treatment, the Grants’ reception was, fittingly, presidential. The couple was given use of the fabulous Qasr al-Muzha—the Little Palace of Pleasures—and a full-time liveried staff. “We had only to clap our hands and lo! A servant dressed in white approached with noiseless steps,” Julia recalled. The couple proceeded to visit the usual sights and provided Egyptians with some unprecedented ones, among them that of a former head of state and his wife bouncing toward the pyramids on donkeyback. They cruised up the Nile, shooting hyenas and crocodiles and crooning “Rally Round the Flag, Boys” and the “Star Spangled Banner.”

Egypt, for the Grants, was a chiaroscuro of splendor and decay. Staring at the Sphinx, Grant remarked, “It looks as if it has kept on thinking through all eternity without talking too much,” and concluded, “I have seen more to interest me in Egypt than in any of my travels.” Julia, though, was less charmed. “One could not but reflect here on the emptiness, frailty and vanity of the works of man,” she brooded. “Egypt, the birthplace, the cradle of civilization—Egypt, the builder of temples, tombs and the great pyramids—has nothing.”

Ancient visages certainly excited Grant, but not as visibly as those from his own distant past. “Why there’s Loring, whom I haven’t seen for thirty years,” he exclaimed, taking the remaining hand of the officer who had fought by his side in the Mexican War and against him in the war between North and South. “And there’s Stone, who must have been dyeing his hair to make it so white.” A less felicitous encounter, however, occurred between Grant and the daughter of General Robert E. Lee, Mary, who happened to be visiting Egypt as well. A spirited woman, she refused to dine with her father’s former nemesis, snapping, “I wouldn’t sit down at the same table with General Grant to save his life.” Instead, she climbed to the top of the Great Pyramid and waved the Confederate flag.6

bed to the top of the Great Pyramid and waved the Confederate flag.6

Following the traditional American path through the Middle East, from Egypt the Grants ascended to Palestine. Julia found Jaffa to be “a poor place and very dirty,” but her husband continued to exude excitement. The Holy Land, he reckoned, could “feed all that portion of the Mediterranean,” if only it were tilled by Americans. Guided by Rolla Floyd, the Adams colony veteran, the pair began the scenic climb to Jerusalem. Bedouin and villagers clothed in what looked to the visitors like biblical dress lined the road, cheering. “The General’s head was bared nearly all of the time in acknowledgement of the salutes as we passed,” Julia noted. The most remarkable sight, however, welcomed them outside the Old City walls: a double row of mounted soldiers and blaring military band, “a gorgeous gleaming pageant.”7

Ulysses S. Grant departed Palestine for Istanbul, where, once again, he was regaled as royalty, feted nightly, taken for tours of the bazaar and reviews of Turkish troops armed with Civil War swords and carbines. His trip to the Middle East, like those of Seward and Sherman preceding it, established a paradigm for many such visits by American leaders over the next century and a half. The schedule would invariably be hectic and the need to maintain appearances unrelieved. For Grant, the only respite from the frenzied pace lay in reading a book he brought with him from home. Set largely in the Middle East, the volume was not, however, the Bible or a missionary’s correspondence but rather the scathing travelogue by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.

Innocence Lost

Cairo, for Twain, was an Illinois city bordering the Mississippi River, the Grand Turk was a steamboat, and “Arab” was a derogatory name for dockworkers. A onetime Confederate militiaman, river-boat pilot, and prospector, he had spent much of his thirty-two years moving as far west of his native Missouri as possible, with scarcely a thought about turning back east, much less to the Middle East. Nor did he have any particular yearning to see the Holy Land. Though raised a strict Presbyterian and respectably versed in the Bible, he lacked “the necessary stock in trade—i.e., religion”—to become a preacher, and detested the missionaries who made people “permanently miserable by telling them…how blissful a place heaven is, and [how] nearly impossible it is to get there.” Yet Twain also suffered from the frontiersman’s restlessness, and, by the spring of 1867, in spite of his more than forty sea voyages and a recent junket to Hawaii, he was “tired of staying in one place.” Just then, he learned of the first-ever luxury around-the-world cruise, with stopovers in Morocco, Egypt, and Palestine. The itinerary excited him, evoking images recalled from his favorite childhood book, A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Elatedly he wrote his mother, “I…welcome the wind that wafts a weary soul to the sunny lands of the Mediterranean!”

By that time, the hawk-nosed, mustachioed Twain was fast gaining fame in San Francisco for his sardonic vignettes on American life and his lecturing as “the Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope.” The cruise, organized by “prominent Brooklynites” and billed as a “picnic on a gigantic scale” with public figures such as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and General Sherman participating, seemed the perfect grist for satire. Twain accordingly appealed to two papers, San Francisco’s Alta California and the New York Tribune, offering to submit regular dispatches from the voyage in exchange for the $1,250 ticket. “Isn’t it a most attractive scheme?” he reasoned. “Five months of utter freedom from care and anxiety of every kind, and in company with a set of people who will go only to enjoy themselves, and will never mention a word about business.” The editors readily agreed and on June 8, toting “green spectacles, umbrellas, veils for Egypt…and substantial clothing for rough pilgrimizing in the Holy Land,” Twain boarded the Quaker City, a sidewheel steamer equipped with every convenience, including cannon for saluting royalty.

Neither Beecher nor Sherman was among the passengers, however, and instead of celebrities, Twain found a number of innocuous Americans, most of them middle-aged midwesterners. More disappointingly, in place of license to “scamper about the decks by day, filling the ship with shouts and laughter,” and at night to “dance, and promenade, and smoke, and sing, and make love,” the passengers received Plymouth Hymnals and invitations to attend daily services in a cabin that Twain quietly dubbed “the Synagogue.” The so-called Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion, the satirist complained, “was a funeral without a corpse,” and recommended that its name be changed to “The Grand Holy Land Funeral Procession.”8

Twain nevertheless managed to make friends with some of the passengers (“eight out of the sixty-five”), and especially with two women journalists, Mary Fairbanks and Emily Severance, who expunged his off-color correspondence and curbed his more raucous behavior. The ship, meanwhile, crossed the Atlantic to its first destination, Tangier, where Consul James De Long had arrested the Confederate emissaries Myers and Tunstall five years earlier. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,” Twain asserted, disingenuously, as he entered the exotic Moroccan port.

‘Isn’t it an oriental picture?” Twain began and went on to describe the “packed and jammed city…of snowy tombs” and the “swarms of humanity…foreign and curious to look upon.” Like so many American writers before him, he castigated Middle Eastern regimes for their presumed corruption, dismissing the emperor of Morocco as a “soulless despot” who mistreated his subjects, even his wives. “[He] thinks he has five hundred [wives]…a dozen or so, one way or the other, don’t matter.” He resented the supposed refusal of Muslims to allow “Christian dogs” to enter their houses and mosques and recoiled from the cruelty of cutting off the legs and hands of criminals. “They slice around the bone a little, then break off the limb. Sometimes the patient gets well; but, as a general thing, he don’t.” Yet even a captious observer like Twain could not be immune to the city’s romantic lure. “Tangier is a foreign land if ever there was one,” he admitted, “and the true spirit of it can never be found in any book save The Arabian Nights.”

In his criticism as well as his revelry, Twain indeed resembled earlier American visitors to the Middle East, yet one characteristic distinguished his writing from that of all other tourists. Whereas his predecessors looked at the region and saw in its brutality and backwardness an inverse image of their own tolerance and refinement, the mirror, for Twain, showed Americans to be equally small-minded and crude. Seven years earlier, before the Civil War, American readers might have objected to such an unflattering depiction. But the violent deaths of 600,000 soldiers forced Americans to look at themselves, to question whether they indeed retained any claim to innocence or the right to call any other culture uncivilized. Twain advised his countrymen to prefer a death sentence to residence in the Middle East, yet he also consoled those Middle Eastern peoples overrun by that “strange horde…that called themselves Americans and seemed to imagine…that they had a right to be proud of it.”9

Leaving Tangier, the Quaker City embarked on a meandering course toward the eastern Mediterranean that brought it back to Europe and the French port of Marseille. Twain took the railroad to Paris and arrived in time to watch a parade staged by Napoleon III in honor of the visiting Ottoman sultan. The event provided the writer with a platform for previewing his impressions of the Turkish empire, well before he even reached it. While heaping encomium on the puny French autocrat who had so recently invaded Mexico—the epitome of “modern civilization, progress, refinement”—Twain unleashed an invective against Abdul Aziz:

a short, stout, dark man, black-bearded, black-eyed, stupid, unprepossessing…the representative of a…government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity, Blood…. Born to a throne; weak, stupid, ignorant, almost, as his meanest slave; chief of a vast royalty…who holds in his hands the power of life and death over millions—yet who sleeps, sleeps, eats, eats, idles with his eight hundred concubines…[and] who believes in gnomes and genii and the wild fables of The Arabian Nights, but has small regard for the mighty magicians of today and is nervous in the presence of their mysterious railroads and steamboats and telegraphs.

As a satirist and social commentator, Twain rarely had kind words for any ethnic or religious group, yet his disdain for Muslims was unrivaled. A “filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, superstitious people,” he alleged, the followers of Allah were also deluded by the “wild fables of The Arabian Nights.” Such imprecations reflected deep-rooted American prejudices against Islam, as well as Twain’s tendency to impute to Muslims a belief in the Middle Eastern myths to which he, in fact, subscribed. The extent of those illusions would become unequivocally clear to Twain when the Quaker City anchored in Istanbul.

The sense of otherness again proved bewildering for Twain. The streets all seemed mazelike to him and the people, dressed “in all the outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning costumes,” appeared kaleidoscopic. He complained about the plethora of graveyards and mosques, the dearth of whiskey, and the omnipresence of freaks—“the three-legged woman and the man with the eye in his cheek…the dwarf with seven fingers on each hand, no upper lip, and his underjaw gone.” No number of negative adjectives, it seemed, could express Twain’s disgust. Especially revolting were the Turkish baths of which he had long dreamed, but which he now found “vast, naked, dreary,” with “nothing of romance, nothing of oriental splendor.” Still, while wandering through the outdoor market, ambling between hawkers and camels and waterpipe-smoking sheikhs, Twain could almost forget his disenchantment. “The picture lacks nothing,” he relented. “It casts you back at once into your forgotten boyhood, and again you dream over the wonders of The Arabian Nights.”

Twain’s aversion toward all things Middle Eastern only thickened the more deeply he penetrated the region. The city of Damascus, which looked to him like “an island of pearls and opals gleaming out of a sea of emeralds” from the distance, up close became “the very sink of pollution and uncomeliness.” The Syrian men he encountered were a “wretched nest of human vermin,” a hodgepodge of “rags, dirt, sunken cheeks, pallor of sickness, sores, [and] projecting bones,” and the women so ugly they “couldn’t smile after ten o’clock Saturday night without breaking the Sabbath.” He scoffed at the ignorance of his Bedouin guides and at their vexingly unpronounceable names. Despairing of Arabic, Twain simply referred to all natives collectively as “Ferguson” and to their villages as “Jonesborough.” He admitted, unhappily, “To glance at the genuine son of the desert is to take the romance out of him forever.”10

From Syria, Twain and his party followed the usual American route into Palestine, but there the confluence ended. Although few travelers had dared to describe the Holy Land in anything less than superlatives, Twain maligned Palestine as a “hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land,” its villages “frescoed…with disks of camel dung” and its roads more rock strewn than the stony countryside. “If all the poetry…upon the…bland scenery of this region were collected in a book, it would make a most valuable volume to burn,” he surmised. Like many Americans before him, raised on bigger-than-life Bible stories, Twain was disappointed by the minuscule size of Palestinian sites—the Jordan, which he estimated to be about half the width of most American streets, and the Sea of Galilee, which he deemed so tiny that he refused to pay the exorbitant boatfare across. “Is it any wonder that Christ walked?” Three Palestines, he reckoned, could fit comfortably into the state of Missouri, with possibly room for a fourth.

In Palestine, Twain’s impudence rapidly descended into sacrilege and nowhere more blasphemously than in Jerusalem. Bereft of any holiness, the city was a “mournful and dreary and lifeless” place for Twain, “grimy and impoverished,” and teeming with lepers, idiots, and the blind. He seemed to derive pleasure in deriding the pilgrims, the Presbyterians in particular, who vainly came searching for their dream of a Promised Land only to find this waste heap. He debated whether to lie to his readers and relate how he tore himself “reluctantly away from…Palestine,” but then reconsidered and wrote, “One is glad to get away.”

In the end, though, not even Mark Twain—caustic, iconoclastic, outrageous—could suppress his admiration for the men and women who “journeyed thousands and thousands of miles, in weariness and tribulation” in order to “sail upon the hallowed sea and kiss the holy soil that compassed about it.” An avowed secularist who routinely scorned Scripture, Twain could not resist purchasing a leather-bound Bible in Istanbul and reading it throughout his trip and buying a second for his mother in Jerusalem. Nor could he deny the sense of “vagueness and mystery and ghostliness” that occasionally seized him in Palestine: “I am sitting where a god has stood and looking upon the brook and the mountains which that god looked upon and am surrounded by dusky men and women whose ancestors saw him, and even talked with him, face-to-face.”

Behind his glibness lurked Twain’s longing for the unconquerable faith of his forebears, that purity which he and so many of his generation had lost. “I cannot comprehend this,” he again confessed before departing the Holy Land. “The gods of my understanding have always been hidden in clouds.”11

The Quaker City at last steamed out of Jaffa, but not before taking on board forty new passengers—children, old people, recently married couples—all of them Americans. These were the survivors of the Indian River colony, simple people who, Twain related, had been “shamefully humbugged by their prophet,” George Adams. The sight of these dejected and half-starved naïfs symbolized for Twain the pitiful illusions with which Americans approached the Middle East and Palestine in particular. “Palestine is no more of this workaday world,” he concluded; “it is dreamland.”

Still, Twain made one last Middle Eastern stop, Egypt, which proved to be anticlimactic. With his vitriol toward Muslim civilization spent, much of Twain’s denigration aimed at the American tourists who “infested” the hotels and the “American vandals” who chipped off pieces of Pompey’s Pillar with sledgehammers. Departing Alexandria, finally, the Quaker City turned toward home, its passengers outfitted in “Moorish haiks,

Turkish fezzes, sashes from Persia.” Other souvenirs included orange tree seedlings that one enterprising tourist managed to replant and cultivate in Florida and several mummies later put on display in P. T. Barnum’s Museum. Of all the Americans who disembarked in New York on November 19, 1868, however, none was more enriched by the Middle Eastern sojourn than Mark Twain. The book he wrote about that excursion soon made him America’s most celebrated author.

Compiled from his dispatches, The Innocents Abroad; or The New Pilgrims’ Progress earned Twain more than $300,000, selling half a million copies— “right along with Bible,” he quipped. The title was vintage Twain, glib and ironic, for the excursion was hardly a pilgrimage and its participants anything but innocent. Readers nevertheless embraced that paradox, this “gospel of sincerity,” as one of Twain’s early biographers labeled it, secure in their war-born worldliness. The Barbary Wars fifty years earlier had helped Americans define themselves and now, after a vastly bloodier conflict, an American in the Middle East had sharpened—and darkened—that definition.

The publication of The Innocents Abroad Launched Twain’s career as an immensely successful novelist, essayist, and social commentator. He also became the publisher and friend of Ulysses Grant, who had read the book throughout his Middle East travels. But Twain would never again write about the region. He began a farce about an American convert to Islam who establishes a harem on the Mississippi, and an Arabian Nights spoof in which Scheherazade saves herself by boring a king with her tales, but completed neither.12 Having seen the reality, apparently, Twain could no longer romanticize about the Middle East, even humorously.

MARK TWAIN may have dispelled the fantasy of Americans in the Middle East, but he could not extinguish their fantasies of the Middle East. Full vent to these was given on September 26, 1872, at the inauguration of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, a fraternal offshoot of the Masons. Founded by Dr. Walter Fleming, a former Civil War surgeon, and the actor Billy Florence, who had performed in Cairo and Algiers, the “Shriners” adopted the scimitar and crescent as their emblems and the fez as their headgear. Their first temple was called Mecca, and entering it, initiates greeted one another with the Arabic salutation “Es Selamu Aleikum”—peace be upon you. The organization, though initially focused on fun, eventually became philanthropic and, a century later, could boast of half a million members and twenty-two hospitals specializing in pediatrics and burn care.

For the broader American public, too, illusions of Middle East remained rife. Among the most popular attractions at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia was the “Egypt-Soodan” pavilion. Under a banner proclaiming “the oldest people of the world send its morning greetings to the youngest nation,” visitors viewed a replica of Ramses’ temple and two thousand samples of Egyptian cotton. Proceeding to the Turkish pavilion, they could sip bittersweet cups of coffee and purchase “genuine” Ottoman items such as carpets, swords, and, of course, fezzes. The most alluring display, however, was a domed Moroccan villa set with intricate, inlaid wood imported—so the sponsors claimed—“from Tangier, that somnolent country so ludicrously described by Mark Twain.”13

Whether welcoming each other in Arabic, buying fezzes at a fair, or laughing at the satire in The Innocents Abroad, Americans were still enchanted by the Middle East, or rather by the mecca of myths that, in their imaginations at least, it remained.

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