Indian Equator

Ian Strathcarron

Description

In 1895/6 the sixty-year-old Mark Twain set off on a worldwide lecture tour to pay off his debts from a publishing company bankruptcy, notes from which a year later became his final travel book Following the Equator. Two years later he wrote, 'How I did loathe that journey around the world! except the sea-part and India.' Although he was only in India for just over two of the twelve months, his exploits and observations there take up forty per cent of the book-and by common consent are by far the best and liveliest part of it. In The Indian Equator the Mark Twain travel trilogist Ian Strathcarron, his wife and photographer Gillian and his factota Sita follow in his mentor's footsteps, train tracks and boat wakes tracing the route that Twain, his wife Livy, his daughter Clara, his manager Smythe and his bearer Satan took as they crisscrossed the sub-continent. Leaving from the Bombay that was and the Mumbai that is, both writers follow the lecture circuit of old India--including what is now Pakistan--across the plains and cities of the north up to the peaks of the Himalayas by way of Baroda, Jaipur, Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Benares/Varanasi, Calcutta/Kolkata, Darjeeling, Lahore and Rawalpindi. Staying in the same Raj clubs, travelling down the same train lines, meeting the high and mighty and the downtrodden and destitute, Twain and Strathcarron are absorbed by an India that then was and now is 'not for the faint of heart nor mild of spirit nor weak of mind nor dull of sense nor correct of politic'; a rapidly changing yet still deeply traditional society where 'a few hundred million have grabbed the twenty-first century by the whiskers and many more hundred million still tuck the nineteenth century into bed at night'. Mark Twain loved the India of 1896; like his trilogist, he would love it still.

Sujets

• Travel writing
• India

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 20 août 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908493927
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
THE INDIAN EQUATOR
Mark Twain’s India Revisited

By
Ian Strathcarron



Publisher Information
First published in 2013 by
Signal Books Limited
36 Minster Road
Oxford
OX4 1LY
www.signalbooks.co.uk
Digital Edition converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited 2013
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © F&J Productions Ltd, 2013
The right of Ian Strathcarron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. The whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.



Prologue
“Dear me! It is a strange world. Particularly the Indian division of it.”
Mark Twain, Following the Equator
As noted below in a series of clippings from The New York Times, Mark Twain’s publishing company was declared bankrupt in 1894. Although he was under no legal obligation to pay off any of the company’s debts of $250,000 - about $4,000,000 in today’s money - he felt a moral obligation to pay them in full.
By then fifty-eight years old, his plan was to raise funds by two means: a worldwide lecture tour and a subsequent book about the tour. The one hundred-date lecture tour, which took him across North America, to Australia, New Zealand, India, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, South Africa and England, lasted from July 1895 to July 1896. On tour he took extensive notes, which in late 1896 and early 1897 in London he turned into the book. It was published as Following the Equator in New York and More Tramps Abroad in London in November 1897. The mission was successful and a year later all his debts were repaid. >Mark Twain, 1894<
Two years later he wrote, “How I did loathe that journey around the world! - except the sea-part and India.” Although he was only in India for just over two months his exploits and observations there take up forty percent of the book - and by common consent are by far the best and liveliest part of it.
He loved India and its exotic splash of humanity then; I’m sure he would love it still; I certainly did as I followed him around that extraordinary country, truly a country without padding.



The New York Times
May 10, 1894
CHARLES L. WEBSTER & CO.’S AFFAIRS 

The Liabilities Placed at About $80,000 - “Mark Twain” Sails for Europe
Samuel L. Clemens, (Mark Twain) senior partner of the publishing house of Charles L. Webster & Co., sailed for Europe yesterday on the steamship New York . Before his departure Mr. Clemens held an extended conference with Bainbridge Colby, the assignee of the company. Later, Mr. Colby made the following statement:
“The liabilities of the firm will not exceed $80,000. The largest claim against the company is one for $25,000. There is no truth whatever in the report that Mrs. U. S. Grant has a large sum of money due here on the Grant “Memoirs.” Her claim will not exceed a few hundred dollars. I am convinced there is only one way to realize on the assets of the Webster Company, and that is to sell them in the usual course of business. I still have hopes that some plan may be perfected which will make it possible to sell the stock which is on hand without resorting to such a costly alternative as an assignee’s sale.
“Mr. Clemens feels keenly the condition in which his affairs are involved, and whatever the result of the plan which he has adopted for the working up of the assets and the continuation of contracts, I do not think that he will consider himself relieved of the moral obligation to repay his creditors.”
Mr. Colby said Mr. Clemens sailed for Europe to be absent indefinitely. He has a number of important engagements abroad, but will return at once should there by any need here for his presence.

The New York Times
September 19, 1894
BUSINESS TROUBLES
The schedules of Charles L. Webster & Co., book publishers at 67 Fifth Avenue, in which firm Samuel L. Clemens (“Mark Twain”) and Frederick J. Hall are the partners, were filed yesterday. They show liabilities of $94,191, nominal assets of $122,657, actual assets of $69,164, less $15,000 hypothecated to the United States National Bank, and net actual assets of $54,164.
There are more than 200 creditors scattered all over the United States. Among the creditors are: Mount Morris Bank, $29,500; United States National Bank, $15,000; George Barrow, Skaneateles, N. Y., $15,420; S. D. Warren & Co., Boston, $6,332; Jenkins & McCowan, $5,363; Thomas Russell & Son, $4,623. There is due for royalties: Estate of U. S. Grant, $2,216; Col. F. D. Grant, $727; estate of Gen. P. H. Sheridan, St. Paul, Minn., $374; Mrs. E. B. Custer, London, $1,825.
The New York Times
July 12, 1895
EXAMINING MARK TWAIN’S ASSETS
Supplementary Proceedings on a Judgment Resulting from Failure of C. L . Webster & Co. - Mr. Clemens in Poor Health
Samuel L. Clemens, (Mark Twain,) the humorist, was yesterday examined in supplementary proceedings at the office of his lawyers, 40 Wall Street. Mr. Clemens was a partner in the publishing house of Charles L. Webster. The firm was organized in 1885, failed in 1890, was reorganized, and failed again in April 1894, with assets of $25,000, and liabilities of $80,000. The firm published Grant’s Memoirs, and made a success of it, but in the late business depression the firm became embarrassed.
The examination of Mark Twain yesterday was upon a judgment against him and Frederick J. Hall, another member of the firm, that Thomas Russell & Sons, printers of 34 New Chambers Street, obtained in the sum of $5,046.83. Upon the return of the execution unsatisfied, Justice Patterson issued an order for the examination of Messrs. Clemens and Hall.
Mr. Clemens returned from Europe about six weeks ago and went to Elmira. He was there served with the order for the examination, and came here yesterday morning.
Bainbridge Colby, assignee of the firm of Charles L. Webster & Co., said that Mr. Clemens had lost all of his money trying to keep the firm solvent, and that in its failure he had lost everything.
When the firm needed money and Mr. Clemens had no more to give it, Mrs. Clemens made loans, until, at the time of the failure, it owed her $70,000. For this she has never made a claim against the firm’s assets.
With the exception of Russell & Sons, the creditors of the firm have taken no action against Mr. Clemens, knowing that Mr. Clemens will do what he can to pay them in full.
At the time of the failure, Mr. Clemens became ill through worrying over his business affairs, and has not yet fully regained his health. If he regains his health sufficiently he will start West. He expects to leave Vancouver Aug. 16, on a lecture tour around the world, that he contemplates making.



The New York Times
August 17, 1895
MARK TWAIN’S PLAN OF SETTLEMENT 

Samuel L. Clemens Proposed to Pay the Indebtedness of His Firm with Proceeds of Lectures and Book
VANCOUVER, B. C., Samuel L. Clemens, (Mark Twain,) who is leaving for Australia, made a signed statement today concerning the purposes of his worldwide lecture tour and his business troubles, in part, as follows:
“I intend the lectures, as well as the property, for the creditors. The law recognizes no mortgage on a man’s brain, and a merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the rules of insolvency and start free again for himself; but I am not a business man; and honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot compromise for less than a hundred cents on the dollar, and its debts never outlaw.
“I had a two-thirds interest in the publishing firm, whose capital I furnished. If the firm had prospered, I should have expected to collect two-thirds of the profit. As it is, I expect to pay all the debts. My partner has no resources, and I do not look for assistance from him. By far the largest single creditor of this firm is my wife, whose contributions in cash, from her private means, have nearly equaled the claims of all the others combined. In satisfaction of this great and just claim, she has taken nothing, except to avail herself of the opportunity of retaining control of the copyrights of my books, which, for many easily understood reasons, of which financial ones are the least, we do not desire to see in the hands of strangers. On the contrary, she has helped and intends to help me to satisfy the obligations due to the rest.
“The present situation is that the wreckage of the firm, together with what money I can scrape together with my wife’s aid, will enable me to pay the other creditors about 50 per cent of their claims. It is my intention to ask them to accept that as a legal discharge, and trust to my honor to pay the other 50 per cent. as fast as I can earn it. From my reception thus far on my lecturing tour, I am confident that, if I live I can pay off the last debt within four years, after which, at the age of sixty-four, I can make a fresh and unencumbered start in life.
“I do not enjoy the hard travel and broken rest inseparable from lecturing, and, if it had not been for the imperious moral necessity or paying these debts, which I never contracted but which were accumulated on the faith of my name by those who had a presumptive right to use it, I should never have taken to the road at my time of life. I could have supported myself comfortably by writing, but writing is too slow for the demands that I have