July, 2025 - Horizon Guest House

Mark Twain would spend four months in the Hawaiian Islands – traveling to Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island – while writing letters about his travels for the Sacramento Union. Letters from his time on the Big Island provide an interesting view of the island as it was in the 1860s.

When Mark Twain first sighted the shores of Hawaii Island he was impressed by the imposing size of Mauna Loa and Hualalai, in particular Mauna Loa, describing the ‘rays of glittering snow and ice, that clasped its summit like a claw’. On arrival in Kailua-Kona he was struck by the sleepy nature of what was then just ‘a little collection of native grass houses reposing under tall coconut trees’.

Mark Twain arrived on the Big Island in July 1866, having traveled from Honolulu where he had been based for some time. After arriving in Kona, he traveled on horseback south to Kealakekua Bay. The road south at this time was overgrown, with the route veering inland, out of sight of the ocean, and the path; shaded by ‘trees, whose great boughs overarch the road and shut out sun and sea and everything, and leave you in a dim, shady tunnel, haunted with invisible singing birds and fragrant with the odor of flowers’.

Twain believed that Kona coffee had a ‘richer flavor than any other’ and noted that the coffee industry had been plagued by a recent ‘blight’ while exports of coffee remained insignificant compared to exports of sugar. In 1865, 263,000 pounds of coffee were exported from the islands compared with more than 15 million pounds of sugar. Oranges were also an important industry at the time with approximately half a million oranges exported in 1865, mostly to California. Twain considered that ‘there are no finer oranges grown in the world’ than those grown on the Kona Coast.

When he arrived in Kealakekua Bay he was greeted by a summer rain and ‘two magnificent rainbows’. It was here he visited the spot where Captain Cook was killed, and tried in vain to imagine Cook’s last moments but ‘could not do it’.

Traveling on by canoe to Honaunau, he was struck by the immensity of Mauna Loa, the ‘long mountain with its rich green forests stretching up into the curtaining clouds’. Dolphins surrounded the canoe, ‘arching over a wave and disappearing, and then doing it over again… like so many well-submerged wheels’.

While visiting Place of Refuge (Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau) he walked part of the King’s trail, remarking with surprise at the ‘considerable degree of engineering skill’ of the paved pathway, and that it reminded him of the ancient roads ‘out of Rome’.

Twain continued on by boat south to Kau and then via mule to Volcano where he stayed at Volcano House which had only just opened about three months prior. He was surprised at ‘finding a good hotel in such an outlandish spot’. He remained in awe while observing the simmering volcano at night:

‘It was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it––imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire!’

Twain declared that his ‘jaunt through Kona will always be to me a happy memory’.

For further reading about Mark Twain’s time in Hawaii see Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1975.

Peanut Chocolate Brownies

This recipe is a New Zealand classic and though it’s called a brownie it’s actually a chocolate cookie with crunchy roasted peanuts.

Ingredients

Instructions

Mark Twain on the Big Island

Mark Twain would spend four months in the Hawaiian Islands – traveling to Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island – while writing letters about his travels for the Sacramento Union. Letters from his time on the Big Island provide an interesting view of the island as it was in the 1860s.