READING MARK TWAIN'S "LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI"

 

          [TRY AS I MIGHT I COULDN'T GET AN IMAGE OF A STEAMBOAT TO LOAD. THESE ARE FROM MY COMPUTER FILES]

      I’m just now reading Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi.” And I can hardly put it down. Thank goodness the paperback I have is tightly bound so no pages are coming loose. I usually annotate where and when I got the book, but this one has zilch info.
            Samuel Clemens used several pseudonyms during his long writing career. But the author wrote his best-known works, including such American classics as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, under the pen name Mark Twain. Not surprisingly, Clemens adopted his pen name from his experiences piloting steamboats up and down the Mississippi.

                "Twain" literally means "two." As a riverboat pilot, Clemens would have heard the term, "Mark Twain," which means "two fathoms," on a regular basis. According to the UC Berkeley Library, Clemens first used this pseudonym in 1863, when he was working as a newspaper reporter in Nevada, long after his riverboat days.

                Clemens became a riverboat "cub," or trainee, in 1857. Two years later, he earned his full pilot's license and began piloting the steamboat Alonzo Child upriver from New Orleans in January 1861. His piloting career was cut short when riverboat traffic ceased at the start of the Civil War that same year.

                "Mark Twain" means the second mark on a line that measured depth, signifying two fathoms, or 12 feet, which was a safe depth for riverboats. The method of dropping a line to determine the water's depth was a way to read the river and avoid submerged rocks and reefs that could "tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated," as Clemens wrote in his 1863 novel, "Life on the Mississippi." 

                [Citation: Lombardi, Esther. "The Meaning of the Pseudonym Mark Twain." ThoughtCo, Aug. 27, 2020, thoughtco.com/what-does-twain-mean-740683.]

            Later in the book I found words that I didn't know. They are below:

                I DIDN’T KNOW THAT “trig” and “trigness of the house” as found in Mark Twain’s book, “Life on the Mississippi” meant smartness, neatness, trim, spruce. Makes sense in that context, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it without its math meaning.

             In the same vein, “texas” with a small “t” in steamboat lingo refers to the long, narrow cabin known as the crew’s quarters. Also, the “hurricane deck” is above the boiler deck, usually the uppermost full deck. It’s also called the upward deck or roof.

Now that I've finished reading, I know so much more than I did. About so many things in and around the big river, the 1800s, the parts of Arkansas that are mentioned. But isn't that true of everything we read? I recommended it highly.

c 2023, PL, dba lovepat press Benton AR USA