178 Crossing the Line 



1897 



Sept. 5. Closing in on the equator this noon. A sailor explained to a young 

 girl that the ship's speed is poor because we are chmbing up a bulge toward 

 the center of the globe; but that when we should once get over, at the 

 equator, and start down-hill, we should fly. When she asked him the other 

 day what the fore-yard was, he said it was the front yard, the open area in 

 the front end of the ship. That man has a good deal of learning stored up, 

 and the girl is likely to get it aU. 



Afternoon. Crossed the equator. In the distance it looked like a blue ribbon 

 stretched across the ocean. Several passengers kodak'd it. We had no fool 

 ceremonies, no fantastics, no horse-play. All that sort of thing has gone out. 

 In old times a sailor, dressed as Neptune, used to come in over the bows, 

 with his suite, and lather up and shave everybody who was crossing the 

 equator for the first time, and then cleanse these unfortunates by swinging 

 them from the yard-arm and ducking them three times in the sea. This was 

 considered funny. Nobody knows why. No, that is not true. We do know why. 

 Such a thing could never be funny on land; no part of the old-time grotesque 

 performances gotten up on shipboard to celebrate the passage of the line 

 could ever be fimny on shore — they would seem dreary and witless to 

 shore people. But the shore people would change their minds about it at sea, 

 on a long voyage. On such a voyage, with its eternal monotonies, people's 

 intellects deteriorate; the owners of the intellects soon reach a point where 

 they almost seem to prefer childish things to things of a matmer degree. One 

 is often surprised at the juvenilities which grown people indulge in a sea, 

 and the interest they take in them, and the consuming enjoyment they get 

 out of them. This is on long voyages only. The mind gradually becomes inert, 

 dull, blunted; it loses its accustomed interest in intellectual things; nothing 

 but horse-play can rouse it, nothing but wild and foolish grotesqueries can 

 entertain it. On short voyages it makes no such exposure of itself; it hasn't 

 time to slump down to this sorrowful level. 



(Samuel Langhome Clemens. Following the equator; a journey around 

 the world. By Mark Twain. Hartford, Connecticut [1897] p. 65-69.) 



The vocabulary is typical Mark Twain. How much study did he give to the ceremony before 

 settling the question? If the initiation ceremony at the passing of the mouth of the Platte 

 upward bound on the Missouri had ever come to the notice of Sam Clemens, the Mississippi 

 pilot, one would expect mention of it here. And the crossing of the height of land between the 

 Great Lakes and the Pacific and Hudson's Bay watershed would be ruled out here as mere 

 landsmen's frivohties. 



Reprinted with permission of Harper & Brothers. 



