Page 44 - Holyland Magazine - 2009 Edition
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tour guide handbook; and Mark Twain’s representative and the first genuine tour highlight of the “Pilgrims” Holy Land
The Innocents Abroad or, The New guide (dragoman) in the country. Cook’s excursion – the city of Jerusalem.
Pilgrims’ Progress, published in 1869. tours brought together the elements of
This book was the first long work of Samuel adventure, instruction and devotion, creating While contemplating that he was, finally,
Clemens, better known by his literary name the experience that General Grant so within the illustrious city of Abraham,
Mark Twain, and as such it became enjoyed when Floyd guided him quoting Solomon and Jesus, he writes “Just after
a benchmark on his way to fame. the Bible and Twain as they traveled through noon we entered these narrow, crooked
the ancient landscape. streets, by the ancient and the famed
Grant's guide to the land was Rolla Floyd, Damascus gate,” and in his diary he adds
an American Protestant who had been a On September 23, 1867, after a three- “the Damascus gate, part of which is very
member of George Jones Adams’ week overland trip from Beirut via old & part was repaired by the Crusaders.”
“American Colony” in Jaffa, which was Damascus to the Galilee and from there He notes that the party, “riding ahead of
founded by a group of believers from Maine through Samaria, Twain and his party of their tents and equipment, took rooms at
that ultimately failed in its attempt to settle eight arrived at what should have been the the Mediterranean Hotel.”
the Holy Land. Floyd stayed behind in
1867 when the rest of the group boarded Although written as a satire, a comic
the famous ship “Quaker City” to head mockery of existing Holy Land travel books
back to America from the port of Jaffa. (and to some, disrespectful of religious
On board that same ship was Samuel sentiment), The Innocents Abroad chalked
Clemens, who was returning home after up an enormous success and is still among
his long voyage to the Holy Land. the most popular travel books ever written.
When in 1869 Thomas Cook of Britain, Today traveling with Twain in hand can be
the father of modern tourism, led his first just as enjoyable; reading some iconic quotes
party to Jerusalem, Floyd became his from The Innocents Abroad as you try to
imagine the changing landscape of the last
Jerusalem as seen from the Damascus Gate in the Mark Twain (age 31) taken in Jaffa by Abdullah
1880s. The city "is as knobby with countless little Frères before boarding the ship back home. On
domes as a prison door is with bolt-heads. Wherefore, the back its written "Saml Clemens, Jaffa,
when one looks down from an eminence..., he sees Sept.30,1867. Photos: Library of Congress
the knobbiest town in the world," as Mark Twain wrote
in "The Innocents Abroad." Circled in red is the
Mediterranean Hotel, where Twain stayed when he
visited Jerusalem in 1867.
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