Julius Moulton, along with Mark Twain and 73 other brave souls, was a passenger
on the Mediterranean-bound cruise ship Quaker City. It was the original luxury cruise.
The steam-driven side-wheeler of eighteen hundred tons had a top speed of ten
knots and had auxiliary sails. It left Brooklyn, New York on June 8 and returned
November 19, 1867.
The idea for the cruise originated in the Brooklyn church of Henry Ward Beecher*.
The Sunday-school superintendent, Charles Duncan, organized and arranged to
lease the ship as well as being its captain**.
The Innocents Abroad was Twain's first travel book and it was about this trip. It was
published in 1869.
Julius Moulton who was one of the younger carefree pilgrims helped to make the
excursion both fun and adventure for Mark Twain. A group of close-knit companions,
called sinners by Twain, traveled together throughout the Mediterranean which
included a long trip through Syria, from Beirut to Jerusalem, to Egypt and to
southern Spain. Chapter 56 of Innocents describes the adventures of the sinners
in Jerusalem and in Chapter 58 the adventures in Egypt. The passengers, for the
most part, were middle-aged, prosperous and religious. Twain, in spite of his
amusement with the sinners, found many on the trip to be shallow hypocrites with
muddy intellects. While in Jerusalem Mark Twain bought for his mother a Bible, a
small souvenir volume bound in olive and balsam wood. On the flyleaf he wrote:
Mrs. Jane Clemens from her son. Jerusalem, September 24, 1876.
Toward the end of the excursion, after leaving Alexandria, Egypt, the Quaker City
landed at Gibraltar on the night of October 17 to take on coal. Julius Moulton, Mark
Twain, Dr. A. Reeves Jackson and Miss Julia Newell, a Wisconsin newspaper
correspondent whom he disliked, left the ship and with a Spanish guide traveled
through Andalusia by horseback and train. They rejoined the Quaker City at Cadiz
a week later. A chapter was written for The Innocents Abroad but was omitted
because of a suggestion by Bret Harte***. In notes for the book Mark Twain
summarized the hectic journey:
We hired a guide, took a carriage, crossed the neutral ground & drove around
the seashore to Algeciras, where we arrived about three in the afternoon....
At five, the guide brought some immense, high-trotting horses, with unimaginable
and indescribable saddles, and we mounted and left....We went flying through Spain,
unencumbered, over a faultless road....
We seldom galloped. We went in a swinging trot all night. Just as it turned broad
daylight we came clattering up to a diligence station called Bekjes, or some such
barbarous name. We took breakfast, hired a couple of covered one-horse go-carts
called caleches, and drove off through sunny Andalusia, among picturesque villages,
scenes of rural beauty and mountainous grandeur, stopping now and then to look
and admire, or halting a moment a a peasant's house to eat pomegranates and
luscious grapes. Away again, meeting quaintly-costumed Sancho Panzas riding
sedate little asses, and wondering why the mischief the redoubtable Don Quixxote,
solemn and extravagant, did not emerge from the wayward trees or from some grim
dungeon of a Spanish inn......
We reached the fine city of San Leandro, or San Lorenzo, or some such name,
after a while, rather jaded and sleepy. The diligence was ready to start, it was full, we
were tired, the weather was hot, it was sixteen awful hours to Granada and the
Alhambra--we sighed, said it was too much and sorrowfully gave it up....The Alcazar
was said to be a Moorish palace a thousand years old--it was the Alhambra in
miniature--its rich architecture had been perfectly restored, its gardens and fountains
likewise;--enough--let argument cease--we would fly to Seville. We took the cars
at once....At midnight we started from a doze and....in another moment, we were
in charming Seville. We took the cars and went to ancient Cordova....We were
lions in Cordova--especially our lady with her short traveling doubt. Dressed in the
quaint costumes of five hundred years ago, they flocked after us and gazed upon us
as though somewhat as if we had dropped out of heaven, but more as if we had
come up from the other place.....We staid all night at the funniest, strangest, old-
fashioned Spanish hotel. At 9 A. M. we hurried to the depot...We got in the car--
we moved--we flew--toward Cadiz.
Next morning the Quaker City left the continent from Cadiz to return home. They
stopped at Bermuda for four days to refuel and on November 19, after an absence
of five and a half months, the pilgrims steamed into New York.
"The long, strange cruise was over."
The following Christmas Eve in New York City, the Quaker City Nighthawks, another Twain name for the sinners, held a reunion, or blowout. They were the unholiest gang
that ever cavorted through Palestine. All were there except Julius Moulton of St. Louis,
and we needed Moulton badly......I just laughed till my sides ached, over some of our
reminiscences.
In 1907 in commenting on who "Moult" of The Innocents Abroad was, Mark Twain
said that after the Quaker City cruise I have never heard of him since.
Julius Moulton was described by fellow excursionist, Colonel William R. Denny as
"a clever youth of about 22 summers," as "tall, slender and kind" and belongs to
church****".
He was from St. Louis and was employed as an assistant engineer on the North
Missouri Railroad of which his father, Jonathan Benjamin Moulton was the Chief
Engineer. Forty years after the cruise Mark Twain would describe him as a young
fellow from Missouri, quiet and diffidant; he had not been away from home before.
He is mentioned throughout Innocents as "Moult". Julius Moulton wrote five letters
about the cruise for the Missouri Republican of St. Louis. The publication dates
were August 19, October 14, 22 and November 19 and 24; Twain sent fifty-three
letters to the Alta California, six to the New York Tribune and three to the New York
Herald. Before departing the Quaker City, Mark Twain entrusted a package
containing gifts and mementoes and the Jerusalem Bible to St. Louisan Nighthawk
Julius Moulton. He was to give it to Jane Clemens and Pamela Moffett on his
return home. The King James Bible is now with the Mark Twain Papers at the
University of California, Berkeley. When Mark Twain was in St. Louis in 1902 he
was welcomed aboard a steamboat that was renamed for him by the Harbor
Department of St. Louis*****. When a deckhand shouted out the river's depth,
the celebrated author/pilot sang back, Mark Twain--good enough water for anyone;
you couldn't improve it without a little whiskey. An ideal ending to the trip, so filled
with memories, would have been a meeting with his long-ago Mediterranean-tour companion, Julius Moulton. Moulton died at the age of 71 in New Smyrna, Florida on February 14, 1916. The cause of death is listed as indigestion.
Julius Moulton (1844-1916), Block 50, Lot 263
To read the information that is suggested by the asterik's.....please go to the
next page.
Main image is taken from my own personal cd
collection and the information that is on the
following pages have been researched through
genealogy links and the Bellefontaine Cemetery
listings.
This set is NOT linkware and is NOT to leave
this site by any means. It is for my own personal
use and NOT yours. If I find that any part of it is
used somewhere else....I will turn you and your site
over to MSN and there will be NO QUESTIONS
ASKED!!! Thanks.....Fiddlinsue a.k.a. Suzanne
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