Samuel Langhorne Clemens was a young man of thirty when he boarded the sail-steamer Ajax on March 7, 1866, to venture on an ocean voyage to the Hawaiian Islands as a roving reporter for The Sacramento Union. He had not yet written Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, or Life on the Mississippi. He was poor and not yet internationally known. His Sandwich Islands venture would become the catapulting event that would fire Mark Twain from roving reporter to famous speaker to famous writer, enabling him to ascend to the heights of literary greatness.