We passed a rocky shore, the scene of two tragic events. On April Fools Day, 1946, a Tsunami smashed into this spot at Laupahoehoe, Hawai’i, killing 24 people, including nineteen schoolchildren.

Eighty years earlier, a lifeboat crashed into this ragged roiling coast, ending 43 days at sea after the clipper ship Hornet caught fire and sank near the equator.

Mark Twain interviewed the lifeboat survivors–fifteen starving crewmen–about their ordeal. His riveting story, published in the Sacramento Union, helped establish the young author.

Before we relinquished the boat we stopped on the north side of the Big Island to provision at Ching’s Store in Panalu’u, A relic from the past that had survived the massive 1946 tsunami.