In Aprill857 Sam boarded the Paul Jones in Cincinnati, bound for New Orleans as the first stop on a trip up the Amazon to make a fortune growing cocoa, as he later exaggerated. On the way to New Orleans, however, the pilot, Horace Bixby, agreed to take Clemens on as a cub pilot, the profession he later called the "one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village." His apprenticeship to Bixby marked the end of his youthful vagabondage and completed the phase of his life that was later to be transformed into The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and some of the most poignant recollections in Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924).
For almost two years Clemens served as Bixby's "cub," receiving his own license in April 1859 and becoming a pilot, the "only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth." Until the outbreak of the Civil War and the closing of the Mississippi River traffic, Clemens wallowed in his prestige, conspicuousness, and grandeur. The only tragedy that interrupted his idyll was the death of his younger brother Henry (fictionalized as Sid in Tom Sawyer) in the explosion of the Pennsylvania— a death for which Sam was to hold himself responsible for the rest of his life because he had secured his younger brother's passage on the ship.
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