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Adventure in Literature and the Cinema and The Steamboat

There was a big storm after midnight and the rain poured down. We stayed inside the shelter we had built and let the raft sail down the river. Suddenly, by the light of the lightning, we saw something in the middle of the river. It looked like a house at first, but then we realized it was a steamboat. It had hit a rock and was half in and half out of the water. We were sailing straight towards it. "It looks as if it'll go under soon," Jim said, after a couple of minutes. "Let's go and take a look," I said. "I don't want to board a sinking ship," said Jim, but when I suggested that we might find something useful on the boat, he agreed to go. So we paddled over and climbed on to the steamboat, keeping as quiet as mice. To our astonishment, there was a light in one of the cabins. Then we heard someone shout, "Oh please boys, don't kill me! I won't tell anybody!" A man's angry voice answered, "You're lying. You said that last time. We're going to kill you." When he heard these words, Jim panicked and ran to the raft. But although I was frightened, I also felt very curious, so I put my head round the door. It was quite dark, but I could see a man lying on the floor, tied up with rope. There were two men standing over him. One was short, with a beard. The other was tall and had something in his hand that looked like a gun. 'I've had enough of you. I'm going to shoot you now," this man said. He was obviously the one who had threatened the man on the floor. And it was a gun he had in his hand. "No, don't do that," said the short man. "Let's leave him here. The steamboat will sink in a couple of hours and he'll go down with it." When he heard that, the frightened man on the floor started crying. "He sounds as if he's going to die of fright!" I thought. "I have to find a way to save him!" I crawled along the deck, found Jim, and told him what I had heard. "We must find their boat and take it away, then they'll have to stay here," I said. Jim looked terrified. "I'm not staying here," he said. But I persuaded him to help me, and we found the men's boat tied to the other side of the steamboat. We climbed quietly in and as we paddled away we heard the two men shouting. By then we were a safe distance away. But now I began to feel bad about what we had done. I didn't want all three men to die. The Life of Mark Twain Often the lives of writers resemble the lives fo the characters they create. Mark Twain, who wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, was no exception. To start with, the author’s name, Mark Twain, is itself an invention, or “pen name”. Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens. “Mark Twain”, which means “watermark two”, was a call used by sailors on the Mississippi to warn shipmates that they were coming into shallow water. Like Huck, Mark Twain led an adventurous life. He left school early, and as an adolescent, determined to make his fortune in South America, set off from his home in Hannibal, Missouri, for New Orleans. He wanted to take a boat to the Amazon, where he thought he could get rich quickly. He arrived in New Orleans without a penny in his pocket only to find that there were no boats for South America. Forced to change his plans, he worked for several years as a pilot on a steamboat, taking passengers up and down the Mississippi, the great river which flows from the north of the US near the Canadian border, down to the Gulf of Mexico. Later he became a journalist and began writing stories about life on the river. Twain’s vivid and often amusing descriptions of life on the river quickly became popular, and established the reputation he still enjoys today as one of America’s greatest writers.\