The steamship that carried Mark Twain on his 1867 tour of Europe and the Holy Land was the Quaker City.
Twain sailed aboard the chartered Quaker City on June 8, 1867, as part of a group of American travelers on a five-month Mediterranean and Holy Land excursion. The vessel was a retired Civil War ship, and the journey included stops in Europe, North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East, along with inland trips such as the visit to the 1867 Paris Exhibition.
Twain wrote dispatches about the voyage for the Alta California and later expanded them into The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869. The book became one of his most successful works and made his skeptical, comic observations of famous places widely popular. The ship’s name is sometimes confused with other historic American vessels, but Robert E. Lee, Delta Queen, and Sultana were not the vessel associated with Twain’s 1867 excursion.