Tom Sawyer Abroad Essay, Research Paper

In Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer and Nat Parsons (who was postmaster of the village) always told about the adventures they had been on. They were always trying to tell the best stories, so that the people of the town would listen and become interested in them. But Nat Parsons went to Washington and when he came back he told about the exciting things that happened. Soon Nat got all the people’s attention, and Tom became jealous and wanted to do more adventurous things than Nat so that he could tell stories about it.

Not long after Tom’s longing for adventure, there was talk about a big hot air balloon that was flying across the ocean to Europe. A professor, who made the balloon, was going to ride in it. The balloon was coming to town, and Tom, his friend Huck Finn, and his black friend Jim just had to see it. They went to the edge of town and gazed at it with awe. Other people that had come to view the large balloon were laughing at the professor saying that a balloon could not fly across the ocean. Tom, Jim, and Huck climbed aboard the boat-like structure that was attached to the bottom of the balloon, so that they could take a better look at the flying balloon. Suddenly the balloon took off in the air with them and the professor in it.

Tom was very excited about this, and soon the professor taught him how to steer the ship and land it. The professor went crazy due to all the people making fun of him, and one night during a storm, he fell off the ship. So the boys were left with the ship, and luckily the professor had stored plenty of food on board for three or more months. They were going east, but during the storm the ship had wandered off course, so Tom tried to line it back up as much as possible. While they were travelling across the ocean, Tom tried to teach Jim and Huck about time zones and things like that, which he had learned from reading some of the professor’s books. One morning Jim shouted out that there was land. Tim and Huck woke up, but found they were not in Europe but in the Great Sahara Desert in Africa. They landed the balloon and ran a little to stretch their legs, but a lion started chasing them, so they got back into the balloon for safety. They had another encounter with lions later, but they escaped them too.

Tom usually kept the balloon pretty high in altitude in order to catch the winds, so they could not see the desert too well from where they were. But one time they noticed a line of black things moving across the desert. Tom thought it to be camels, and sure enough it was a caravan of camels, with Arabs of course.

They started to run out of water and then they found a lake. Beside the lake they killed a lion with the professor’s revolver. They then tied a rope to it and brought it onto the ship. They also caught fish in the same lake that they had gotten their water from.

They had found another caravan and started to follow them, but a great sandstorm came and wiped the caravan out. The sand had killed and then buried the Arabs. When they finally had gotten to the end of the desert, they saw the great pyramids of Egypt and the Sphinx. Tom then found the granary where Joseph stored the grain before the famine. They also saw the Red Sea and Mount Sinai. Things were going well until Tom’s smoking pipe fell to pieces. He would not settle for any other pipe, so he told Jim and a local guide to fly back home and get his pipe, which was in his aunt’s house. Tom calculated that it would only take about two days to go home and get back to where they were, and sure enough it did; but Aunt Polly saw Jim and told him to tell Tom that he better get home quick because he was in trouble. The book ended when the boys were headed back home for Missouri.