The cardinal navigational law of serendipity is this: You can only get to the magic kingdom by getting lost. You get there when you think you are going somewhere else and fall off the maps.

Take the case of Mark Twain’s search for fortune in Brazil. He wasn’t yet Mark Twain. He was young Sam Clemens from Missouri, eking out a living in a print shop in Iowa, drinking red whiskey and dreaming of greatness.

Up there in the guest house in Keokuk, Iowa, Sam Clemens read a book that described “a vegetable product with miraculous powers” that grew in Brazil. Sam was “fired with a longing” to go up the Amazon, secure a supply of this miracle plant – and make a fortune. He sailed to New Orleans on a riverboat whose pilot was the celebrated Horace Bixby.

When he got to New Orleans, Sam found that no ship in port was sailing for Brazil, and no one could tell him how to get there. So he changed his plans, sought out Bixby, and used his gift of the gab to persuade the old river man to take him on as an apprentice pilot, which was a pretty good meal ticket in those days.

Working on theMississippi river, he got many of the ideas for the books that made him famous under the pen-name he now borrowed from the boatmen’s cry “Mark Twain”, meaning two fathoms, safe water.

The miracle plant Sam had set out to find was coca. Had he succeeded in his original plan, Keokuk, Iowa would have become the cocaine capital of America. Because Sam Clemens couldn’t find Brazil, he failed to become the first cocaine dealer in North American history and instead became Mark Twain.

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Mark Twain made a lifelong study and practice of navigating by coincidence. For more on this, read “Mark Twain’s Rhyming Life” in The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.