The Cruise of the Snark
Jack London
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Dedication
CHAPTER I - FOREWORD
CHAPTER II - THE INCONCEIVABLE AND MONSTROUS
CHAPTER III - ADVENTURE
CHAPTER IV - FINDING ONE’S WAY ABOUT
CHAPTER V - THE FIRST LANDFALL
CHAPTER VI - A ROYAL SPORT
CHAPTER VII - THE LEPERS OF MOLOKAI
CHAPTER VIII - THE HOUSE OF THE SUN
CHAPTER IX - A PACIFIC TRAVERSE
CHAPTER X - TYPEE
CHAPTER XI - THE NATURE MAN
CHAPTER XII - THE HIGH SEAT OF ABUNDANCE
CHAPTER XIII - THE STONE-FISHING OF BORA BORA
CHAPTER XIV - THE AMATEUR NAVIGATOR
CHAPTER XV - CRUISING IN THE SOLOMONS
CHAPTER XVI - BÊCHE DE MER ENGLISH
CHAPTER XVII - THE AMATEUR M.D.
BACKWORD
Notes on The Cruise of the Snark
APPENDICES
THE CRUISE OF THE SNARK
JACK LONDON—his real name was John Griffith London—had a wild and colorful youth on the waterfront of San Francisco, his native city. Born in 1876, he left school at the age of fourteen and worked in a cannery. By the time he was sixteen he had been both an oyster pirate and a member of the Fish Patrol in San Francisco Bay and he later wrote about his experiences in The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902) and Tales of the Fish Patrol (1905). In 1893 he joined a sealing cruise which took him as far as Japan. Returning to the United States, he travelled throughout the country. He was determined to become a writer and read voraciously. After a brief period of study at the University of California he joined the gold rush to the Klondike in 1897. He returned to San Francisco the following year and wrote about his experiences. His short stories of the Yukon were published in Overland Monthly (1898) and the Atlantic Monthly (1899), and in 1900 his first collection, The Son of the Wolf, appeared, bringing him national fame. In 1902 he went to London, where he studied the slum conditions of the East End. He wrote about his experiences in The People of the Abyss (1903). His life was exciting and eventful. There were sailing voyages to the Caribbean and the South Seas. He reported on the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst papers and gave lecture tours. A prolific writer, he published an enormous number of stories and novels. Besides several collections of short stories, including Love of Life (1907), Lost Face (1910), and On the Makaloa Mat (1919), he wrote many novels, including The Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea-Wolf (1904), The Game (1905), White Fang (1906), Martin Eden (1909), John Barleycorn (1913), and Jerry of the Islands (1917). Jack London died in 1916, at his home in California.
R. D. MADISON is professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He has edited several volumes of military and naval history, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment and Other Writings (Penguin Classics, 1997) and William Bligh and Edward Christian’s The Bounty Mutiny (Penguin Classics, 2001).
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First published in the United States of America by The Macmillan Company 1911
This edition with an introduction by R. D. Madison published in Penguin Books 2004
Introduction copyright © R. D. Madison, 2004
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
London, Jack, 1876-1916.
The cruise of the Snark / Jack London ; introduction and notes by R. D. Madison.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN : 978-1-4406-5076-5
1. London, Jack, 1876-1916—Travel—Oceania. 2. Americans—Oceania—History—20th century.
3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Oceania—Description and travel. 5. Ocean travel.
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3523.O46Z464 2004
818’.5203—dc22 2003064756
[B]
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Introduction:
The Romance of Yachting; or, The Private History of a Voyage That Failed
When a man announces that he is about to do something stupid—something profoundly stupid to the point of being dangerous—his friends naturally try to talk him out of it. Then, in response, comes the rationalization—usually a condescension that trivializes friendship and conventional wisdom, and ends in assertive and dismissive solipsism. At that point there is nothing to be done.
As well point out that neither the man Jack nor his wife Charmian nor her uncle Roscoe Eames nor all of the “Snarkites” combined could match the experience and technical seamanship that enabled Joshua Slocum, in three years at the end of the nineteenth century, to circumnavigate the globe alone in a boat he had rebuilt with his own hands. Jack said he “had followed the sea a bit”—a statement that ought to bear some qualification unless turning pages counts as much as turning a windlass. But all his life Jack had fantasized about being a sailor; perhaps submitting to the romantic lure of the sea was the line of least resistance for him.
By age seventeen, with no blue-water experience, Jack had seduced his way into a berth as an Able-Bodied Seaman on the Sophie Sutherland, a three-masted sealing schooner bound to the western Pacific. Usually a green-hand would ship for a first voyage as a “Landsman,” a name that itself indicates the level of seamanship expected. Jack’s experience as a youth on San Francisco Bay would have justified him in claiming the berth of an “Ordinary Seaman”—a sailor who could steer and handle sail. But to claim anything more—as Jack did—is surely the result of pride or illusion or—most likely—both. And it is certain that Jack looked back on this experience with both pride and illusion.
While Jack’s career as a writer was launched by his prize-winning “Story of a Typhoon off the Coast of Japan” (1893), a decade later he had returned to his boyhood experiences on the Bay for nautical literary material, and the deep blue sea had been relegated to the Horatio-Algerish The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902)—in which Jack demonstrated, not for the last time, that when he wrote about the sea his writing could be unabashedly sentimental. But although a book for boys, The Cruise of the Dazzler helped Jack work out some of the problems of writing about the sea. The book is full of inchoate themes and characterizations that would mature two years later in The Sea-Wolf: Nelson is the prototype for Wolf Larsen; his vessel, the Reindeer, a model for the Ghost. Most of all, Jack portrays the sea as destroyer; the ship is a prison despite being a place of refuge from school ashore. And Jack expresses the friendship between the two boys, Frisco Kid and J
oe (the son of a successful capitalist), in words that unmistakably show that he is already trying to reshape Rudyard Kipling’s “snorter” Captains Courageous (1897): “He’s a captain on sea, and I’m a captain on land.”
Kipling’s book celebrated bootstrap capitalism—(exemplified by the railroad) alongside hands-on industry (exemplified by the Gloucester fishing fleet). When Harvey Cheyne, the son of a wealthy railroad magnate, falls overboard from a liner on the Grand Banks and is rescued by the crew of the We’re Here, he begins an initiation into manhood that his father will appreciate but could not have provided himself. Harvey’s sea experience entails coping with the harshness of working-class life as well as the dangers of the sea. In fact, for much of the book the sea is a nurturing force—the most forceful images of the destructive power of water do not belong to Harvey’s growth to maturity but to Penn’s family lost to the Johnstown flood and to Mrs. Troop’s peroration on the sea after the We’re Here has safely returned to land. Only with the raising of a flag as the vessel enters Gloucester harbor—to signal the loss of the man whom Harvey replaced—does the book develop in full the sea as reaper of lives.
Captains Courageous had not exhausted the genre. Only a year after Kipling’s success, another California writer, Frank Norris, explored the socialite-at-sea in Moran of the Lady Letty (1898). Norris provided a model for Jack’s Humphrey Van Weyden in his own Ross Wilbur, a Yale man who is shanghaied by shark hunters in San Francisco. Sailing south to Baja California, Ross encounters Moran, who as the daughter of a sailing skipper has been brought up to be as tough as the sailors she lived among. After a terrific battle in which Moran goes berserk and nearly kills Ross, who finally defeats her, the two fall in love—Moran acknowledging that she has met her match in Ross, whom she now refers to primally as “mate” (anticipating Jack and Charmian’s nickname for each other). But as Ross toughens through his encounter with brutality, Moran softens as she adopts a dependency on Ross more “appropriate” for a woman at sea. At the beginning Moran is worthy of no less a mate than a Wolf Larsen; by the end of the book she hasn’t the strength of a Maud Brewster.
Norris’s book is handled with all the awkwardness of an immature writer, but its examination of the theme of the survival of the fittest is nevertheless powerful. Jack perhaps mistook the immaturity of Moran of the Lady Letty for youthful genius; Jack’s best sea writing owes more to Norris’s early novel than to his masterpieces McTeague (1899) or The Octopus (1901). In any case, Norris died young in 1902, leaving the field of American literary naturalism pretty much to Jack.
At least as far as his lasting reputation is concerned, Jack’s greatest experience was not at sea but in the Klondike goldfields. At the end of 1902, Jack was working on a social novel, The People of the Abyss, and his greatest book, The Call of the Wild. It would be hard to overemphasize the achievement of the latter book. It was unique in American literature, and in it Jack synthesized many currents of literature more successfully than at any other time in his career. Jack was on a roll when he began his greatest sea story, The Sea-Wolf (1904).
Jack owned the North; but he was too late—after his contemporaries Kipling, Stevenson, and Conrad (themselves second-generation writers of the sea)—to do much with the sea-novel. And The Sea-Wolf would not be any reader’s candidate for the perfect novel. Its elements remain fragmentary, but in this work Jack created his most powerful human character in Wolf Larsen, skipper of the sealing-schooner Ghost. Although not without antecedents like Melville’s monomaniacal Captain Ahab or Dana’s cruelly arbitrary Captain Thompson, Larsen emerges sui generis from Jack’s amalgamation of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. And yet the vision that gave birth to Wolf Larsen fails to sustain the rest of the book. Although Jack tries to describe a sea more truthful than Harvey Cheyne’s and a love more fit for survival than Moran’s, the scenes with Hump and Maud never escape their artificiality. For better or worse, Maud’s arrival signals a triumph of civilization as clearly as the elder Cheyne’s railroad trip across America. London’s naturalism in The Sea-Wolf is romanticism on all fours. Yet Jack would not have admitted that his art in The Sea-Wolf was incoherent: to Jack realism probably meant getting the storm scenes right, while characterization was more about fidelity of character to type—to types as Jack saw them, not necessarily at all what the world would judge to be specimens of humanity. Nothing could be more firmly in the romantic tradition than Jack’s notion of type—it accounts for his best characters as well as his worst, his racism as well as his interpretation of the animal world. And Maud represented something in addition for Jack: she was an audience for Hump, the necessary adulatory witness of Hump’s passage into a manhood uncompromised by his civility. At a time when Jack was succumbing to the seductions of Charmian Kittredge and initiating a divorce from his first wife, the arrival of Maud in Jack’s imagination is perhaps more significant than her arrival on the Ghost.
Perhaps, after all, Jack knew more truths about dogs than about people. As a writer, Jack was best standing at the edge of a boreal forest he could fill with canine creatures of his imagination. Though he tried, he could not fill the sea with his own life, instead leaving in his pseudo-autobiographical sea fiction, in Melville’s words, only a “white and turbid wake.” Aside from the characterization of Larsen, Jack’s imagination seemed to work only re-constructively. He could dismantle the recent sea novels of Kipling and Norris and reassemble them into a work that seemed to diminish most of the themes and nearly every effort towards realistically complex characterization. Norris had handled naturalism with a more honestly scientific mind, however crude his first book may otherwise have been. But perhaps Jack’s greatest problem was that by the time he wrote The Sea-Wolf, science at sea had pretty much left fiction behind. And sea fiction, as it matured at the end of the nineteenth century, may well have left writers like Jack behind.
Born in 1857, Joseph Conrad was a generation older than Jack, a generation he had spent at sea. Once he had turned to fiction in the mid 1890s, Conrad would never forget that he was an artist, while Jack never forgot he was writing for money. By 1903, Conrad had already written Nigger of the Narcissus, Lord Jim, and Youth—any one of which shows more artistic integrity than Jack’s whole maritime output. Jack admired Conrad, as he admired Melville, without a prayer or an intention of ever writing like either of them. To the craft of language, in the Conradian sense, Jack was entirely a stranger.
But Jack had done something Melville had only begun and Conrad had never attempted: he had built a persona for himself as a man who had done something. Jack’s readers may have been naïve in their appreciation of literature, but they were quick to appreciate the man. Here was a man who as a kid had gone to sea under the most brutal conditions and had survived to write about it. And here was a young man who had gone to the goldfields of the frozen north and had again survived to write about it. He had mingled among the slums of the world, and had not been degraded, had not been crushed by disease or poverty. And after the publication of The Sea-Wolf, Jack’s persona was further honed to the point where even his friends began to call him “Wolf.” Jack had been tested in the caldron of brute nature and had been found fit.
Whether, as Alfred Kazin maintained, the greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived, or whether the greatest story Jack ever wrote was the one he wanted us to believe he lived, Jack was personally and commercially wrapped up in this persona. By the time he began to consider the Snark voyage, Jack was neither simply writer nor adventurer but—like Hemingway a generation later—was both: a public adventurer who was expected to put himself in harm’s way and to report the result to the panting public.
Jack had two models before him as he envisioned the great voyage he would undertake. Of course, he had been inspired by Herman Melville’s Typee (1846). Melville’s alter-ego Tomo would evolve, as Hershel Parker has suggested, into America’s first literary sex star, until the phrase “the man who lived among cannibals” was only a slightly disguised euphem
ism. But although Melville may have drawn Jack to the Marquesas, Jack already had a Fayaway in Charmian. And besides, Melville had jumped ship to win his vacation in paradise, while Jack intended to sail his own vessel.
He got the idea from Joshua Slocum, whose Sailing Alone Around the World had appeared in book form in 1900, and which Jack and Charmian read aloud in 1905. Slocum had built his own yacht with his own hands from the crumbling remains of an oyster sloop. He had then carefully selected his crew of one (he had sailed on a small boat voyage with his family before, and did not choose to repeat the experiment), and sailed single-handedly around the world—the first solo circumnavigation of the globe.
Slocum’s writing style was unpretentious. As a failed ship captain, Slocum seemed also destined to be a failure as a writer. Two previous voyage narratives had netted him practically nothing. He was, as Conrad would have put it, at the end of his tether when he sailed out of Boston Harbor in 1895 on the rebuilt Spray. But Slocum’s voyage clarified both spirit and mind. When he came to write about his three-year voyage, an “easy literary concord” resulted, in the words of Haskell Springer, “from his remarkable competence with both tiller and pen.” Springer’s choice of the word “concord” is perhaps subliminal: at its best Slocum’s book reads like a saltwater Walden.
In Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum achieved a perfect balance of ship, sailor, and the sea. Everything in the book is seasoned with the salt of the Spray, her skipper, and the watery world in which she sailed. But when in July 1906 Jack described both the voyage he planned to take and the book he planned to write about it in a prospectus to Woman’s Home Companion, his model was no longer Slocum but Robert Louis Stevenson.
