The Cruise of the Snark, Page 2

  In the struggle for survival, Stevenson was losing fast. Born in 1850, he never outgrew childhood sickliness, but his search for a better environment for his failing lungs took him on journeys by canoe, donkey, train, and ship. He also found a soulmate, Fanny, under whose care he wrote his masterpiece Treasure Island (1883), the first of a number of successes. By 1888, Stevenson and Fanny were able to journey to the South Pacific, stopping (as would Jack) at the leper colony at Molokai and island-hopping their way to Samoa. There Stevenson would settle and, despite a brief and productive respite in health, die in 1894, honored throughout the world as “Tusitala”—the Teller of Tales. Stevenson did not live to complete a proposed collection of descriptive pieces: they were haggled together after his death as In the South Seas (1896). Stevenson had been catering to the demand of readers to see the sea through the eyes of the now-great writer, but Stevenson made the crippling mistake of leaving himself largely out of his observations—a mistake that, unfortunately, would be largely repeated in Jack’s own book, both in prospectus and in the writing. Despite enjoying great reputations as literary personae, neither Stevenson nor Jack really got the point that they had to be in the foreground of any view of the South Seas they chose to give. On the other hand, both books were by dying men who in some deeply psychological way may have been unable or unwilling to look squarely at their own lack of fitness in the great South Pacific archipelago.

  So although he was inspired to take the voyage by Slocum, as a literary project the trip was handicapped by Jack’s infatuation with Stevenson. Nevertheless, the voyage-cum-book was an easy sell to the magazines, even if some of his friends thought he was crazy. As Jack’s contemporary, arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, might have remarked, only the unprepared have adventures.

  Still another influence began to bear on the Snark project. The greatest living American writer of London’s day was Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens (1835-1910). Jack may have looked up Twain’s Roughing It (1872) for its account of Hawaii. And as recently as 1897 Twain had published the account of his own circumnavigation, Following the Equator. Jack liked Twain’s laconic irony, and adopted it in most of the essays that would become The Cruise of the Snark, but in none so much as in the first two chapters, originally titled “The Voyage of the Snark” and “Building of the Boat.”

  The Twain experiment was a healthy one for Jack, and probably would have worked if one didn’t suspect that behind all the supposed irony Jack wasn’t, after all, falling for his own dream. Twain, after all, had wrecked the Walter Scott, but Jack was actually going to do this thing. And he was, in true Jack form, going to do it by himself. There was no Adirondack Murray of the sea to trick the innocent into the jaws of romance—even Tomo had fled from Fayaway’s valley in fear for his life. Although he may have rankled under the celebration of capitalism while being attracted to Kipling’s captain of industry (a kind of superman), Jack wanted to believe in Typee and Captains Courageous. He had a dream and it shanghaied him.

  The first of Jack’s preliminary articles appeared in Cosmopolitan for December 1906, prefaced by the following somewhat premature paragraph:

  Jack London is off on his round-the-world voyage for the Cosmopolitan, in his little forty-five foot, ketch-rigged boat, the Snark, with Mrs. London, her uncle, a cook, and a Japanese cabin-boy. The author of “The Sea Wolf” expects to be gone several years and, for the time, to do all his writing on board his boat. He will write the story of the voyage exclusively for the Cosmopolitan, and expects to begin his narration in the January or February number.

  The article was illustrated with photographs of Jack and the still a-building Snark, one of which bore the caption, “Jack London and the skeleton of his forty-five foot boat, in which he will sail around the world for the Cosmopolitan Magazine.” Jack was furious. Besides resenting the implication that he was undertaking the voyage as a convenience to the Cosmopolitan, Jack knew full well that he had already negotiated to place Snark material in other periodicals. There would be no more articles for the Cosmopolitan this trip

  But the voyage wouldn’t begin anyway. Although he had chosen his crew by year’s end, the Snark refused to be finished. Jack was no Slocum, and even if he had wanted to build the boat with his own hands, he needed to keep those hands busy writing in order to pay for the adventure. Not one of the crew he had arranged, not even Charmian’s uncle Roscoe Eames who supposedly was to provide the maritime experience of the outfit, was competent to oversee the building of such a vessel. And in the wake of the earthquake of 1906, new building put a premium on materials, labor, and transportation that often brought construction of the Snark to a halt. Not until spring of 1907 did Jack desperately decide to sail the still-unfinished yacht to Hawaii.

  When, on April 23, 1907, the Snark sailed out the Golden Gate, she carried three people on board who would chronicle the voyage, although it would be misleading to say they stuck to her to the end—since the intended circumnavigation would never come to pass. With as much discipline as any writer ever displayed, Jack continued his daily grind, writing for a set number of hours nearly every morning on a rainbow of subjects. Charmian was probably a lot smarter than Jack—and she was probably a better travel writer, if their respective Snark books are admitted as evidence. But she idolized Jack—both the man and the persona, if there was any difference to her—and she had the advantage of making Jack the persona of her book while developing her own narrative voice. Martin Johnson turned out to be a far better writer than cook. Martin was a perfect boy-companion for Jack, as Jack almost certainly realized when he chose him out of the myriads of applicants for a position on the Snark. Martin was still young enough to adulate Jack, but he was also probably, after all, more intelligent. Navigation was Jack’s greatest intellectual achievement; for Martin, repairing the engine was an exercise in logic and organization that was more likely characteristic. Jack would remain an enormously popular writer of fiction, but Martin would grow up to be the most celebrated adventurer of his day. Martin, of course, had the advantage of hero and heroine, both ready-made, for his book, and retained a distinct enough voice that he does not too frequently lose himself in his admiration (which was real and profound) of his shipmates. And it is Martin, after all, who provides the most direct evidence of the sincerity of the Jack London persona—evidence important when one weighs the artistic and personal successes or failures of the voyage.

  John Seelye has called Martin Johnson the “shadow hero” of the Snark voyage. Born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1884, Martin would make several successful voyages of his own to South Sea archipelagos, as well as Africa, with his wife, Osa. Together the two of them would practically invent the travel film and the recording of natural history through both still photography and the motion picture. Martin and Osa combined twentieth-century technology with a knack for popularization—in both of which areas Martin served his apprenticeship aboard the Snark.

  In fact, Martin probably spent more time aboard the vessel—before, during, and after the cruise—than any of the other Snarkites. Traveling to Oakland long before the Snark was ready to sail, Martin spent the time observing the construction of the vessel at Anderson’s Ways in San Francisco. He became part of the London household, and recorded his wonder at his good fortune:

  Some hundreds of persons wrote to Jack, begging him to let them go with him on the cruise. Every mail contained such letters. They continued to pour in almost up to the day we sailed out of the Golden Gate. Most of the letters Jack showed to me. Here was a chef in a big hotel in Philadelphia, a man getting over two hundred dollars a month, who offered his services free. A college professor volunteered to do any kind of work, and give one thousand dollars for the privilege. Another man, the son of a millionaire, offered five hundred dollars to go along. Still another declared that he would put up any amount of money if Jack would allow his son to be one of the crew. And there were offers and solicitations from school-teachers, draftsmen, authors, photographers, secretaries, stenogr
aphers, physicians, surgeons, civil engineers, cooks, typists, dentists, compositors, reporters, adventurers, sailors, valets, “lady companions” for Mrs. London, stewards, machinists, engineers, high-school and university students, electricians—men and women of every imaginable trade, profession or inclination. I began to have misgivings when I thought of the fine chefs who had applied. I contrasted their skilled ability with the little that I had learned from the cook-book! It was just such things as these that made me feel how lucky I was to be a member of the crew of the Snark. (Chapter II)

  Even at his young age, Martin had done some exploring of his own, and he and Jack were able to compare notes on the East End of London: Martin remarked that Jack’s “People of the Abyss” read “almost like a passage out of my own life.”

  After March 1907, Martin largely lived aboard the still uncompleted but by now launched Snark in the Oakland Estuary. Rather naively, he described the conditions of a trial voyage on San Francisco Bay “as heavy a sea as will be encountered on an ocean voyage,” and, not surprisingly, he added, “And we were seasick—oh! We were seasick!” Shortly after the trial voyage, the Snark was nearly sunk at her moorings as two lumber scows drove into her in a gale: “wherever she is,” Martin wrote, “the Snark is lop-sided to this day.” In another gale while moored off Oakland, the Snark dragged her anchor and nearly stove herself in on a wharf to leeward. Martin miraculously set a kedge anchor, which gave him time to reassemble the engine, start it successfully, and keep the Snark from grounding—all this alone at night on an unfinished vessel.

  Martin practiced his cooking on the shipwrights who worked on the Snark, and later entertained the Famous Fraternity, “a group of celebrated authors and artists, all hailing from California and most of them resident there”:

  Among those who came were George Sterling, the man whom the Londons had pronounced one of the greatest of living poets, Martinez, the artist, Dick Partington, another artist, Johannes Reimers, writer, and Jimmie Hopper, famous first as a football hero and then as a writer of short stories, and others, whose names I have forgotten. I did my very best to prepare them a good dinner; and if their expressions of satisfaction were any indication, I succeeded. (Chapter II)

  Martin described the final preparations for sailing with particular attention to the literary nature of the voyage:

  We began provisioning and buying all kinds of photographic supplies, done up in tropical form—that is, with the film wrapped in tin-foil and sealed in tins, and the paper triple-wrapped and protected with foil. . . . We bought clothing, and we bought fishing tackle, and harpoons, and guns, and pistols, and we bought paper, paper for Jack’s writing, and paper for the typewriter, hundreds of reams of it. (Chapter II)

  Above all, Martin wrote, they brought “books—five hundred of them, on every conceivable topic, selected from Jack’s library of ten thousand volumes. The Snark was fairly ballasted with books.” In the weeks leading up to the departure, Martin read many of Jack’s books—literally, that is—books that Jack had written himself. Interrupting one of Jack’s pre-departure reveries, Martin asked him, “What do you think you’ll write about?”

  He smiled

  “Well, if we’re boarded by pirates and fight it out until our deck becomes a shambles, I don’t think I’ll write about it. And if we’re wrecked at sea, and are driven by starvation into eating one another, I’ll keep it quiet for the sake of our relatives. And if we’re killed and eaten by cannibals, of course, I shan’t let the American public get an inkling of it.” (Chapter II)

  Jack already knew what he was going to write. And it was Martin, also, who gave his name to the most important work Jack wrote on this trip, his semi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909). Written during the first half of the trip, the novel has received a mixed critical response. It is another example of Jack’s ideas being bigger than his art. As a character, Martin Eden is slightly less credible than a Horatio Alger hero. And one suspects that at times Eden is more hallucination than autobiography. At its worst, Martin Eden merely cribs from DeQuincey (the end of chapter four) or rather pathetically echoes Conrad’s Youth (“And he was only twenty-one, and he had never been in love before”), while at its best it never rises to the inspiration of Call of the Wild or even The Sea-Wolf. Jack, of course, bragged that he never waited for inspiration, but perhaps he should have. Jack, no doubt, wrote too much on this voyage—as he always wrote too much. But he saw writing more as an act of the hands than of the mind. And he had to pay the bills. Martin (the real Martin) described the inception and composition of the novel:

  Jack was writing a new book. While in Honolulu, he had told me of it, and he was then preparing his notes for it.

  “Look here, Martin,” he called to me one day, at the Seaside Hotel.

  I came to where he was writing.

  “Look at this,” he directed, holding out a sheet of paper. “There’s the title of something new I’m going to write. And I’m going to make you half-hero of it, what’s more.”

  I looked at the paper. On it was the title, “Martin Eden.”

  Jack then went on to explain. The name was a combination. Jack had used my Christian name and the surname of an old friend of his called Eden. The story, he said, would be drawn largely from his own experience; it would treat of the struggles of a young fellow who was determined to “make good” at writing; of his eventual success; and of his unhappy death. But it was to be more than a story. Through it was to run a certain cosmic undertone that would make of it a record of universal truths. Beyond the mere recital of details incident to the plot would be a biological and sociological significance. The thing would be true, not only of Martin Eden, but of all life, of all time. In a way, a value would be put upon life and the things of life that would ring true, even though the view-point would not be that of the smug bourgeoisie.

  When he was not too sick, Jack worked on this book. (Chapter VI)

  As far as being a sea story, Martin Eden isn’t. Jack was on a voyage; he wasn’t writing about one. At the beginning of chapter nine, Jack disposes of an entire South Sea voyage in one paragraph. The book is about education ashore, not afloat. And yet Jack couldn’t write convincingly about that, about culture in its literal sense, either: medieval Kant, Saxon Chaucer, and their ilk are slips that cannot be ascribed to the characters. But there are some places where the voyage creeps in; the description of Eden’s room applies to the below-decks of the Snark in both detail and tone:

  A small closet contained his clothes and the books he had accumulated and for which there was no room on the table or under the table. Hand in hand with reading, he had developed the habit of making notes, and so copiously did he make them that there would have been no existence for him in the confined quarters had he not rigged several clothes-lines across the room on which the notes were hung. Even so, he was crowded until navigating the room was a difficult task. He could not open the door without first closing the closet door, and vice versa. It was impossible for him anywhere to traverse the room in a straight line. To go from the door to the head of the bed was a zigzag course that he was never quite able to accomplish in the dark without collisions. Having settled the difficulty of the conflicting doors, he had to steer sharply to the right to avoid the kitchen. Next, he sheered to the left, to escape the foot of the bed; but this sheer, if too generous, brought him against the corner of the table. With a sudden twitch and lurch, he terminated the sheer and bore off to the right along a sort of canal, one bank of which was the bed, the other the table. When the one chair in the room was at its usual place before the table, the canal was unnavigable. When the chair was not in use, it reposed on top of the bed, though sometimes he sat on the chair when cooking, reading a book while the water boiled, and even becoming skillful enough to manage a paragraph or two while steak was frying. Also, so small was the little corner that constituted the kitchen, he was able, sitting down, to reach anything he needed. In fact, it was expedient to cook sitting down; standing up, he wa
s too often in his own way. (Chapter 23)

  This is Jack’s tongue-in-cheek description of the real Martin negotiating his well-over-six-foot form in the galley of the Snark.

  The Snark, after a refit in Hawaii, visited the Marquesas and reached Tahiti around Christmas, 1907. The Snark remained at Tahiti for several months, while the steamer Mariposa carried Jack as well as his manuscripts back to the United States. With Martin Eden out of his system, Jack began more systematically to turn the materials of the voyage into literature. “The House of Mapuhi” proved popular, although this styleless story of the loss and recovery of a pearl by means of a hurricane might to modern readers seem to lack both goal and spirit; “The Whale Tooth” seems a pointless excursion; “Yah! Yah! Yah!” is much better and in fact reads as if it were by an entirely different author; “The Heathen” seems to have been a practice run at the materials of “Yah,” tentatively borrowing the names of its characters from Jack’s recent voyage-reading—“Charley” from Conrad and “Carruthers” from Erskine Childers.

  During Jack’s brief return to California, he must have brought himself up to date on a literary controversy that had been raging in the United States, and which by implication involved him. The best known—and most widely loved—nature writer of Jack’s day was John Burroughs (1837-1921), a comrade of Walt Whitman and, later, Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1903 published the essay “Real and Sham Natural History” in the Atlantic Monthly, the flagship periodical of the eastern literary establishment. Normally mild-mannered, Burroughs sarcastically took two of his contemporaries—Ernest Thompson Seton and William J. Long—to the whipping post for trying to pass off wilderness fantasies as factual nature study. Burroughs almost immediately regretted publishing the essay (the Atlantic didn’t even cite it in its own index for that year, and Burroughs never included it in collected editions of his writing). But the gauntlet had been thrown, and when the “Nature Fakers,” as they came to be known, took it up, no less a champion than Roosevelt himself waded in on the side of Burroughs. The essay didn’t mention Jack’s animal stories directly, but perhaps Jack heard about this essay secondhand anyway, from someone who confused the name “Long” with “London” and Charles G. D. Roberts’s Kindred of the Wild with Call of the Wild. Burroughs had written,