The Cruise of the Snark (4 page)

 

One wonders what Wolf Larsen would have done.

Meanwhile Jack kept the periodical market well stocked with
Snark
material, which as “work performed” continued to be published even after the end of the voyage.
Woman's Home Companion
published “Riding the South Sea Surf” (October 1907), “The Lepers of Molokai” (January 1908), “The Nature Man” (September 1908), “The High Seat of Abundance” (November 1908), and “‘Too Much' English” [“Bêche de Mer English”] (April 1909).
Harpers Weekly
published “Building of the Boat” (July 1908), “Adventures in Dream Harbor” (August 1908), and “Finding One's Way on the Sea” (August 1910).
Pacific Monthly
published “The House of the Sun” (January 1910), “A Pacific Traverse” (February 1910), “Typee” (March 1910), “The Stone Fishing of Bora Bora” (April 1910), “The Amateur Navigator” (May 1910), “Cruising in the Solomons” (July 1910), and “Amateur M.D.” (August 1910). Near the end of 1908 Jack began his novel
Adventure,
a reworking of the Londons' August 1908 “blackbirding” cruise and near shipwreck in the Solomon Islands on the
Minota.

But by then the cruise was over. At nearly every major island group the
Snark
had suffered a crew change—some leaving of their own accord, others being fired for a variety of incompetences. Only Martin, promoted from cook to engineer, survived aboard with Jack and Charmian. And if all of them had suffered seasickness (another form of romanticism on all fours) on the passages to Hawaii and the Marquesas, on the second half of the voyage intermittent bouts of nausea, exhaustion, and disorientation were complemented by a variety of tropical diseases. But for all the flaws of the
Snark,
the crew, and the dream, it was only when Jack lost the use of his hands—the indispensable tools through which only could he write—that the voyage was abandoned. “The cruise of the Snark,” in Martin's words, “was a thing of the past.”

In a postscript to Martin's book, Ralph D. Harrison summarizes the disposition of the Snarkites:

 

Jack returned a chastened yachtsman, if not a well man. He wrote two of his most successful sea-pieces after his return—“That Dead Men Rise Up Never” (1909) and “The Joy of Small-Boat Sailing” (1911). Once the
Snark
essays had had their periodical run, Jack assembled them into
The Cruise of the
Snark (1911). Two years later, Martin finished his book,
Through the South Seas With Jack London
(1913). Shortly afterwards he eloped with his own mate, Osa, and in 1937, after a short but happy life filled with adventure, Martin was killed in a plane crash. In 1915, a year before Jack's death, Charmian published her own book,
The Log of the
Snark, calling it “the one accurate, continuous story of the adventures of the
Snark,
from San Francisco Bay to the Cannibal Isles.” It may have been.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Adventure.
New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1911.

Martin Eden,
ed. Andrew Sinclair. New York: Penguin Classics, 1993.

Sea-Wolf and Other Stories, The,
ed. Andrew Sinclair. New York: Penguin Classics, 1989.

Tales of the Pacific,
ed. Andrew Sinclair. New York: Penguin Classics, 1989.

Childers, Erskine.
The Riddle of the Sands,
ed. Geoffrey Household. Penguin Classics, 1978.

Herbert, T. Walter.
Marquesan Encounters.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Johnson, Irving and Electa.
Westward Bound in the Schooner
Yankee. New York: Norton, 1936.

Johnson, Martin.
Through the South Seas With Jack London.
New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1913.

London, Charmian Kittredge.
The Log of the
Snark. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915.

Melville, Herman.
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life,
ed. Harrison Hayford et al. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1968.

Porter, David.
Journal of a Cruise,
ed. R. D. Madison and Karen Hamon. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986.

Slocum, Joshua.
Sailing Alone around the World,
ed. Thomas Philbrick. Penguin Classics, 1999.

Stevenson, Robert Louis.
In the South Seas,
ed. Neil Rennie. Penguin Classics, 1998.

A Note on the Texts

The text for this edition of
The Cruise of the
Snark is that of the first American edition published by Macmillan in 1911. The collateral
Snark
texts printed in the appendix are from Martin Johnson,
Through the South Seas With Jack London
(New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1913) and Charmian Kittredge London,
The Log of the
Snark (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915). The text of “That Dead Men Rise Up Never” is based on that in
The Human Drift
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917); the text of “The Joy of Small Boat Sailing” is based on that in
Country Life in America
(August 1, 1912).

THE CRUISE OF THE SNARK

BY
JACK LONDON

AUTHOR OF “BURNING DAYLIGHT,” “MARTIN EDEN,” “THE CALL OF THE WILD,” ETC.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ILLUSTRATE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

 

1911

 

All rights reserved

TO
CHARMIAN
THE MATE OF THE SNARK
WHO TOOK THE WHEEL, NIGHT OR DAY, WHEN ENTERING
OR LEAVING PORT OR RUNNING A PASSAGE, WHO
TOOK THE WHEEL IN EVERY EMERGENCY, AND WHO WEPT
AFTER TWO YEARS OF SAILING, WHEN THE
VOYAGE WAS DISCONTINUED

“You have heard the beat of the offshore wind, And the thresh of the deep-sea rain; You have heard the song—how long! how long! Pull out on the trail again!”

[
Rudyard Kipling, “The Long Trail”
]

It began in the swimming pool at Glen Ellen. Between swims it was our wont to come out and lie in the sand and let our skins breathe the warm air and soak in the sunshine. Roscoe was a yachtsman. I had followed the sea a bit. It was inevitable that we should talk about boats. We talked about small boats, and the seaworthiness of small boats. We instanced Captain Slocum and his three years' voyage around the world in the
Spray.

We asserted that we were not afraid to go around the world in a small boat, say forty feet long. We asserted furthermore that we would like to do it. We asserted finally that there was nothing in this world we'd like better than a chance to do it.

“Let us do it,” we said . . . in fun.

Then I asked Charmian privily if she'd really care to do it, and she said that it was too good to be true.

The next time we breathed our skins in the sand by the swimming pool I said to Roscoe, “Let us do it.”

I was in earnest, and so was he, for he said:

“When shall we start?”

I had a house to build on the ranch, also an orchard, a vineyard, and several hedges to plant, and a number of other things to do. We thought we would start in four or five years. Then the lure of the adventure began to grip us. Why not start at once? We'd never be younger, any of us. Let the orchard, vineyard, and hedges be growing up while we were away. When we came back, they would be ready for us, and we could live in the barn while we built the house.

So the trip was decided upon, and the building of the
Snark
began. We named her the
Snark
because we could not think of any other name—this information is given for the benefit of those who otherwise might think there is something occult in the name.

Our friends cannot understand why we make this voyage. They shudder, and moan, and raise their hands. No amount of explanation can make them comprehend that we are moving along the line of least resistance; that it is easier for us to go down to the sea in a small ship than to remain on dry land, just as it is easier for them to remain on dry land than to go down to the sea in the small ship. This state of mind comes of an undue prominence of the ego. They cannot get away from themselves. They cannot come out of themselves long enough to see that their line of least resistance is not necessarily everybody else's line of least resistance. They make of their own bundle of desires, likes, and dislikes a yardstick wherewith to measure the desires, likes, and dislikes of all creatures. This is unfair. I tell them so. But they cannot get away from their own miserable egos long enough to hear me. They think I am crazy. In return, I am sympathetic. It is a state of mind familiar to me. We are all prone to think there is something wrong with the mental processes of the man who disagrees with us.

The ultimate word is I LIKE. It lies beneath philosophy, and is twined about the heart of life. When philosophy has maundered ponderously for a month, telling the individual what he must do, the individual says, in an instant, “I LIKE,” and does something else, and philosophy goes glimmering. It is I LIKE that makes the drunkard drink and the martyr wear a hair shirt; that makes one man a reveller and another man an anchorite; that makes one man pursue fame, another gold, another love, and another God. Philosophy is very often a man's way of explaining his own I LIKE.

But to return to the
Snark,
and why I, for one, want to journey in her around the world. The things I like constitute my set of values. The thing I like most of all is personal achievement—not achievement for the world's applause, but achievement for my own delight. It is the old “I did it! I did it! With my own hands I did it!” But personal achievement, with me, must be concrete. I'd rather win a water-fight in the swimming pool, or remain astride a horse that is trying to get out from under me, than write the great American novel. Each man to his liking. Some other fellow would prefer writing the great American novel to winning the water-fight or mastering the horse.

Possibly the proudest achievement of my life, my moment of highest living, occurred when I was seventeen. I was in a three-masted schooner off the coast of Japan. We were in a typhoon. All hands had been on deck most of the night. I was called from my bunk at seven in the morning to take the wheel. Not a stitch of canvas was set. We were running before it under bare poles, yet the schooner fairly tore along. The seas were all of an eighth of a mile apart and the wind snatched the whitecaps from their summits, filling the air so thick with driving spray that it was impossible to see more than two waves at a time The schooner was almost unmanageable, rolling her rail under to starboard and to port, veering and yawing anywhere between southeast and southwest, and threatening, when the huge seas lifted under her quarter, to broach to. Had she broached to, she would ultimately have been reported lost with all hands and no tidings.