The Cruise of the Snark

Table of Contents

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).

PENGUIN BOOKS

 

 

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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:

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 Joe (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.