Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  Jack was the illegitimate son of Flora Chaney, a headstrong woman who seemed to plunge from one crisis to another. Flora had originally come from a well-to-do Ohio family and had grown up used to luxury and comfort. Unfortunately, a bout of typhoid at a young age had stunted her growth, ruined her looks and left her bald. Inevitably this severely dented her chances of finding a suitable and respectable partner. Bored and disillusioned, she eventually stormed out of the family home at the age of 25 in search of a new life. She found little more than poverty and, after an ill-fated relationship with astrologer William Chaney, she fell pregnant with Jack. William Chaney rapidly disappeared and Flora was in a tight corner. Salvation came when she met John London, a Civil War veteran with a kind heart and ailing health. The pair married, but Flora’s wilful, grasping personality ensured they would not be happy for long. She longed for the wealth and respectability she had enjoyed in her youth and bullied John into one poor business venture after another. Despite John setting up a successful smallholding, the London household was constantly overreaching itself financially and found itself gradually sliding into poverty. From a very early age, Jack was sent to work for a living, undertaking countless dreary jobs before and after school. Newspaper rounds, stuffing pickles in a cannery and working in a laundry: it all added up to one long round of drudgery.

  Yet Jack was a lively boy, full of daring and with a keen sense of adventure. It was natural that he should be drawn to the sea that lay gleaming at his doorstep, beckoning him on to freedom. The first step was to scrape together enough money to buy a dinghy. By hiding some of his earnings from his mother, London was able to save enough to purchase a little 14ft sailing skiff with which he could explore San Francisco Bay. This was no mean feat, as the bay is as treacherous as it is beautiful. As Jack himself put it: ‘No lustier, tougher, sheet of water can be found for small-boat sailing.’ This huge natural harbour is a labyrinth of shallows, strong tides, fogs and brutal Pacific swells. It is no place for the novice and London learnt to sail his little vessel at the toughest of schools. With the basics mastered, he proceeded to drum up some extra cash for his ever-demanding family by running errands from ship to shore; whether it was working as a water taxi to some of the ships out at anchor in the bay, running messages or carrying supplies to and fro, London was always grateful for the extra income. All the while he was honing his sailing skills.

  Ever since the first of the 49ers had passed through San Francisco’s Golden Gate en route to the goldfields in 1849, the city had enjoyed a reputation for a certain reckless, lawless romance and wild living. In the 1850s the population of desperate prospectors and ne’er do wells had grown tenfold: lynch mobs roamed the ramshackle streets, and every now and again great swathes of the city would be destroyed by wildfire. The Barbary Coast area, crammed with prostitutes, drunks and thieves, gained a reputation that had barely diminished when Jack first started roaming its streets in the 1890s. Based across the bay in Oakland, he was positioned on the pulsing jugular of San Francisco’s seediest suburb. Life was cheap, as the newly arrived Chinese and Italian Immigrants brawled and scrabbled about for their own slice of the American Dream. Young Jack was entranced and his adventurous soul was drawn to the gloomy bars that proliferated on the waterfront. He began to frequent Jonny Heinold’s ‘Last Chance’ saloon, a dark, rundown bar made out of the rotting ribs of a long-forgotten whaling ship, all spit, sawdust and men who reeked of hemp, tar and spirits. It was here that he encountered some of the heroes of the Oakland waterfront; sailors who lived on the margins of society and often used their boats for illicit purposes in order to make ends meet. Jack was particularly entranced by an encounter aboard a sailing vessel by the name of Idler, which was rumoured to have operated as an opium smuggler. After ferrying a visitor across to the mysterious vessel, Jack was invited aboard and was immediately drawn into a world as heady and intoxicating to the young boy as the Idler’s illicit cargo. He later recalled:

  It was the first sea interior I had ever seen, the clothing smelled musty but what of it? Was it not the sea gear of men? Leather jackets lined with corduroy, blue coats of pilot cloth, sou’westers, sea boots, oil skins. And everywhere was in evidence the economy of space – the narrow bunks, the swinging tables, the incredible lockers. There were the tell tale compass, the sea lamps in their gimbals, the blue backed charts carelessly rolled and tucked away. The signal flags in alphabetical order, and a mariner’s dividers jammed into the woodwork to hold a calendar. At last, I was living.

  Jack was clearly spellbound by the romance of the mariner’s life and it is hardly a surprise that shortly after this encounter, he joined up with Oakland’s desperate band of oyster pirates. The oyster pirates were very much a byproduct of the wanton avarice that was sweeping through North America during the late 1800s. This was a period branded by the novelist and satirist Mark Twain as America’s ‘gilded age’ for beneath a veneer of glittering wealth, the rest of the country laboured, often in extreme poverty. Capitalism was king, and America was rapidly becoming a country divided between the haves and the have-nots. Jack fell firmly into the latter camp but he had sufficient fire in his belly to ensure that he was willing to redress the situation by any means available. In the oyster pirates, he saw an opportunity. San Francisco Bay was blessed with a wealth of marshlands and shallows, which were the ideal breeding ground for oysters. Traditionally the farming of the foreshore had been considered a public right, but gradually the richest areas had been leased out by landowners and were in the hands of private companies, who were very possessive of their investment. In turn, local fishermen, deprived of a valuable income stream, showed no compunction in raiding the oyster beds. These renegade fishermen became known as the oyster pirates and were often perceived as local heroes in the Oakland area due to the controversial manner in which the fishing grounds had been taken from the people. The risks of this pursuit were high, for the oyster fisheries had soon cottoned on to what was going on, and guards and watchmen were posted. The penalty for getting caught was often a bullet in the back or a lengthy stretch in San Quentin Prison. Yet the lure for young London was irresistible, as he later explained:

  I wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew. And the winds of adventure blew the oyster pirate sloops up and down San Francisco Bay, from raided oyster-beds and fights at night on shoal and flat, to markets in the morning against city wharves, where peddlers and saloon-keepers came down to buy. Every raid was a felony. The penalty was state imprisonment, the stripes and the lockstep. And what of that! The men in stripes worked a shorter day than I. And behind it all, behind all of me with youth a-bubble, whispered Romance, Adventure.

  Fired up by his youthful exuberance, Jack persuaded one of his childhood mentors to stump up the $300 required for him to purchase an oyster sloop, the Razzle Dazzle. At the age of fifteen, he set about a new life as an oyster pirate. If the risks of the trade were high, so were the rewards and in a single successful night as an oyster pirate, Jack could earn as much as he would in a month or more of working in a cannery. He was soon able to pay off his $300 debt and also had plenty of spare cash for his family. In addition, there were more than enough risks associated with this hazardous trade to satisfy the youngster’s thirst for adventure. In fact, he immediately fell foul of French Frank, the very man he had purchased Razzle Dazzle from. It appears that when London bought the sloop, he inherited her crew and this included a young girl called Mamie, who had earned the nickname ‘The Queen of the Oyster Pirates’. French Frank was in love with this girl and was horrified when Mamie proceeded to seduce the new owner of Razzle Dazzle. According to London, he was taken aside by Whisky Bob, another member of the oyster pirates, and warned as follows:

  Whisky Bob got me aside a moment. ‘Keep your eyes open,’ he muttered. ‘Take my tip. French Frank’s ugly. I’m going up river with him to get a schooner for oystering. When he gets down on the beds, watch out. He says he’ll run you down. After dark, any time he’s around, change your an
chorage and douse your riding light. Savve?’

  London did just that, and when he did finally encounter French Frank, he saw him off thus:

  I stood on the deck of the Razzle Dazzle, a cocked double-barrelled shotgun in my hands, steering with my feet and holding her to her course, and compelled him to put up his wheel and keep away.

  Many of his adventures in this esoteric trade are described picturesquely in his short story The Cruise of the Dazzler, a book that was aimed at youngsters, but can easily be appreciated by sailors of any age, as the narrative skims along with the ease and elegance of his former command. Much of the book is fiction, loosely based on fact, focusing on the adventures of the wild but kindly Frisco Kid, who bears more than a passing resemblance to London himself, and the well-to-do Joe Horton, a runaway who can’t bear to be in school.

  The description of the some of the pirate fleet gives a good insight into the boat he owned, while his whole relationship with the sea is perfectly encapsulated in this description:

  There were four boats, and from where he sat he could make out their names. The one directly beneath him had the name Ghost painted in large green letters on its stern. The other three, which lay beyond, were called respectively La Caprice, the Oyster Queen, and the Flying Dutchman.

  Each of these boats had cabins built amidships, with short stovepipes projecting through the roofs, and from the pipe of the Ghost smoke was ascending. The cabin doors were open and the roof-slide pulled back, so that Joe could look inside and observe the inmate, a young fellow of nineteen or twenty who was engaged just then in cooking. He was clad in long sea-boots which reached the hips, blue overalls, and dark woolen shirt. The sleeves, rolled back to the elbows, disclosed sturdy, sun-bronzed arms, and when the young fellow looked up his face proved to be equally bronzed and tanned.

  All the romance of Joe’s nature stirred at the sight. That was life. They were living, and gaining their living, out in the free open, under the sun and sky, with the sea rocking beneath them, and the wind blowing on them, or the rain falling on them, as the chance might be.

  Oyster poaching in itself was something of an art. The little vessels would glide stealthily into the oyster grounds under cover of darkness, all running gear well oiled to ensure that no creaking block or squeaking pintle should betray them, navigation lights extinguished and the crew tiptoeing around as they handled sail. At the helm, skippers always kept one eye on where they were going and a weather eye out for the authorities. Sometimes skiffs with heavily muffled oars were used to land on the flats at low tide in order to pick the oysters by hand, at other times the sloops themselves towed dredges in order to pull up the oysters, which were then sorted on deck. This is tough enough work but bear in mind that San Francisco Bay has strong tides and is prone to severe fogs that can sweep in with little warning. Add in to that equation that the pirates were generally working in the dead of night and sailing their unpowered craft across shallows and bars, all the while trying to ensure that they were not detected, and you have some idea of the risks these sailors endured in order to bring home a catch. In The Cruise of the Dazzler, London has the French skipper sum up the unique relationship that these men gained with the bay itself:

  ‘I feel ze tide, ze wind, ze speed,’ he explained. ‘Even do I feel ze land. Dat I tell you for sure. How? I do not know. Only do I know dat I feel ze land, just like my arm grow long, miles and miles long, and I put my hand upon ze land and feel it, and know dat it is there.’

  This was true seamanship, and there is little doubt that London’s skills as a sailor were honed by this experience in a manner that few modern sailors would dare to imagine. It is telling that The Cruise of the Dazzler concludes with a hair-raising escape from pursuing authorities by cutting across a shallow, storm-lashed bar to safety. Truly, London was living the macho life that he had aspired to, and he gloried in it in later years when he recalled:

  There were the times I brought the Razzle Dazzle in with a bigger load of oysters than any other two-man craft; there was the time when we raided far down in Lower Bay, and mine was the only craft back at daylight to the anchorage off Asparagus Island; there was the Thursday night we raced for market and I brought the Razzle Dazzle in without a rudder, first of the fleet, and skimmed the cream of the Friday morning trade; and there was the time I brought her in from Upper Bay under a jib, when a rival burned my mainsail.

  For all his successes, the trade was always going to be a tenuous one and competition from other poachers was starting to put a squeeze on the young pirate. Troubles reached a head when his vessel was set on fire by a rival crew. From hereon Jack was compelled to work on someone else’s sloop, and he chose the wildest and most daring character of them all, a youngster by the name of ‘Scratch’ Nelson whose Reindeer was noted for her sailing qualities, as Jack recalled:

  I have never regretted those months of mad devilry I put in with Nelson. He COULD sail, even if he did frighten every man that sailed with him. To steer to miss destruction by an inch or an instant was his joy. To do what everybody else did not dare attempt to do, was his pride. Never to reef down was his mania, and in all the time I spent with him, blow high or low, the Reindeer was never reefed. Nor was she ever dry. We strained her open and sailed her open and sailed her open continually. And we abandoned the Oakland water-front and went wider afield for our adventures.

  It was during this relatively happy period of his life that Jack first became fully acquainted with alcohol. It was a relationship that was to bedevil him for the rest of his days and inspire his damning memoir John Barleycorn, which speaks both with fondness and disgust of the regular binges that took place in the ‘Last Resort’. He later estimated that at one point he was drunk for a full three-week stretch. Perhaps the biggest wake-up call for Jack came after a very heavy session when, late at night and utterly intoxicated, he fell asleep on a jetty and unwittingly rolled into the waters of the Carquinez Strait, which runs out of the Suisun Bay. At certain points of the tide, this is a regular mill race, and there was little for it but to go with the flow, as Jack later recalled:

  I was borne away by the current. I was not startled. I thought the misadventure delightful. I was a good swimmer, and in my inflamed condition the contact of the water with my skin soothed me like cool linen. Some maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me. I had never been morbid. Thoughts of suicide had never entered my head. And now that they entered, I thought it fine, a splendid culminating, a perfect rounding off of my short but exciting career. I, who had never known girl’s love, nor woman’s love, nor the love of children; who had never played in the wide joy-fields of art, nor climbed the star-cool heights of philosophy, nor seen with my eyes more than a pin-point’s surface of the gorgeous world; I decided that this was all, that I had seen all, lived all, been all, that was worth while, and that now was the time to cease.

  Next I discovered that I was very weary and very cold, and quite sober, and that I didn’t in the least want to be drowned. I could make out the Selby Smelter on the Contra Costa shore and the Mare Island lighthouse. I started to swim for the Solano shore, but was too weak and chilled, and made so little headway, and at the cost of such painful effort, that I gave it up and contented myself with floating, now and then giving a stroke to keep my balance in the tide-rips which were increasing their commotion on the surface of the water. And I knew fear. I was sober now, and I didn’t want to die. I discovered scores of reasons for living. And the more reasons I discovered, the more liable it seemed that I was going to drown anyway.

  Daylight, after I had been four hours in the water, found me in a parlous condition in the tide-rips off Mare Island light, where the swift ebbs from Vallejo Straits and Carquinez Straits were fighting with each other, and where, at that particular moment, they were fighting the flood tide setting up against them from San Pablo Bay. A stiff breeze had sprung up, and the crisp little waves were persistently lapping into my mouth, and I was beginning to swallow salt water
. With my swimmer’s knowledge, I knew the end was near. And then the boat came – a Greek fisherman running in for Vallejo.

  This sobering incident seems to have ushered in a sort of new beginning for London: after a brief spell working for the fisheries authority trying to catch the very group of felons he had once worked with, Jack quit the oyster pirates for good. It was time to start a new chapter and, inevitably, London turned to the sea.

  By now he was 17 and determined that he needed a deep-water passage to satisfy his lust for adventure. Using his waterfront contacts, he secured a berth aboard the sealing schooner, Sophia Sutherland, bound for the Northern Pacific, Japan, and the Bering Sea. Sealing was, in every sense, a different kettle of fish from life as an oyster pirate and, although it was legal, it was still a brutal and often tenuous existence. Sealers could be away from home for months at a time; a group of men all trapped together within the confines of a small ship. The Sophia Sutherland was a handsome three-masted schooner 90ft in length. The crew was divided into the hunters who were generally idle until the sealing grounds were reached and the sailors who ran the boat and handled the small narrow boats, or dories that were used for sealing once the grounds were reached.

  With typical boldness, Jack signed up as an able seaman for the trip. The usual rank for a youngster was either ship’s boy or ordinary seaman, but despite never having sailed beyond the Golden Gate, London bullied the captain into awarding him the higher rank. This, he knew, would lead to confrontation with some of the older hands but Jack, young and eager, was determined to make a good show of it.

  I was an able seaman. I had graduated from the right school. It took no more than minutes to learn the names and uses of the few new ropes. It was simple. I did not do things blindly. As a small-boat sailor I had learned to reason out and know the why of everything. It is true, I had to learn to steer by compass, which took maybe half a minute; but when it came to steering full-and-by and close-and-by, I could beat the average of my shipmates, because that was the very way I had always sailed. Inside fifteen minutes I could box the compass around and back again. And there was little else to learn during that seven-months cruise, except fancy rope-sailorizing, such as the more complicated lanyard knots and the making of various kinds of sennit and rope-mats.