Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  Given his indomitable confidence it is perhaps unsurprising that he acquitted himself extremely well and it is also evident that the life of a simple sailor brought him a great deal of contentment. In later years he seemed to look back on these months spent aboard the Sophia Sutherland as among his happiest. He was doing a manly job well in a healthy environment without any of his usual distractions of money concerns or alcohol. Nevertheless, he was left under no illusions that this was a tough existence. In the early days of the trip, he fell foul of a huge Swedish sailor by the name of Red John, who resented the youngster’s rapid promotion to able seaman. At every turn he tried to make Jack’s life a misery by bullying him into carrying out many of the more irksome tasks, which were in reality his own. From the first, Jack was unwilling to carry them out and realised that the only way to deal with this man was head on. Thus, despite Red John’s far greater size and strength, London confronted him and when the big Swede took a swing at him with his lethal fists, London jumped on his back and proceeded to gouge at his eyes and face. Red John was completely taken aback by this approach and staggered around the low beamed fo’c’sle, smashing Jack into walls and braining him on the beams. Still London held on, shouting: ‘Will y’let me alone? Will you?’ Eventually Red John conceded defeat to the tenacious upstart, and from that moment on the Sophia Sutherland’s youngest able seaman had the respect of his elders.

  Despite this, the voyage was tough and Jack saw life stripped down to the bare essentials. One incident, which unquestionably remained lodged in London’s subconscious for many years to come was the death of a fellow seaman who was known as ‘the Bricklayer’. This uninspiring character seemed to have almost no interest in anything around him, was a hopeless sailor and was deeply unpopular with his shipmates. Several weeks into the passage, the crew stopped talking to him entirely and London relates his final days and death in his short story, The Dead Rise Up Never:

  We gave him the silent treatment, and for weeks before he died we neither spoke to him nor did he speak to us. And for weeks he moved among us, or lay in his bunk in our crowded house, grinning at us his hatred and malignancy. He was a dying man, and he knew it, and we knew it. And furthermore, he knew that we wanted him to die. He cumbered our life with his presence, and ours was a rough life that made rough men of us. And so he died, in a small space crowded by twelve men and as much alone as if he had died on some desolate mountain peak. No kindly word, no last word, was passed between. He died as he had lived, a beast, and he died hating us and hated by us. And now I come to the most startling moment of my life. No sooner was he dead than he was flung overboard. He died in a night of wind, drawing his last breath as the men tumbled into their oilskins to the cry of ‘All hands!’ And he was flung overboard, several hours later, on a day of wind. Not even a canvas wrapping graced his mortal remains; nor was he deemed worthy of bars of iron at his feet. We sewed him up in the blankets in which he died and laid him on a hatch-cover for’ard of the main-hatch on the port side. A gunnysack, half full of galley coal, was fastened to his feet. It was bitter cold. The weather-side of every rope, spar, and stay was coated with ice, while all the rigging was a harp, singing and shouting under the fierce hand of the wind. The schooner, hove to, lurched and floundered through the sea, rolling her scuppers under and perpetually flooding the deck with icy salt water. We of the forecastle stood in sea-boots and oilskins. Our hands were mittened, but our heads were bared in the presence of the death we did not respect. Our ears stung and numbed and whitened, and we yearned for the body to be gone. But the interminable reading of the burial service went on. The captain had mistaken his place, and while he read on without purpose we froze our ears and resented this final hardship thrust upon us by the helpless cadaver. As from the beginning, so to the end, everything had gone wrong with the Bricklayer. Finally, the captain’s son, irritated beyond measure, jerked the book from the palsied fingers of the old man and found the place. Again the quavering voice of the captain arose. Then came the cue: ‘And the body shall be cast into the sea.’ We elevated one end of the hatch-cover, and the Bricklayer plunged outboard and was gone.

  He remained haunted by the cold, brutal, emotionless manner of the Bricklayer’s departure from this world. It was a theme that he looked at in depth in The Sea Wolf, one of his most successful novels, which draws heavily on his experiences aboard the Sophia Sutherland, exploring the relationship between the fey young writer Humphrey Van Weyden, who is effectively kidnapped aboard the sealing schooner Ghost, skippered by the brutal Captain ‘Wolf’ Larsen. The book explores in great detail the struggle that clearly went on in London’s own mind between his need to make a living from writing and his great passion for the brutal simplicity of a sailor’s life.

  Haunted though he was by the death of the Bricklayer, he still took the dead man’s old bunk, which was a more comfortable one than his own, although this was to have distressing consequences for London when he stood his watch on deck that night. The vessel was hove to in rough seas and it was traditional in these circumstances to only have one man on watch. The night was wild, with great ragged clouds racing across the moon and, in this solitude, Jack’s imagination began to run riot. Soon, he was convinced he could perceive a shadowy wraith flitting around forward, ‘There, in the dim light, where we had flung the dead man overboard, I had seen a faint and wavering form. Six-feet in length it was, slender, and of substance so attenuated that I had distinctly seen through it the tracery of the fore-rigging.’ The battle between Jack’s steadfast reason and terror of this ghost went on for some time, until, finally he plucked up the courage to confront the wraith and, armed with a knife, he went forward, only to discover that it was a trick of the moonlight playing on the rigging and sails.

  After a brief stop in the Bonin Islands off the coast of Japan, the Sophia Sutherland headed north to the Siberian coast to carry out her bloody trade. Sealing was a fascinating art in itself, which involved a good deal of risk. Every day the schooner would drop off dories, each loaded with a rower or ‘puller’ and a hunter armed with a shotgun. Jack was a rower and would have needed all of his strength to prove himself equal to the job. The schooner would then drop down several miles to leeward of its boats and wait to pick them up as evening fell. The icy sea was often rough, fogs could form quickly and by the end of the day, the dory, loaded down with seals, would become a liability to handle. Both oarsman and hunter lived with the constant threat of becoming permanently separated from the mother ship, which almost inevitably meant death. Once safely back aboard, sailors and hunters engaged in an orgy of blood and guts as the seals were skinned and salted down. This was the first step in a transformation from living creature to a fashionable piece of couture for the fine ladies of New York, Paris and beyond.

  London described the work with relish: ‘The deck was a slaughter-house, week in and week out … We kept up a lively competition to see who would have the biggest number of skins salted down at the close of the season. It was wild, heavy work off the coast of Siberia, with no let-up weeks on end.’

  Despite the nature of the work, London was truly in his element and there is little doubt that his experiences of the weeks with only dark sea and infinite heaven for company had a profound effect on his life and cemented his romantic view of the ocean.

  In all, the Sophia Sutherland was away for three months and returned to San Francisco in 1893. London noted with some sadness that many of his shipmates were promptly fleeced out of their pay by the many crimps and criminals waiting in San Francisco on the lookout for any sailor out on a spree. By the end of a week’s shore leave, many of the crew were once again penniless and had already signed up for the next voyage. Not so London, who dutifully handed over most of his earnings to his impoverished parents. In his absence, things had gone from bad to worse for his family. America was in the grip of a financial slump, and to exacerbate things the last shred of John London’s health had failed and he was essentially an invalid. Jack became the main br
eadwinner for the family. He dutifully went back to work in a jute mill, working for ten hours a day for a pittance. The contrast between the wild freedom of the sea and the drudgery of life ashore could not have been starker.

  Yet for some time London turned his back on sailing. No doubt he was further sobered by the news that most of his former Oakland Wharf associates were either dead or imprisoned. His closest friend ‘Scratch’ Nelson was in his grave, having been riddled with bullets following a barroom brawl. Jack’s determination to make a fresh start was further bolstered by an unexpected windfall; after returning from the Pacific, he had written down his adventures in the great storm off the coast of Japan. Encouraged by his mother, he had decided to enter this piece into a writing competition and was elated when he won the first prize of $25. Even at the tender age of 17, Jack was more than capable of bringing the terrifying beauty of the storm alive:

  It was on deck that the force of the wind could be fully appreciated, especially after leaving the stifling fo’castle. It seemed to stand up against you like a wall, making it almost impossible to move on the heaving decks or to breathe as the fierce gusts came dashing by. The schooner was hove to under jib, foresail and mainsail. We proceeded to lower the foresail and make it fast. The night was dark, greatly impeding our labor. Still, though not a star or the moon could pierce the black masses of storm clouds that obscured the sky as they swept along before the gale, nature aided us in a measure. A soft light emanated from the movement of the ocean. Each mighty sea, all phosphorescent and glowing with the tiny lights of myriads of animalculae, threatened to overwhelm us with a deluge of fire. Higher and higher, thinner and thinner, the crest grew as it began to curve and overtop preparatory to breaking, until with a roar it fell over the bulwarks, a mass of soft glowing light and tons of water which sent the sailors sprawling in all directions and left in each nook and cranny little specks of light that glowed and trembled till the next sea washed them away, depositing new ones in their places. Sometimes several seas following each other with great rapidity and thundering down on our decks filled them full to the bulwarks, but soon they were discharged through the lee scuppers.

  No doubt his success in getting the piece published spurred the youngster on and, determined to better himself, he set about putting himself through high school, despite the fact he was now four years older than his classmates. After a brief stint back at school, he crammed for the entrance exams to Berkeley University and passed with distinction. All this time he was still paying his way through odd jobs, and after four months of living a double life of student and wage slave, he was forced to quit and return to a full-time job in a laundry.

  Yet he was far from beaten and his next adventure was just around the corner. This time it was not the call of the sea he answered, but the call of the wild. In 1896 gold was discovered in the barren wastelands of the Yukon in Northern Canada. By 1897, gold fever had taken full grip and hopefuls travelled from all over the world in search of untold and generally elusive wealth. Among them was Jack London. Although he barely found a speck of gold, his adventures in this harsh white wasteland left him more determined than ever to become a writer. He was fortunate, for the American public was hungry for stories of exploits from the goldfields and his subsequent narration of these adventures for various magazines and journals helped him to make a name for himself. In the meantime, he married Bess Maddern, a lady he liked but certainly did not love, and they settled down to have a family.

  Everything was to change when he scored his big breakthrough with the publication of The Call of the Wild. This novel based around the Yukon brought him fame and fortune. From hereon the man who always relished the simple pleasures of working with his hands would make his living pushing a pen. The next time he contemplated the sea, it would be not to support himself and his family but from the privileged position of a yachtsman. It is telling that his first act on hitting the big time was to purchase Spray, a small yacht in which he explored some of his old oyster-raiding haunts from the new perspective of a wealthy man. Sailing around San Francisco was not London’s only use for the Spray: he also used her snug cabin to seduce a number of ladies from the Bohemian set he had begun to hang around with as a successful writer. This fact underlines that, despite Bess bearing Jack two daughters, all was not well with their relationship. Jack had married Bess in order to prove his theory at the time that it was better to make a cold-headed decision on finding a partner based on compatibility than forging a match based on passion and true love. Whatever the merits of this theory, Jack seemed hell-bent on proving himself wrong at the expense of his wife. Jack and Bess skirted around this issue until he met Charmian Kitteridge, a vivacious lady some five years his senior. Like Jack, she was red blooded, bold and adventurous. She was more than a match for him whether they were sparring verbally or indulging in a spot of boxing, a hobby the pair enjoyed greatly. The couple embarked on a passionate affair and the ultimate conclusion was Jack’s permanent separation from Bess.

  While all of this was going on, Jack was completing his second novel, The Sea Wolf, in which he returned to his first love, the sea. The tale leans heavily on Jack’s own adventures on the Sophia Sutherland for its inspiration, and his new romance with Charmian certainly influenced the second part of the book, which features a rather nauseating romance, written in such a prudish and hidebound fashion that it almost ruins the latter stages of the book. In Jack’s defence, he was utterly hemmed in by the social mores of the period and it is doubtful that a publisher would have sanctioned any of the kind of fiery romantic prose that Jack was certainly more than capable of putting together on this subject.

  Charmian’s influence was to be even more profound when it came to London’s next seafaring adventure:

  It began in the swimming pool at Glen Ellen [London’s home at the time]. 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 [Eames, Charmian’s uncle] 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?’

  The reference to Captain Slocum is interesting: in 1899, Joshua Slocum had kick-started what we now know as ‘blue water cruising’ by sailing single-handed around the world on his 36ft ketch, Spray. London was clearly inspired by his adventures – the name of his own yacht at the time clearly illustrates this – and it played a big part in his decision. There was more, however: as always it boiled down to London’s persistent plea that a life of adventure was truly living and everything else was just a slow death. He explained:

  There is also another side to the voyage. Being alive, I want to see, and all the world is a bigger thing to see than one small town or valley. We have done little outlining of the voyage. Only one thing is definite, and that is that our first port of call will be Honolulu. Beyond a few general ideas, we have no thought of our next port after Hawaii. We shall make up our minds as we get nearer, in a general way we know that we shall wander through the South Seas, take in Samoa, New Zealand, Tasmania, Australia, New Guinea, Borneo, and Sumatra, and go on up through the Philippines to Japan. Then will come Korea, China, India, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean. After that the voyage becomes too vague to describe, though we know a number of things we shall surely do, and we expect to spend
from one to several months in every country in Europe.

  Thus the decision was made to build a brand new vessel, Snark, with the express intention of sailing around the world. Named after one of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poems, she was a 44ft-long ketch that would be the last word in cruising design, featuring an early petrol engine for auxiliary power and promising to be extremely comfortable. Such a craft was ideal for cruising the world, or so it seemed.

  From the start, the project seemed almost cursed. It didn’t help that London was trying to get the vessel built in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The city had been devastated and one of the effects of the rebuild was that materials and tradesmen were in extremely short supply. London found himself facing endless delays and extortionate fees for basic work to be carried out. It didn’t help that he chose the aforementioned Roscoe Eames, Charmian’s uncle, to oversee the project. Eames proved himself to be utterly incompetent and did a great deal to hamper work on the Snark. London wanted everything on the yacht to be of the best possible quality, yet under Eames’ supervision the vessel’s frames were laid up in pine rather than oak, making the yacht fundamentally weaker and therefore less seaworthy. Many other aspects of the fitting-out were botched and all the while the cost of building the Snark soared beyond expectation. The press started to nickname the boat ‘London’s folly’.