After this summer, however, his life revolved around Hickmott’s Cannery. Even as Mark Twain and Edith Wharton were writing of America’s “Gilded Age” of white gloves and liveried servants and Newport mansions, with Twain questioning its economic justice and Wharton lamenting its social consequences for wealthy women trapped in gilded cages, Jack London and other child laborers experienced its ugly, all-too-real underbelly. Theirs was a world of brutish and dangerous labor to the point of physical collapse, where workers were discarded without help if they fell ill or injured in factories where the loss of digits and even limbs was commonplace. His resentment of it never abated, and even as he exaggerated his family’s poverty in his later telling of this period of time, his claim to have sometimes earned $50 a month at a dime an hour, if not an exaggeration, surely described labor at the outer limit of human endurance, especially for a fourteen-year-old. That arithmetic required sixteen hours per day, seven days each week, for an entire month. However, London always insisted that there were times he worked shifts for twenty-four hours straight and even longer, so five hundred hours—$50—in a month was possible.
2
THE OYSTER PIRATE
Jack London’s consoling joy through these years, apart from his books, was hunting ducks at the edge of the marshes with his stepfather. Occasionally John London would find the money to rent a rowboat, and they would pull out onto the bay and fish for rock cod. It was the beginning of Jack London’s courtship of the sea.
By saving small change over several months, he managed to hoard $5, more than half the purchase price of his own small skiff. But his mother soon learned that he had been holding out on her. One day during his shift at the cannery, Flora stormed into the place, upbraided him, and held out her hand for the money. Crestfallen and humiliated, he handed it over, but at the cost of his remaining affection for her. He always respected her for her hard labor and made allowances for her innumerable disappointments in life, but in his mental ledger he compounded this incident with another, in which she had punished him summarily and wrongly.
Young as he was, he was already turning into his own man. There were times, before he moved out of the London house, he still deferred to his mother’s judgment, but his several months of hard labor in Hickmott’s finished the job begun with the paper route, of forging him into a bleakly independent spirit, his own judge of what was right and wrong and reasonable. Raised but little loved, taught toughness by dockside brawling, taught that tenderness would be detected and attacked as weakness, assimilating that an intellectual curiosity only led to frustration in one fated to be a Work Beast, Jack London by age fifteen already looked out on the world through the eyes of the Wolf.
More cunning in his second attempt, London finally saved up enough money to acquire a small boat. John London’s declining health, and his subsequent injury in a railyard accident, ended their fishing trips together, but of his own accord, Jack began teaching himself to sail. This was no easy endeavor on San Francisco Bay, which isn’t a single body of water at all, but an intricate complex of a great bay fed by smaller estuaries that are themselves linked by swift-current narrows. The entire watery expanse stretches forty miles from southeast to northwest with the Golden Gate opening to the Pacific Ocean about halfway up, and at the northern end doglegs east through the Carquinez Straits to the complex of inland bays that receives runoff from the whole central valley. There are treacherous shallows, nearly irresistible currents, and the constant imperative to dodge commercial traffic and fishermen—all in all it was a tough school in which to train himself in the art of boat handling.
Sailing naturally brought him into closer contact with the waterfront and its denizens, and his favorite haunt became the J. M. Heinold Saloon. It was a tiny cracker box of a bar, built on pilings over the water at the end of Webster Street, constructed of timbers salvaged from a scrapped whaler. Originally erected in 1880 as a bunkhouse for oyster tenders, it was purchased three years later by “Johnny” Heinold, a slightly built but tough Pennsylvania German, a seaman who had ploughed into San Francisco Bay on a windjammer the year London was born. The affable, rubber-faced, stogie-mouthing Heinold reconfigured the bunkhouse into a saloon, which he managed for the next five decades, its congeniality underwritten by the sign over the bar:ALL NATIONS WELCOME . . . EXCEPT CARRIE
In the off-season he dispensed drinks to the crews of the few dozen whaling and sealing ships that laid up in port for the winter, and when the men were at sea he held their mail for them. In season and out Heinold’s became the favored saloon of the Oakland waterfront, as well as a regular stopping place for dray-men hauling their loads across the estuary bridge. Only one rule was perennially enforced: fights had to be taken outside.
From this establishment, Heinold often observed young London working his skiff, a decked-over fourteen-footer with a centerboard, in chop that often threatened to swamp him. Heinold also marked London’s endless enterprise, how the boy would take a load of onions and potatoes out to anchored vessels, whose cooks would hand over empty kerosene cans that London could sell for scrap at a dime apiece—each tin the equivalent of an hour’s wage slavery at Hickmott’s cannery. During these months, at age fifteen, he met real deep-water sailors—and these acquaintances came to have signal importance to the developing youth. Anchored across the estuary was a sloop, the Idler, arrived from Hawaii, where she was rumored to have been an opium smuggler. He had seen her tended by an impressive-looking young man, but felt himself unworthy to sail over, hail him, and make an acquaintance.
One day a youth who identified himself as Scotty, a British deserter who had jumped ship in Australia and made his way to California, asked London to sail him over to the Idler; her caretaker was a harpooner who intended to go out with the whaler Bonanza when she next sailed, and Scotty wanted to go, too. Tingling with anticipation, London sailed him over; they were invited aboard and below, and suddenly he was breathing the air of a new world, a man’s world that electrified him.
It was the first sea-interior I had ever seen. The clothing . . . smelled musty. But what of that? Was it not the sea-gear of men?—leather jackets lined with corduroy, blue coats of pilot cloth, sou’westers, sea boots, oilskins. 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.
Inevitably, the two older teens—Scotty was sixteen and the harpooner nineteen—began pouring drinks, offering London to join in. Jawing and singing, the older boys eventually passed out, leaving London not only their equal, but their superior for having drunk them under the table. To emphasize this point, when he might easily have sought an empty bunk and slept it off, he untied his skiff, and in the vicious chop of a heavy wind and an equally heavy tide opposing each other, he sailed the skiff back to Oakland. There the slack tide had left the water’s edge a hundred yards from the wharf; only when he jumped down to haul it across the ooze and fell face-first into the mud did he realize he was still drunk. He cut his arms on a piling, from which he acquired painful barnacle poisoning, but that night below deck on the Idler cemented Jack London’s betrothal to the sea.
The adolescent sailor bidding for acceptance was one identity he accommodated; still, he had to do something with the other, the reader and dreamer that he felt compelled to stow away. Within the gaslight of Heinold’s bar, in addition to the hale company and the warmth from the wood-burning stove, London was also drawn to an enormous dictionary kept on a table by the window. It was at this table that Jack London would occasionally revert to his open, inquisitive nature. When he wanted to learn new words, recalled Heinold, “never a bit of attention would he pay to the men drinkin’ and smokin’ and jokin’ up here at the bar—just fell to on that old book and read it like he’d like to le
arn everything in it.” Ever alert to the accusation of being a sissy, London sometimes had to vindicate his manliness. “He was gentler than a woman,” said Heinold, “yet he wasn’t to be walked over—I don’t care how big the guy was. He never fought much, but he’d set his jaw a certain way, and look with them flashing deep eyes of his, and that was all he needed to do. You see, he never bluffed.”1
Heinold’s shrewd appraisal of him at fifteen gave ample hints that London’s life had now reached a critical dissonance. On the one hand, Ina Coolbrith and her library books were filling his head with history and adventure, mighty deeds, and a sense of life’s possibilities. Yet against this was set his reality, canning pickles for a dime an hour at least ten hours a day, unable to get even $5 ahead without it being impounded by his imbalanced mother. Such an existence held no charms for a youth bursting at the seams of his life. By London’s own later admission, he now was drinking beer when he would rather have been eating candy; and indeed it was his alter ego, the novice ne’er-do-well of the waterfront, swearing and drinking and brawling, who came up with a plan to shatter the cycle.
Oakland was born to serve San Francisco. When Horace Carpentier started the town in 1852, it was to operate a ferry from the eastern shore of the bay across three miles of open water to San Francisco, saving travelers a trek of eighty miles around the southern portion of the bay and up the mountainous peninsula to the settlement on the Golden Gate. His business acumen was later confirmed when Sacramento became the state capital, and traffic increased—it increased again in 1869 when Oakland became the terminus of the new Transcontinental Railroad. Carpentier had chosen a site of great geographical importance, but Oakland was merely the last way station; San Francisco, with its Nob Hill and its wharves of sleek, mighty clipper ships remained the destination that beckoned. Oakland’s own tatty waterfront serviced far less romantic vessels—the ferry, the blood-greased whaling ships and sealing schooners, and the tired, shallow-draft fishing sloops. Thus when John London packed up Flora, Jack, and his daughters and relocated from San Francisco to Oakland, the move had about it some sense of water finding its own level.
San Francisco first gained prominence after 1849, as the gateway to the goldfields near Sacramento, but within a few years the bay was devastated by polluted runoff from the mining camps in the Sierra Nevada. Native species of fish and shellfish were all but wiped out; exotic species had to be imported to take their place. By 1890, after the gold played out, the tidal flats had recovered enough that they were once again an important source of pot hunting and fishing for the laboring class, especially in Oakland.
At the instance of investors, the Southern Pacific Railroad began to lease out large tracts of its coastal acreage, which had formerly been considered a public resource, so that oyster farmers could raise imported Atlantic oysters, superior in flavor to the native Pacific species. Some of the very first trains to arrive in California from the East on the new Transcontinental Railroad hauled cars containing barrels of “spat,” juvenile oysters attached to chips of shell, ready to transplant. Wide stretches of the adjoining shallow water were dredged up into artificial reefs, and the Atlantic oysters they produced commanded a hefty premium in swanky restaurants.
Being a monopoly, the beds of Atlantic oysters were guarded, and the legislature, pliant to corporate lobbying, made stealing from them a felony. Many of the working-class people in Oakland who had lost their usual foraging grounds regarded this as an insult, even a provocation, so much so that local police sometimes looked the other way when hard-hauling Oakland fishermen raided the oyster beds for a quick supplement to their income. Such “oyster pirates” represented a kind of local folk hero—which may have been one reason the California Fish Commission yanked jurisdiction away from local authorities and created its own enforcement service in 1883.2
Looking at the danger to be braved and the money to be made, Jack London decided he would become an oyster pirate. He had learned of a small sloop, the Razzle Dazzle, that was for sale. She belonged to a regular at the Heinold Saloon who went by the moniker of “French Frank”; he was Gallic, debonair, about fifty, and an acknowledged leader of that shady waterfront community. To London, the $300 price might as well have been $3 million, but there was one person from whom he might confidentially borrow that kind of money, and he went to visit Mammy Jennie.
The Prentiss family had been living and prospering in Alameda, a racially mixed community in which families of color could achieve economic parity, or even live in better circumstances than white families who were down on their luck. Virginia had been steadily working as a nurse and had sizable savings, even as her husband’s health had declined and he took on less work as a carpenter. The families had remained close; with the exception of Frank Atherton, Jack had never fit in well with the Cole School crowd and had spent at least as much time playing with Will Prentiss and his black chums, oblivious to the racial implications of the day. (Once during their roughhousing, Jack accidentally socked Will in the nose and exclaimed apologetically that he had mashed it “as flat as a nigger’s,” utterly unaware of any insult.)
Virginia Prentiss tried mightily to talk her white child out of becoming an outlaw, but Jack’s arguments were unanswerable: he had become as tough as any of the other oyster pirates and could handle a boat better. So what if he got caught? Prison would be preferable to his present existence—the convicts worked shorter hours in better conditions, anyway. In the end, she counted out fifteen $20 gold pieces. “They fixed up the deal in here,” recalled Heinold many years later. “Jack hands French Frank the money, and then they have drinks all around to celebrate.”3
He took possession of the Razzle Dazzle, retaining her crew: a “wharf rat” who went by “Spider” Healey, twenty years old and sporting black whiskers, and Healey’s niece, a girl London named “Mamie” for purposes of retelling, but whose real name he always held in confidence. London’s biographers generally rely on his later written adventures to cite events from his months as an oyster pirate—London’s fondness for artful devices to heighten the dramatic potential of his stories make this a dicey route to reconstructing his escapades. According to one of his own accounts, London’s transition from being a Work Beast in the cannery to feeling the cold sting of salt spray on his face aboard the Razzle Dazzle happened in the space of one day, simply disappearing from the cannery and reappearing at the helm of his raiding sloop, which may or may not have been true. In the same rendition, the purchase was celebrated aboard the boat that night by London, Healey, Mamie, her sister, and others as a demijohn of red wine was liberally passed. During this revelry Mamie supposedly led London up onto the deck and “made love” to him. London and Mamie did become lovers, but whether it happened as described is doubtful.4
What London was not aware of was that French Frank was in love with Mamie, actually had proposed to her, and was sorely jealous of her preference for a fifteen-year-old. Even worse was the ripple of laughter through the saloons at French Frank’s expense (Heinold was still chuckling about it forty years later), which allegedly prompted the older man to attempt to run down the Razzle Dazzle in another vessel during a rainstorm. London was alert to the danger and steered with his feet while brandishing a shotgun to keep French Frank at bay.
The ongoing drama, especially in light of the fact that virtually none of the other oyster pirates kept a woman on board, led Mamie to be dubbed Queen of the Oyster Pirates. By extension, Jack London became Prince of the Oyster Pirates, a sobriquet equally earned by his own quick success and acknowledged daring. In Mamie London discovered a quality in a woman that was new to him: a tomboyish relish of adventure that mirrored his own. “I could not help admiring a certain pluck that she had about her,” he said later, “good fellow all through, unafraid of God or man or devil.” Even so, she knew the terms of their relationship going into it, and abided by them, never asking for more, materially or emotionally, than he had signed on for, never intruding when he needed to be, as he often ca
st it, a man among men. It would be many years before he encountered this same combination of qualities in a woman, and when he finally did, he married her.5
The day-to-day labor of oyster pirating was a challenging and dangerous game of cat-and-mouse. Oyster beds were spaced up and down the coast within the bay. Oysters that were taken from abandoned beds were legal, and without an eyewitness to the theft it was impossible to prove which beds a given cargo of oysters came from. The better-protected beds were watched over by armed guards who kept vigil on platforms set on pilings. Successful pirating required cunning built on an intimate knowledge of the water’s depth and the vessel’s draft, allowing one to go where pursuing boats could not follow; a keen awareness of lunar phases, to blend in with the darkness of the night; and an ability to operate in absolute silence over still waters where even tiny knocks and bumps could travel with shocking clarity.
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 5