Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  At moonless low tides the thieves would drop from their boats and fan out across the dank mud flats, the goal always to be first at the Oakland docks in the morning with a haul of fat fresh oysters commanding the highest price of the day from buyers who could not have cared less that they were enabling an ongoing felony. Twenty-five dollars for a night’s labor was common, with London keeping two-thirds of the money and paying Spider the other third.

  The satisfaction was not lost on him, as he later chuckled to his daughter, that now he had turned the tables on the system, that he was now the employer, with a hireling to pay, although for his share of the risks, Spider’s one-third was much more generous than the going rate of ten cents an hour for common labor.6 With daring that approached a death wish, London earned the deference of the entire fleet of oyster pirates. And this London parlayed into acceptance as that man among men, buying rounds of drinks for everybody at the Heinold Saloon, fighting rarely but fighting to win, and honing the art—significantly for his later career—of holding an audience rapt while he spun a yarn.

  As much as he relished the adventure and the chase, the times that London most enjoyed on the Razzle Dazzle were the nights when he knew that Spider and Mamie would be ashore. In advance of such occasions he would sortie to the Oakland Public Library to change out his books, and now being a young man of means, he would stoke up on a quarter’s worth of candy. Late into the night, locked in his cabin and safe from discovery, he would debauch on Melville and Kipling and Flaubert, and taffy, and hard cannonballs—“big lumps of the most delicious lastingness,” he later called them, proud of his ability to make one last an hour. It was heaven, but in the morning he knew he would have to resume his identity as Prince of the Oyster Pirates. “All the time I was striving to be a man amongst men,” he wrote, “and all the time I nursed secret and shameful desires for candy. But I would have died before I’d let anybody guess it.”7

  He made good money stealing oysters from the Southern Pacific’s leased reefs, later acknowledging that he made more in one week with the Razzle Dazzle than he could in a year at the pickle cannery. He repaid Mammy Jennie’s $300 and made far bigger contributions to his family than even Flora could have dared demand from a boy making ten cents an hour. It was a signal experience for him psychologically as well. As one who grew up experiencing the ugly underbelly of the social and economic hierarchy that Mark Twain dubbed the “Gilded Age,” for the first time he was able to get a little of his own back on the system.

  But he also knew that he was pushing his luck. He was fortunate to have eluded capture thus far, but beyond that lay another worry: the competition was increasing, and he hardly needed to be told that there was, indeed, no honor among thieves. The oyster beds, rich as they were, were a finite resource, and one night a rival set the Razzle Dazzle afire. Arsonists also struck the Reindeer , owned by London’s friend “Young Scratch” Nelson. London had long indulged a distant fascination with Nelson’s father, “Old Scratch,” a big, burly Scandinavian nicknamed for his brawling technique, in which the elder Nelson ended an altercation quickly by simply clawing off a piece of his opponent’s face. Great was London’s thrill the time he bid to increase his social standing by offering to buy Old Scratch a drink, and was accepted; he gained the friendship with Young Scratch in the bargain.8 Nelson fils was an illiterate, but perhaps the strongest man on the waterfront, a Viking he seemed to London, and a daredevil who put the rest of them, even London, to shame.

  Nelson’s Reindeer was less damaged than London’s Razzle Dazzle, so the two became partners, provisioning the Reindeer with a quick loan from Heinold. A few months more of successful oyster pirating with Nelson followed, months London always said he never regretted, except on the score that Nelson was tone-deaf, and London claimed his own ear for music was permanently warped by his partner’s artless bawling of naughty sea chanties. Nevertheless, London’s growing awareness of the gamble, and the growing odds that he would wind up dead or in prison, continued to nag him. Eventually he told Nelson that he wanted out, and the two parted as friends.

  London confided his dilemma to Johnny Heinold, one of the few who understood that his whole persona was an act, a bid to belong, and that there was more to this boy than his buying rounds of drinks for the house and trying overeagerly to fit in with such rough company. Returning to a dime an hour wage was unthinkable for a youth who had been hailed as Prince of the Oyster Pirates, and who had once blown $180 buying drinks for his buddies in a single night. And that night below deck on the Idler continued to haunt and lure him.

  At some point, exactly when can’t be determined, he revealed to Heinold that he wanted to go to sea—to leave San Francisco Bay behind and head through the majestic Golden Gate, pitting himself against the vast Pacific itself. Heinold dissuaded him by suggesting that he join the California Fish Patrol. It made sense. Having mastered all the artful dodges of the law during his life as an oyster pirate, why should he not simply market himself to the other side of the law? North of Oakland, on the jut of land between San Pablo and Suisun bays, was the town of Benicia, where was located one of the first two offices of the Bureau of Patrol and Law Enforcement of the California Fish Commission, known in short as the California Fish Patrol. On one occasion London and Young Scratch had been in Benicia on the Reindeer to market a cargo of oysters, which was a rather cheeky thing to do right under the Fish Patrol’s nose, and the station’s boss, Charley LeGrant, offered them a job. London and, briefly, Nelson entered the service in the grade of deputy patrolmen, the equivalent of game wardens. They would receive no salary, but they would get to keep half the fines levied against lawbreakers they apprehended.

  These new environs were not without interest for the inquisitive young sailor. Benicia boasted the Solano, the largest steam ferry in the world, her main deck laid with railroad tracks for transporting locomotives and cars across the estuary. To reach Benicia London sailed past Vallejo and the vast Navy yard at Mare Island, not really an island but a spindly peninsula that separated the Napa River from the east shore of San Pablo Bay. The yard’s cavernous new dry dock was an architectural and engineering wonder, and nearby, her identity cruelly obscured by a shingle roof pocked with dormers and skylights, with windows where her gun ports used to be, was one of the most storied ships in American history. Laid down during the War of 1812 as the first U.S. ship of the line, a ninety-gun behemoth built to take on the best of the British fleet, she had cowed Barbary pirates and fought in the war with Mexico. For more than a generation she had been designated a receiving ship, a floating office warren, and only her three truncated masts that had once soared to topgallants poked defiantly above her crudely hipped roof to proclaim the last station of the U.S.S. Independence.

  Benicia itself had a colorful history—the first city in California to be founded by Anglo Americans, it served as the state capital for a year before the government moved to Sacramento. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s re-fueling and repair yard was the state’s first large industrial facility, but London’s own world centered on a more human and frowsy section of the waterfront, the community of fishermen and patrolmen, many of whom lived on their boats.

  Living and sailing on Young Scratch’s Reindeer, which the state had chartered, London employed his considerable cunning now on the side of the law. The oyster pirates of the lower bay came within his purview, but the primary targets of California’s early conservation law were Chinese shrimpers who used illegal nets. Neither London nor the law took issue with them when small junks began dredging the bay for shrimp. But, as London wrote in Tales of the Fish Patrol, “This in itself would not be bad, were it not for the small mesh of the nets, so small that the tiniest fishes, little new-hatched things not a quarter of an inch long, cannot pass through. The beautiful beaches of Points Pedro and Pablo, where are the shrimp-catchers’ villages, are made fearful by the stench from myriads of decaying fish.”9 Brought to the United States by the thousands for railroad construction, then r
esented for being there and entering into commerce, the Chinese immigrants withdrew into a society largely closed to Anglos and felt little loyalty to such western concepts as game conservation. Their defiance of the shrimping regulations was sullen and persistent.

  Most of what is known of London’s activities as a lawman comes from Tales of the Fish Patrol, his own somewhat heroically ginned-up memoir in the form of adventure stories for juvenile readers. Beginning in 1905, at the height of his fame and sandwiched between The Sea-Wolf and White Fang, its seven stories were published separately before being collected into book form. Melodramatic and vaguely Eurocentric in its action sequences, London nevertheless displays a keen ear for pidgin dialect, and the stories accurately reflect conditions on the bay in 1892.

  In one of the less believable segments of the memoir, London and Charley LeGrant infiltrate the Oakland oyster pirates by posing as thieves themselves. During a dark-of-night raid, the two tow the pirates’ boats away at low tide while the pirates are working the mud flats, leaving them easy and indeed grateful to be arrested as the tide comes back in. This was not a credible charade for London to have pulled off, when less than a year before he had been loudly buying rounds of drinks for the house, and word must have spread like wildfire when he went over to the Fish Patrol. And indeed, this was one case where London did actually tease apart fact from fiction in a letter to the story’s publisher: there had in fact been such a raid, except it was the company watchmen who were stranded on the mud flats as the tide washed in, and “the raid was successful and . . . not one of the pirates was captured.”

  As with all of London’s writing drawn from his own life—and that means most of his output—separating creative warp from factual, contextual weft is the more difficult because that was precisely what created such a tight fabric of story.10 Interestingly, this is the only one of the Tales of the Fish Patrol that concerns the oyster piracy with which he was intimately familiar. In addition to the illegal shrimp netting by the Chinese, other stories describe the apprehension of Greek sailors who set illegal salmon lines. Throughout the stories, London’s nautical narration clips along under full sail, but whether because it was early in his career or because he was writing for a youthful audience, the characters are simplistic, and they spout slang-laden dialogue that does more to advance plot and reinforce non-American stereotypes than it does enrich character or even depict realistic exchanges.

  London’s pro rata share of fines that were levied on poachers he had apprehended was paltry compared to his take as an oyster pirate, and his contributions to his parents fell off. John London and Flora moved into a tiny, tatty cottage built of lumber salvaged from dismantled recreational buildings from Badger Park—where, ironically, Johnny London as a boy had set up bowling pins. Jack’s failure to make up for his stepfather’s inability to provide for the family surely lent an element of despair to his drinking, although to outward appearances he still bent the elbow in hearty male bonding with his new mates in the Fish Patrol—and he quickly discovered that they drank every bit as hard as the oyster pirates.

  An important turning point in his life occurred one night after a Herculean toot. Weaving his way down the wharf, he boarded a handy boat out near the channel to sleep it off, but then lost his footing and plunged overboard, where the sloughing tide carried him rapidly away. London was suddenly enveloped in disgust at the turns of his life thus far—unloved and forced to menial labor, shown through books a great sense of life and its possibilities, and then denied that life for his own squalid existence. And this was what he had come to: a stumbling teenage drunk who didn’t even like to drink, but that was the price of admission to the camaraderie of men who would have howled and scoffed had they but known of his love of poetry and literature. A surreal sort of calm swept over him as the current took him down the Carquinez Straits, making it seem almost poetically appropriate that his wastrel’s tale should come to such an end, and he oddly did not mind the shore lights slipping farther into the distance; he floated, weeping, waiting for the waters to close over him.

  Four hours in the cold bay sobered him up, and with sobriety came a resurgence of his will not just to live, but to have great adventures and triumph. And with this unstoppable animal instinct to fight for survival came the reality that he very likely was going to die. The swirl of currents in the lower straits was lethal; he was aware of the vicious riptide off Mare Island with its pathetic hulk of the Independence, and before it could suck him under he shucked his clothes and, though exhausted, began stroking for the middle of the channel. Fighting, ardently convinced that he wanted to live, becoming acutely aware of the coldness of the water and of the numberless slaps of salt water in the growing chop he had already swallowed, a rapidly failing Jack London was plucked from the tide at dawn by a Greek salmon fisherman who happened by on his way into nearby Vallejo.

  London quit the Fish Patrol, adding that experience to his growing résumé of adventurous employment, and left the San Francisco oyster industry to choke in the sewage and industrial pollution that was increasingly fouling the bay.11 Restless over what to do with himself now, he returned to Oakland, his visible life resuming its slide into delinquency of drinking and slumming as his deeper self pondered the next move.

  He was around the shabby London cottage irregularly, angering his mother, who needed his income, and troubling his increasingly disabled stepfather, who worried over the boy’s future. Jack London loved sailing; the thrill of man against water had been the best thing about both oyster pirating and working for the law. He had been telling Heinold that he wanted to put to sea, but when it came time to act, he moved in the opposite direction: for $10 he and a friend agreed to sail a stolen and recovered boat from Oakland deep into the inland delta to Port Costa. When the boat’s rightful owner stiffed them for the reward, they made off with the boat instead, eluding capture by sailing up the Sacramento River. They came across a gang of youthful hoboes skinny-dipping in the river near Sacramento. Suddenly fascinated by such a freewheeling lifestyle, London sent his friend on his way in the stolen boat and briefly took up life on the road as a tramp.

  The other boys dubbed him “Sailor Kid,” and for a brief lark he traveled with them so far inland as to cross the Sierra Nevada—a new sight indeed for such a coastal youth—and, it was said, he learned the essentials of rolling hapless immigrants for clothing or petty cash. The thrill of running with a gang soon wore off, for in its reduction it promised the same pointless end, prison or a violent death, as had oyster pirating. He gained skills that served him in future tramping adventures, but for the present he returned to the Oakland waterfront and the comfort of its familiar, if not uplifting, circumstances. He dallied with one and then another of West Oakland’s collections of thugs, the Boo Gang and the Sporting Life Gang, but finding himself ill at ease with them, regularly returned to Young Scratch Nelson and the wharf rats clustered about Heinold’s saloon, now renamed Heinold’s First and Last Chance for its position at the departure point on the wharf, where travelers could have their first drink upon arriving from across the bay or their last drink before departing.

  During the 1892 election season, London endured another tussle with alcohol that was in its way as grave a warning as when he had fallen overboard into the Carquinez Straits. He was loafing, penniless, about the Overland House, when an oyster pirate he knew called Joe Goose entered on a mission to round up men to fill out a torchlight parade at the Hancock Fire Brigade. The whiskey, as much as they could drink, was free to all who would come. In company with Young Scratch and others, they were herded onto a train for Hayward, a city a few miles in from the eastern shore of the Bay, fifteen miles southeast of Oakland. Once there, they cooperatively donned red shirts and fire helmets, and paraded with lighted torches for the local politicians who were supplying the booze. And they got drunk beyond description.

  The parade’s sponsors were not about to risk a horde of drunken wharf rats rampaging through Hayward, and quickly herded
the crowd back onto the train. Dizzy and hyperventilating, London was beginning to show the symptoms of acute alcohol poisoning, and in a panic he tried to flee, falling down with each attempt to run, to a chorus of guffaws from the rest. Young Scratch finally carried him onto the train. Short of breath in his seat, London began clawing at a window and failing to open it—it was screwed shut—he seized someone’s torch and broke the glass in a desperate bid for fresh air. Young Scratch thought he was trying to throw himself from the train and attempted to restrain him, but London resisted with all the violence his drunkenness could summon. A general brawl ensued, and London was knocked out cold.

  If London’s 1913 roman à clef of his struggle against alcohol, John Barleycorn , tells the truth without varnish, and there is a general agreement among his biographers that in this case it does, the incident shook him badly. “I often think that was the nearest to death I have ever been,” he wrote. “I was scorching up, burning alive internally, in an agony of fire and suffocation, and I wanted air—I madly wanted air.” And then all was blackness until he awoke again, seventeen hours later. With time and sobriety to reflect, he concluded that this could not go on.

  3

  THE SEAL HUNTER

  Just a short time in the California Fish Patrol convinced Jack London that greater adventures must await him beyond the horizon. The day before his seventeenth birthday he announced to Johnny Heinold that he intended to go to sea—“before the mast,” an expression that spiced his plan with a touch of Herman Melville and Richard Henry Dana and romance.