Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  Heinold tried to persuade him to go back to school, but upon finding his arguments wasted he assayed the possibilities in the fleet laid up nearby. “The Sophia Sutherland was in port then, just bein’ fixed up for a whalin’ and sealin’ voyage to Japan and the Bering Sea. I knew the skipper pretty well. He was a big hard-faced ‘blue-noser’ from Nova Scotia. . . . I think he was Irish-Scotch.” The name of the vessel’s captain was also Sutherland, so presumably she was named for wife or daughter.1 He was the owner as well, nearly eighty, but his son managed the ship’s day-to-day operation.

  Heinold recommended London to Sutherland but was turned down flat when it came out that London was just turning seventeen. Over the course of an hour Heinold wore the captain down, detailing London’s skill at handling his skiff, insisting that he was cut from a different cloth than others hanging around the bar, and hinting that he might turn out badly if he shipped out under a lesser captain. Heinold did not recall it in his short memoir, but he likely also told him of London’s local fame as Prince of the Oyster Pirates turned lawman. The sale that Heinold began, London completed, impressing Sutherland with his maturity and determination.2

  On January 20, 1893, barely a week after his seventeenth birthday, Jack London took leave of his parents. He was pricked only by the look of wistfulness in the eyes of his long-suffering stepfather, whom he loved and whose failing health did not guarantee that he would live to see a reunion. London signed aboard the Sophia Sutherland, a three-masted sealing schooner, topsail rigged, bound for the Bonin Islands, Japan, and then seal hunting in the Bering Sea. Gently swaybacked and of only modest displacement (conflicting accounts of her size average a hundred tons), her raked prow nevertheless had cut through a disreputable past. Apparently she had sailed under three other names, or more, smuggling and even “blackbirding”—kidnapping south sea island natives as slave labor for copra plantations.3

  Three days later the Sophia Sutherland passed through the Golden Gate into the open Pacific. The precocious youth who watched the strait pass by and then drop astern could not have been more acutely conscious that he was entering a new life.

  Like many boys who grow into their adult features precociously, he had been a homely child. Now at seventeen the ugly duckling of a boy had blossomed into a youth of head-turning beauty: light brown curly hair, large blue eyes with long lashes, and delicate features, but with a physique honed by constant labor and a constitution to match.

  Banking on his experience at handling the sloops Razzle Dazzle and Reindeer , London signed aboard the much larger sealer as an able seaman, a rank that normally required three years’ experience and an age of nineteen. This presumptuousness was sure to cause him trouble with the seasoned and unforgiving older sailors who would pounce on any excuse, any shirked task or poorly tied knot, to make this pretty boy’s life a misery. Yet from the first day at sea, London determined to give no man cause to fault him; he quickly assimilated the names of ropes and knots that were new to him; he raced aloft without the least complaint whenever ordered; he was the first on deck for his watch and the last to go below after making certain that nothing assigned to him was left undone.

  Still, the custom of the sea was that boys serve older sailors, and some of the crew of twenty-two were determined that London should pay his dues. His chief tormentor was a looming, ham-fisted Swede who went by Big Red John. Their altercation came when it was Big Red John’s turn at “peggy-day,” washing dishes and setting the fo’c’sle back in order after meals. Resenting doing chores while London was occupied only in weaving a rope mat, the older man ordered him to refill the molasses. London refused once, twice, and then three times, telling him to do it himself.

  Every man in the cabin saw the fight coming. In a rage, Big Red John dropped a stack of dishes and moved to backhand him, but London lashed out with a punch that landed squarely between the Swede’s eyes. Not for nothing had London observed the technique of Old Scratch Nelson back in Oakland: go for vital damage and end the fight quickly. Dodging one powerful but clumsy punch, London leapt on the Swede’s back and began choking him. Big Red John did everything he could to dislodge London from his back, running him into bulkheads, cracking his head onto the beams that supported the deck above them, which dislodged the slush lamp and sent it crashing down. The seventeen-year-old took a terrible beating but Big Red John couldn’t see it, and London’s only way out was to squeeze harder and harder, bloodied but conscious of the sweet prize at the end if he could hang on: respect. As the Swede began to weaken, London cried out a curiously, almost comically boylike demand: “Will you promise to let me alone? Eh—will you promise?”

  Big Red John, as London later said in an interview, “purple in the face, gurgled an assent, and when that viselike grip on his throat lessened, reeled and stumbled to his knees like a felled bullock.” At the instant of victory the other ten men of the fo’c’sle crowded around him solicitously, their admiration palpable—a man among men, at last.4

  Not all the establishment of dominance in the fo’c’sle revolved around menial labor, and it was aboard the Sophia Sutherland that Jack began to form his understanding of sexuality as a force of nature that would find expression without regard to social convention or taboo. The forward cabin of the Sophia Sutherland housed a dozen men, ten of them hardened seamen, and two, including Jack, inexperienced youths whom the older sailors sought to victimize. London hinted at it, apparently with chilling clarity, many years later in Manhattan, while walking with Michael Monahan, editor of an impoverished belles-lettres periodical called Papyrus, and journalist Joseph Noel, to whom he had licensed dramatic rights to one of his novels.

  After an evening of drinking whiskey and listening to Chopin and Rachmaninoff at Victor Herbert’s studio, London led Monahan and Noel on a drinking tour from one pub to another. At one point they passed a clot of rouged homosexuals loitering about the Flatiron Building at Fifth Avenue and Broadway, their principal gathering location, and Monahan lamented the perversion of Rimbaud, who, he said, had been led astray by troops in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.

  London asked particularly whether it was soldiers who had lured Rimbaud into same-sex activity, Monahan confirmed that it was, and London volunteered, “Sailors are that way, too. Prisoners in cells are also that way. Whenever you herd men together and deny them women their latent sex perversions come to the surface. It’s a perfectly natural result of a natural cause.” He did not say whether he ever participated aboard the sealing schooner or, in later years, in jail in Buffalo or snowbound with his fellows in Alaska, but he did nonplus Noel with a description of homosexual acts that Noel characterized as “brutal, frank, disgusting.”

  In passing the fey men in mascara—the third sex, as Noel called them in a reference to the eunuchs in India—Monahan declared, “I’d hang them all.” London’s rejoinder was more even-tempered. “A man should love women, and plenty of them,” to keep from falling into such a state. In his view of the world, a view that later gave him the naturalistic, nonjudgmental voice of Call of the Wild, men denied one usage of sex would simply turn to an alternative.5 That the alternative was practiced in dark corners of the Sophia Sutherland there can be little doubt, but whether London accepted this as a requisite of being a man among men in this womanless environment—his frank exposition of it to Michael Monahan suggests that he may have, but his full-bore heterosexuality in the company of women may suggest otherwise—we don’t know.

  London’s cheek in posing as an able seaman was finally forgiven in his eagerness and assiduity in accomplishing every task given him. Another crewman who had also signed aboard for an able seaman’s wage, a Midwesterner of about forty whom the other men called the Bricklayer, was less fortunate. As it became apparent that he had no idea what to do or how to do it, it was just as well for him that he took to his bunk and, the worse for him, entered the final stages of consumption. He was also regarded as an exceptionally vile human being, and the crew’s contempt for him was not s
oftened by any hint of compassion for a dying man. The sooner he expired, the better for them, and when the Bricklayer did die, he was sewn into his own blankets and weighted with coal.

  Captain Sutherland lost his place in reading the burial service, at which his son seized the book and recited it, rapidly and without feeling, and the body was dumped overboard. London at seventeen watched the shroud disappear astern, and understood what a lonely place the sea could be. Even so, he did not waste a moment in claiming as his own, against all sailing superstition, the Bricklayer’s drier bunk with better light for reading. He had brought books—Moby Dick, obviously, and Anna Karenina, a useful treatise on codes of behavior, and consequences.

  The Sophia Sutherland proceeded west along the southern sea lanes without stopping in Hawaii, but London could make out the islands’ peaks on the horizon. Then the ship steered west-northwest to her first destination, the Bonin Islands. For several hundred miles due south of Tokyo, a thin string of volcanic islands marks the western edge of the Izu Trench. At the southern end, two-thirds of the way to the Marianas, lie the Volcano Islands, including Iwo Jima. North of them, five hundred miles south of Tokyo, is the group called the Bonins, a dozen small, mountainous islands totaling only forty square miles, cloaked in subtropical jungle. The islands were uninhabited when they were discovered first by the Spanish in 1543 and separately by the Japanese fifty years later; in fact the name “Bonin” was a corruption of the Japanese word for “uninhabited.”

  During nineteenth-century imperial expansion, England and the United States quarreled over claims to the islands. The British based theirs on a visit by H.M.S. Blossom in 1827 and the Americans based their own on first settlement, as their descendants were still resident on the islands, although now outnumbered by Japanese immigrants who began arriving in 1861. Based on this plurality, and the islands’ proximity to their homeland, the Japanese government managed to negotiate recognition of sovereignty with the western powers in 1876. The group’s main island, Chichi Jima, became an important provisioning stop for Western vessels.

  The Sophia Sutherland’s elderly owner-captain was a teetotaler (perhaps one reason that Johnny Heinold had sought him out) and the voyage was a dry one. Fifty-one days at sea, seven weeks plus two days, and Jack London was, apart from the captain, likely the only man on board who was not famished for alcohol. By the time they dropped anchor in the small, mountain-girdled harbor at Chichi Jima, dotted with some twenty other sealers and whalers lying at anchor, Oakland’s dockside poison had been thoroughly cleansed from London’s system. His every cell quivered with the excitement of adventure, of a dream realized, as though he were finally escaping into the pages of one of Ina Coolbrith’s library books.

  Since brawling his way to the respect of the other men in the fo’c’sle by besting Big Red John, London had become best friends with two in particular, a Swede named Victor and a Norwegian named Axel. When they moved about together, the rest of the crew called them the Three Sports, and they determined to explore the island. Taking one of the schooner’s boats they set out for the sugar-white beach that fronted the settlement of Futami. From the water Victor pointed out a path that, after mounting a bare volcanic hillside, they could trace into the distance, rising higher and higher flanked by palms and flowers. Following this path to wherever it might lead was their first goal. The breeze was offshore, and London filled his lungs with the scents of cedar and sandalwood, glorying in the moment he would set foot on his first foreign sand.

  They pulled their boat ashore but, walking into the beachfront town, discovered it in near pandemonium. “Several hundred riotous seamen from all the world, drinking prodigiously, singing prodigiously, dancing prodigiously—and all on the main street to the scandal of a helpless handful of Japanese police.” London’s Scandinavian companions decided to have a drink before locating that verdant path into the mountains, and since alcohol was still the ticket to acceptance, he joined them. He had no idea what local distillate they were drinking, but “it was hot as fire, pale as water, and quick as death with its kick.”6

  The binge quickly became the focus of the day. Victor and Axel met one acquaintance after another, and every reunion, every story of old times had to be recounted over an additional shot. By mid-afternoon Victor was ragingly, violently drunk, and London and Axel barely managed to get him back out to the ship, which he nearly tore apart before his mates managed to get him undressed and into his bunk.

  Still determined to sample island culture, London and Axel returned to Futami and looked up a Japanese house of entertainment with its sliding doors and paper walls, and engaged some local musicians. No sooner had they arranged themselves in this more quiet activity than Victor found them again, crashing through a wall and scattering the group.

  From this point London gave himself over to the inevitable, and the day dissolved into a staggering binge from which he could recall only an inchoate sequence of impressions. “I remember, somewhere, sitting in a circle of Japanese fishermen, kanaka boat-steerers from our own vessels, and a young Danish sailor fresh from cowboying in the Argentine with a penchant for native customs and ceremonials.” In the swirl of memory he could recall politely drinking sake from tiny porcelain cups, and English runaways of his own age weeping from homesickness. When he awoke he was lying in the door of the harbor pilot’s house, his money and his watch gone, along with his shoes, belt, and coat, with the pilot’s wife bending over him in concern that he might not wake at all. After ten days in the Bonins the Sophia Sutherland weighed anchor and cleaved out of the harbor, with London still wistful that he had never explored that palm- and flower-fringed path into the mountains.

  For the next three months the schooner plied her deadly trade. In following a herd of seals she would deploy six small boats, in one of which London was the oarsman; rifles and shotguns would bang throughout the day, and on gathering again at the mother ship the sailors would skin the carcasses and salt and store the skins, then wash the boats of blood before the next day’s hunt. Steadily they worked their way north.

  As the sun rose on April 10, 1893, the Sophia Sutherland was within sight of Cape Erimo, the prominent, triangular southern tip of Hokkaido. She hove to and launched all six boats, each with a crew of three. They had ventured far from the main seal herd, but there were enough seals nearby to make for a good hunt. London, pulling at his oars, heard one mate remark on the beauty of the morning; his steersman recited a famous dark aphorism: “Red sun in the morning, sailor take warning.”7 By mid-afternoon a dozen seals lay lifeless in the bottom of London’s boat, but the weather had been deteriorating, a constant wind increasing from the west-northwest.

  The schooner had worked her way to the lee of the boats to give them a swift run home, and at three o’clock they saw the return flag fluttering aloft. The sea turned from green to leaden as dark storm clouds rolled in, and the steersmen were challenged to keep their sterns to the growing swell or be swamped. Back aboard the schooner the falling barometer told all they needed to know about the coming night. Haste was made to skin the kill and secure the boats.

  With darkness came the roaring terror of the typhoon. Mountainous waves, driving spray, all hands on deck securing gear that had broken loose, shouting at the top of their lungs without being heard, alert not to wash overboard in the crashing seas as rescue would have been impossible. There was no choice but to run before the storm; twice they shortened sail, the ship so hard to control that each man’s turn, or “trick,” at the wheel lasted only an hour before he stumbled below, exhausted. It was seven in the morning when London was called from the fo’c’sle to take his trick at the wheel. If ever he faced a moment of truth, this was it. Throughout the voyage he had done his job, done more than his share, and earned acceptance as an able seaman two years before it would even be legal to call himself one. But now all his greenness, all his inexperience, was on full display with the lives of the crew in his hands. The sailing master watched him grip the wheel, watched him for t
wenty minutes before feeling reassured that London could handle the job and not get them all killed. Then he went below, leaving London alone and responsible.

  “Not a stitch of canvas was set,” he wrote of it later. “We were running before [the storm] under bare poles, yet the schooner fairly tore along. The seas were all of an eighth of a mile apart, and the wind snatched the whitecaps from their summits, filling the air so thick with driving spray it was impossible to see more than two waves at a time. [She] was almost unmanageable, rolling her rail under to starboard and to port, veering and yawing anywhere from south-east to south-west, and threatening, when the huge seas lifted under her quarter, to broach to. Had she broached to, she would ultimately have been reported lost with all hands and no tidings.” He fought to keep her stern to the swell, but even then, “once we were pooped. I saw it coming, and, half-drowned, with tons of water crushing me, I checked the schooner’s rush to broach to. At the end of the hour, sweating and played out, I was relieved. But I had done it!”8 The typhoon roared over them quickly, and by morning, conditions had lightened dramatically. London’s turn at the wheel was, and remained, the proudest hour of his life.

  As spring wore on, the Sophia Sutherland headed into the Bering Sea for more seals, an orgy of gore, sunup to sundown. The ship was little more than a floating charnel house in which a man of any sensitivity had no place. London later memorialized it in The Sea-Wolf, the decks “slippery with fat and blood, the scuppers running red, masts, ropes, and rails splattered . . . and the men, like butchers plying their trade, naked and red of arm and hand, hard at work with ripping and flensing knives, removing the skins from the pretty creatures they had killed.” The meat was never eaten, the blubber never boiled for oil; the seal carcasses were thrown overboard. All, apparently, save one.