Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  The early 1900s were militaristic in any event; high officers were lionized and news of wars and imperial conflict were followed closely. The obsession only increased after the United States helped itself to an empire following the Spanish-American War. During the spring of 1904 a new conflict drew the world’s notice. In the Far East, the storied “Hermit Kingdom” of Korea, no longer virile enough to maintain a separate existence, had become a contested hors d’oeuvre for the imperial appetites of Japan and Russia. It had been just over thirty years since Japan’s wealthy lords had overthrown the burdensome shogunate and restored the emperor. In that time they amazed the Western world with the speed with which they gained the modern industrial muscle that they were now keen to flex. Russia was just beginning to grow into its vast geography and had recently developed a Pacific port at Vladivostok, though it was iced over for much of the year. Anxious for an ice-free port, they had pressured a weakened China into leasing them Port Arthur, on the Liaotung Peninsula at the head of the Yellow Sea, and west of Korea. Japan had controlled the peninsula through a puppet king since whipping China in a war in 1895, and felt threatened when the Russians began building a railroad spur across Manchuria to consolidate their hold on the port.

  Increasingly it looked like war between Japan and Russia. William Randolph Hearst, who had relished his role in whipping up public opinion in favor of the Spanish-American War, prepared to send correspondents to the Orient, even as other Western journals also began lining up reporters to cover the conflict. Jack London was courted by Harper’s, Collier’s, and the New York Herald, but Hearst, for whose San Francisco Examiner London had taken many assignments, made him the best offer.

  In a rush to sail, London hurried The Sea-Wolf to completion, assigning to Sterling and Charmian his literary power of attorney to edit the manuscript as they saw fit to get it into production, serialized in Century and published by Macmillan. He also arranged with Brett to send his monthly stipend to Bess, their estrangement notwithstanding. London packed the manuscript off to Brett on January 6, 1904, and most of The Crowd saw him off the next day as he embarked for Yokohama aboard the S.S. Siberia, brawny new workhorse of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company.

  American built with two black oval funnels towering 108 feet above the deck, the Siberia was the class of the Pacific Mail fleet—fifty feet shorter but a thousand tons heavier (and therefore five knots slower) than the Majestic, which had taken him to England a year and a half before. She boasted first-class accommodations for three hundred, including on this passage much of the American and some of the British press corps dispatched to cover the impending bloodbath. So expectant were the reporters of recording carnage that they began referring to themselves as the Vultures. A couple of them would become London’s lifelong friends. Special among these were Robert L. Dunn, who was to cover the war for Collier’s after they were unable to procure London, and Dunn’s photographer Jimmy Hare, and Ed Winship, who with his wife, Ida, later became frequent guests at the ranch London would later own.

  During the week’s crossing to a stop in Honolulu, London celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday by coming down with a savage case of “la grippe,” probably influenza. He passed the siege not in his cabin but mostly in a deck chair, delirious with fever for a day. “Oh, how my bones ache, even now,” he wrote Charmian. “And what wild dreams I had!” Apart from the illness, the trip was enjoyable. “The weather is perfect. So is the steamer.” Traveling on Hearst’s bank account, the angry socialist did not find the classy accommodations too unbearable. “Sit at the Captain’s table, and all the rest—you know.”8

  His lingering illness did not prevent London from taking a dip at Waikiki and attending a concert at the Hawaiian Hotel during their brief layover, but soon after resuming the voyage something worse than the flu befell him. While taking part in a deck sport that involved broad-jumping from a height of three and a half feet, his left foot landed on a piece of wood the diameter of a broom-stick. He fell, rupturing the tendons in the inner ankle and spraining the outer ankle so badly he was immobilized for nearly three days.

  Even in pain, he was a favorite of the press corps, and his stateroom was filled with well-wishers from six in the morning until eleven at night. “As a rule there were three or four,” he wrote Charmian, “and very often twice as many. I had thought, when the accident happened, that I should have plenty of time for reading; but I was not left alone long enough to read a line.” On the third day Percival Phillips, the correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, began carrying him on deck for some fresh air each day, and by the sixth day he was scooting about on crutches, albeit painfully. A gale had begun to blow, giving him a chance to admire his ship’s seakeeping qualities. “Siberia is behaving splendidly. . . . I hope war isn’t declared for at least a month after I arrive in Japan—will give my ankle a chance to strengthen.”9

  Once in Tokyo, the Western reporters were bivouacked in the Imperial Hotel to await the Japanese government’s arrangements to transport them on to Korea. They were joined by the dean of American war correspondents, the rock-jawed Richard Harding Davis, who had covered conflicts in Latin America and the Balkans, and who most recently had reported on the Spanish-American and Boer wars. Davis was also a popular author of stories for boys, a station he shared with London, and the two struck up a congenial rapport.

  Japan may have seemed quaint and exotic to ethnocentric Europeans and Americans, but the Japanese military was years ahead of their Western counterparts in the art of railroading journalists. While treating the newsmen with exaggerated hospitality, the military liaisons came up with excuse after road-block after feigned misunderstanding until it was clear to all that the Japanese had no intention of allowing them near the front.

  The deceit dawned on them slowly. “Our experience with other armies had led us to believe that officers and gentlemen speak the truth,” wrote Davis highly, “that men with titles of nobility . . . do not lie. In that we were mistaken.” London’s assessment was simpler. The Japanese, he later told Charmian, “settled the war correspondent forever—and they proved that he is a dispensable feature of warfare.”10

  The first to figure out that the press corps was being sandbagged was Collier’s Robert Dunn. “Politely the War Office gave permits but refused to sign them, beguiling us with promises and banquet speeches about international brotherhood. All we got was secrecy and censorship and propaganda.”11 Suspecting that the Japanese were about to strike the Russians without the formality of declaring war, Dunn abruptly disappeared from the Imperial Hotel to make his own way to Korea. In a flash, London reached the same conclusion and followed suit. Although Japan had controlled Korea in effect since winning the Sino-Japanese war of 1895, they maintained the fiction for diplomatic reasons that Korea, “ruled” by its own emperor, was an independent country. Unless they wanted to give the lie to that subterfuge, they could not forbid Western journalists from going there, once the reporters escaped their official clutches in Japan itself.

  Hearst was paying him to cover the war, and that was what he meant to do. London spent the entire day of January 28 bound for Kobe, some two hundred miles to the southwest, in a train car whose interior temperature he read to be forty degrees. He boarded an express train, traversing the country to its southwestern extremity at Nagasaki on Kyushu Island, where he hoped to catch a steamer across to Korea, but no transport was available there. He had to back-track to the town of Moji, on the north shore of the island, where he intended to catch some form of passage across the Sea of Japan. Like any tourist with time on his hands, he began to take in the sights. Unknown to London as he snapped idle photographs—peasants and merchants, four coolies carrying a large bale of cotton, children playing—Moji was a fortified area, on the strategic strait that separated Kyushu from Honshu, and the Japanese were vigilant to the threat of espionage. Russians were white; London was white, and the spectacle of this white man snapping off pictures left, right, and center resulted in his rapid and unc
eremonious arrest.

  London sent an urgent cable to Dick Davis in Tokyo, who was famous for his entrée into and skills among the diplomatic crowd. As a result, even as London was arraigned in the Kokura District Court, rescue was on its way in the form of the American minister, Lloyd Griscom, who would spring him from the Shimonaseki prison. The local authorities quickly became aware that London was not a spy but as a matter of saving face, London was convicted of espionage and then sentenced only to a small fine and loss of his camera. His old insistence on justice, however, would not allow him to let go of the camera, and he protested vigorously. Griscom obtained an appointment with Foreign Minister Baron Jutaro Komura, who insisted that under Japanese law, weapons used in a crime became government property. With a lusty twinkle, Griscom asked Komura whether, if he could name one exception to that rule, the innocent London’s camera would be returned. Komura, who was a graduate of Harvard Law School and did not think he was in over his head, agreed, at which Griscom triumphantly said, “Rape.” Komura issued the order.

  London surmised that something important must be brewing, for the steamship Keigo Maru, on which he was to sail to Korea on February 8, was commandeered at the last moment by the Japanese government to carry troops. He was put off the ship and just had time to break into a full run, lugging his trunk, for a small steamer that was just casting off lines, bound for Fusan. He was taken aboard but got drenched in rescuing his trunk from a plunge into the icy bay. Fusan (now Pusan) was Korea’s principal port, on the southeast coast directly opposite Moji, about 150 miles across the narrowest part of the Sea of Japan. In crossing, they passed the top entrance of the Strait of Tsushima, where a crushing Japanese naval victory over the Russians would settle the conflict later in the year. At Fusan, London switched to a puffing little steamer no larger than the Sophia Sutherland, which headed south and then west around the tip of the Korean peninsula to Makpo, so badly overloaded that she limped into the port listing thirty degrees to starboard. There this vessel, too, was seized by Japanese authorities, leaving London well short of his ultimate destination of Chemulpo, the former name for Inchon, the port and gateway to the major city of Seoul.

  Now all but certain that action was about to commence, London chartered a local junk to continue up the west coast, but instead entered a different danger that he was lucky to survive. London, his crew of three Koreans, and five Japanese passengers, each group mutually unintelligible to the other two—set off in a blasting February storm of ice and snow. The crew brought the boat into the little port of Kun San minus a mast and with a broken rudder, but still floating. Treated that night as a celebrity in the town, London was stripped, bathed, and shaved by five local girls, while anyone who was curious—including the police chief and the mayor—peeked in for a glimpse of the white man. It was virtually the first and last congenial experience he had with Korean culture (except for once allowing a man to watch as he removed the upper bridge from his mouth before retiring—an act that quickly netted a crowd that dissolved in hysterics as they demanded encores of putting in his teeth and taking them out again).

  No other junk being available, London chartered a sampan and continued his journey north up the coast into the teeth of the same wretched storm, only now in an open boat, with a Japanese crew that didn’t understand a word he said. Lucky to have survived the last leg after the boat was dismasted and the rudder disabled, now he was even luckier to survive the exposure, sheltering only under rice mats in temperatures well below zero, with only a small charcoal box to warm themselves. But there is a language among seamen that needs no translation; they did not need to explain to him what they were doing and London watched with admiration as the sailors brought the sampan into a small port, riding the flood tide over an obstructing reef to enter the harbor. The Japanese had closed the port of Chemulpo to large ships, but London glided right in on his native sampan, and there found Robert Dunn, who wrote that when London landed, “I did not recognize him. He was a physical wreck. His ears were frozen; his fingers were frozen; his feet were frozen. He said that he didn’t mind his condition so long as he got to the front.”12

  Upon their arrival in Seoul on February 24, London assembled a kind of household around himself, consisting of a Japanese interpreter named Yamada, a Korean valet named Manyoungi, and two young grooms to care for the three packhorses and two saddle horses he felt that he required to do his job properly. English-speaking Koreans were not as rare as one might think, for the country had been competitively evangelized for decades by both Catholic and Protestant missionaries, but Manyoungi’s formal dress as an English gentleman’s gentleman, and his habit of addressing London as “master,” began to take some of the starch out of London’s socialism.

  Robert Dunn’s suspicion that the Japanese were preparing a surprise attack with no declaration of war was borne out on February 4, 1904. Frustrated by the lack of progress in negotiations, they struck not at Korea, but at Russia’s naval base at Port Arthur in Manchuria to remove the Russian Pacific fleet from the contest at the beginning. Then they began disembarking four separate armies to consolidate their control of the Korean Peninsula. They defeated the Russians in repeated engagements, pushing the front so far north that Dunn and London, when they set out on a 180-mile trek to Ping Yang (now Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea), which they reached on March 4, that city was already well to the rear of the action. The Japanese army had closed the roads to all but military traffic, so the two Americans slogged along iced-over rice paddies. The Koreans treated them hospitably, but the reporters had to angle to enter a town before any Japanese troops in the area might arrive, on pain of having nowhere to sleep. When they did find a place, London and Dunn would catch one glancing at the other and burst into giggle fits at the sheer lunacy of what they had gotten themselves into. “If we ever meet again,” London told him when they finally parted, “my memory will be your laughing at me and my laughing at you, and your knowing, and my knowing you know I am.”13

  Although London always maintained that the five months spent trying to cover the Russo-Japanese War were a wasted blank in his career, at the time he was living the adventure, he found it and the companionship of the half dozen or so other journalists who eventually straggled into Korea to be so vital and invigorating that he did not even have to drink. He had liquor in his kit, and in a certain city that he didn’t name he took to visiting a certain woman daily for the subtlety of her cocktails, but in the field, once more a man among men, he shared his whiskey socially but had no trouble maintaining his sobriety.14

  Dunn’s and London’s reward for showing the pluck and enterprise to have traveled as far as Ping Yang was to be nabbed by Japanese troops and detained by the Japanese Consul for a week. Upon their release they were sternly warned to return to where they came from; London and Dunn split up, the latter returning to Seoul to plead for permission to do their jobs, while London found his way to the fighting front in the far north of the country—for which he was apprehended and spent four days in military jail. As it turned out, the complaint against them for having too great freedom to travel had been lodged by the Western reporters still in the hotel in Tokyo, who were missing the story.

  When the officials finally relented and agreed to let correspondents see something to report, a chosen delegation, which did not include such prominent reporters as Dick Davis, was brought over in a group and allowed to accompany General Count Tamemoto Kuroki’s First Army and witness an assault from across the Yalu River valley. The Japanese had stacked the field with 50,000 troops to pummel 5,000 Russians, so there was little chance they would lose. “Believe me,” London wrote to Brett, “it has all the appearance now (so far as we are concerned) of a personally conducted Cook’s tourist proposition.”15 The reporters’ vantage point was the walls of the hilltop Wiju Castle; no fighting was visible, although they believed they could discern the distant boom of field artillery. Intense vigil through field glasses finally revealed a muzzle flash, and with all fo
cusing their attention on that point they were able to record the time between flash and boom, and calculated the battle to be raging some two and a half miles away. Their disgust only compounded when they learned that their viewing spot would not be repeated; their conducting officer had made a mistake—they were not supposed to have been allowed so close to the action.

  Nevertheless, London saw enough to file stories with Hearst, albeit with a proportion of “filler” and ginned-up text that would have made Hearst, the master of yellow journalism, proud. “Perfect rot I am turning out,” he confessed to Charmian on March 29. “It’s not war correspondence at all, and the Japs are not allowing us to see any war.” Watching a column of troops rumble by, with officers stopping in his quarters to shake hands and leave their cards, became JAPANESE SUPPLIES RUSHED TO FRONT BY MAN AND BEAST, filed from Wiju on April 16. On May 1 he managed to cross the Yalu River into China, filing GIVING BATTLE TO RETARD ENEMY from the city of Antung. Mocking his own dispatches, he wrote to Charmian Kittredge, “IMPORTANT! ANOTHER VEXATION! Just caught five body lice on my undershirt. That is, I discovered them, Manyoungi picked them off. . . . Lice drive me clean crazy. I am itching all over. I am sure, every second, that a score of them are on me. And how under the sun am I to write!”16 His change of clothes was watched by a Korean noble, who offered the use of his house, but now that other Western journalists had begun to trickle in, they were required to stay together where they were ordered.