Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  “We didn’t discover all our handicaps at once,” recalled Johnson. Thus they were well out to sea when the full extent of their predicament became clear. The boat was leaking dangerously. The two lumber scows in San Francisco Bay had crushed her into a bean shape; the hull leaked, the bulkheads leaked—most of their three months’ provisions were spoiled by either sea water or gasoline leaking out of the ruptured tanks—cabbages, beets, turnips, carrots, fruit—much of it had to be pitched overboard. Her lopsided shape also made her sluggish to steer; the sea anchor was ineffective, and she would not heave to. The main engine of seventy horsepower had dismounted itself from its plate and lay useless. The toilet stopped working. The five-horsepower engine ran the pumps constantly, but the cabin that they sucked out during the day sloshed knee-deep by the following morning. After several days the galley floor buckled from the water pressure, and Johnson took to wearing thigh boots to cook the meals. Eames was driven from his cabin by gasoline fumes, which collected so thickly down below that the crew feared striking matches. Their frame of mind was not aided by the discovery that the Snark’s lifeboat was in no better condition than the mother vessel.

  Johnson began the voyage with the fearless daredeviltry of a young London, but during the terror of his second storm at sea he finally expressed despair for their survival. London tut-tutted this and remarked that he figured they were no more than two miles from land. “Where?” asked the incredulous Johnson. “Straight down, Martin,” he said. “Straight down.” Eventually they mastered the worst of the problems and reached a kind of working routine; one photo of hundreds taken on the trip shows London contentedly at the wheel, a book open between his hands. Twenty-seven days after leaving San Francisco London’s navigation proved itself worthy. They passed through the Kaiwi Channel, rounded Diamond Head, and slid into Pearl Harbor, accompanied by two tugboats.

  Access to the mail brought the chance for a quick missive to George Brett, confessing that he was hard up and confused as to where they stood with each other. But he outlined several projects he had in mind for Macmillan, including a collection of short stories about sharks. “I have already gathered much material for work in the future, down here in the Hawaiian Islands.”10 Sensing that London could replay all of his previous Alaska success with new tropical material, Brett responded by sending him $5,000 and a contract for 1908, which London quickly signed and returned with a note of fulsome thanks.

  London had entrusted Ninetta Eames to run his business affairs in his absence, and there was a barrage of affectionate but busy and incredibly detailed letters to her. In addition to keeping his books straight and forwarding such supplies as camera film, she also had to manage his submissions, of which he had always kept meticulous records. In one case he informed her that he had sent a short story, “The House of Pride,” to Collier’s, with her address as the return. If they turned it down, he advised her of his next twelve choices, in order; it finally sold to Pacific Monthly, which was the eleventh on his list. He also undertook an equally vigorous correspondence with Wiget that showed London’s increasing involvement in the minutiae of the ranch.

  Aunt Netta’s management of London’s business affairs was simple compared to the family tangle in which they found themselves: Roscoe Eames, with whom London’s patience had almost exhausted itself, wrote a vituperative letter to Charmian, and London finally turned him out with equal name-calling, “you . . . hopeless, inefficient, wretched creature.” Netta had had her own problems with Roscoe but felt obligated to advocate for the devil, explaining to London that he had always reacted poorly to disorder, but even then if his rest had not been so regularly disturbed, he might have made a better job of it. London was incredulous, citing as only he could whole paragraphs of Uncle Roscoe’s dereliction that had cost him thousands in discovering that “he is no more a sailor than I am an Egyptian dancing girl.” For her part, Netta had been left in the role of dealing with Flora, whom she found to be the last degree of shocking. “That woman is a horror in flesh and blood. I never saw her like. . . . She is horrible, horrible—full of mean innuendoes about the ones she depends upon for her living. . . . Sometimes I feel like choking off the allowance you make just to see her wriggle. . . . I never saw so utterly hopeless a woman. No redeeming trait in her.” “Let me tell you right now,” London answered, “that you have not seen one thousandth part of the real devil that she is.” That London and Aunt Netta could deal with the worst that the other’s family had to offer, and remain affectionate and trusting, was a testament to the durability of their long friendship. She swore he could not truly be the offspring of “that ungrateful hag,” and he allowed that in marrying Roscoe, “now for the first time I appreciate what you have endured.”11

  Fortunately, Honolulu was about more than work. The Londons were celebrities as much there as anywhere among the American population, and for weeks they enjoyed the social whirl, keeping company with the best the city could offer, including Acting Governor Jack Atkinson and Honolulu newspaper publisher Lorrin Thurston, who had been attorney general in the government of Queen Liliuokalani but had conspired in her 1893 overthrow. For much of her time under repair the Snark was careened, so they could not have remained on board in any event; London and Charmian first stayed in a rented tent cabin of four rooms near Waikiki Beach. It was the property of the Seaside Hotel, whose manager, Fred Church, had been a Klondiker and whom London knew well. Subsequently the Londons were lent a romantic, forest-sheltered waterside bungalow with a pier extending over its narrow beach, property of local artist Thomas Hobron, for the remainder of a stay that embraced five months in all. The writing quota never slackened, and during a brief sojourn with Thurston, London began a major new novel, autobiographical, about a sailor and would-be writer named Martin Eden.

  On June 2 London got it into his head that he would attempt surfing. He knew of it from other authors, including Mark Twain, who maintained that only native Hawaiians could master such death-defying esoterica. London acquired a board and attempted for an hour to position himself on a wave, when he was spotted by Alexander Hume Ford, an American-born adventurer who had been on his way to Australia when he tarried a week in Hawaii to see if he could learn surfing, and had dedicated himself to it ever since. He was in the process of founding the Outrigger Canoe Club and applying for a grant from the estate of the late Queen Emma Kaleleonalani to preserve surfing on boards and in canoes as a national heritage. He lectured London clearly and precisely on what he was doing wrong—exactly the kind of discourse that London gave on subjects on which he was knowledgeable, and he listened raptly. Riding a wave was not a question of brute strength, for even the winsome Princess Kaiulani, late uncrowned heiress to Hawaii’s throne, had been an expert surfer. It was timing, and balance, and understanding the physics of the wave. They waded out together and London mounted Hume’s board. At the right instant Hume gave him a powerful shove, and an electrified London rode the wave all the way to the beach. “From that moment,” he wrote, “I was lost.”

  Perhaps never had he been so completely captured by any discovery he had made. Describing surfing in “The Royal Sport,” his prose reached an ecstasy heretofore unknown to him. First he described how puny and insignificant one feels observing the majestic waves.

  And suddenly, out there where a big smoker lifts skyward, rising like a sea-god out of the welter of spume and churning white, on the giddy, toppling, overhanging and downfalling, precarious crest appears the dark head of a man. Swiftly he rises through the rushing white. His black shoulders, his chest, his loins, his limbs—all is abruptly projected on one’s vision. Where but the moment before was only the wide desolation and invincible roar, is now a man, erect, full-statured, not struggling . . . but standing above them all, calm and superb, poised on the giddy summit, his feet planted in the churning foam, the salt rising to his knees, and all the rest of him in the free air and flashing sunlight, and he is flying through the air, flying forward. . . . He is a Mercury, a brown Mercury.
His heels are winged, and in them is the swiftness of the sea.

  He could not help himself; he surfed, and surfed, and surfed, until the tropical sun nearly killed him. A doctor was sent for the next day, who pronounced him the worst case of sunburn he had ever treated. London was bedridden for four days, and a week and a half later he was still pained by enormous blisters. But he was still positively giddy from the experience. “Please,” he begged Charmian through swollen lips, “don’t let me laugh; it hurts too much.” The experience may have contributed to the skin maladies that plagued him through the rest of the tropics, but his writing about surfing in the subsequent The Cruise of the Snark introduced the sport to the world and helped to preserve a Hawaiian patrimony. It was a turning point also in his depiction of native peoples. His exposure to Hawaiians led him to depict them with an identity and a dignity that marked a departure from his previous espousal of a kind of sympathetic racialism.

  With the worst of the Snark’s disabilities now under repair, it was time to fix the crew as well. Roscoe had been sent back to Glen Ellen, and two abortive attempts were made to replace him, the first put forward by George Sterling and summoned to Hawaii at London’s expense, and then one found locally. Both were as bad as Roscoe. Finally London hired a professional mariner, Captain James Langhorne Warren, who proved suitable. Tochigi, beloved as he was, could not tolerate more seasickness and quit, later to attend an Episcopal seminary. To replace him as cabin boy London hired a merry young Hawaiian Japanese, Yoshimatsu Nakata, who remained in the Londons’ service for several years. Finally, Bert Stolz received a letter from his mother, insisting that he return to Stanford. London had once written of him critically that he was as hopeless a shirk as Roscoe, but accepted his manly apology that he had allowed himself to come under Roscoe’s sway. During their time together, Stolz confided that his real reason for coming to Hawaii was to visit his father’s grave. When Bert was six, Oahu County Sheriff Louis Stolz had been shot and killed by a leper who, rather than be separated from his young wife, fled into the mountains, evading capture and exile to the colony on the island of Molokai. London could not have found better plot material in Sinclair Lewis’s trunk of clippings.

  He must have heard the story of Molokai, of its leper colony and its humble Father Damien, long before from Charles Warren Stoddard, who visited the island and its remarkable priest more than once and wrote of them in his Hawaii dispatches. (Stoddard was also not shy about recalling his return to Molokai to resume a sexual affair, to the mortification of the missionaries, with a young Hawaiian boy who lived outside the colony.) And London was reminded of the lepers again when, at a dinner party they gave, one of the guests was the president of the Board of Health, Lucius Pinkham. He had been as zealous in his efforts to remove the stigma from the leper colony as London had been for his socialist cause. “It is time to cease crying ‘Unclean, Unclean,’ to the lepers,” Pinkham had written, “and refraining from painting dark pictures for literary or sensational effect, thus making segregation more cruel than necessary.” 12 If he could get London to visit the island and write favorably of the colony, that alone would accomplish more reform than he could ever do, and he pressed his case vigorously. In this he was backed by another new acquaintance of the Londons, the influential Lorrin Thurston. Intrigued, London agreed to visit the mysterious place.

  They went over on the interisland Noeau on July 2. The lepers’ primary settlement on Molokai was Kalaupapa, and its superintendent was a man who could help Pinkham’s cause with London. John Devine “Jack” McVeigh was a stocky French Canadian of privileged background; in his youth, while seeing the world in the charge of a tutor, he disappeared in Hawaii and went native, eluding capture when relatives came to bring him home. He had been superintendent for five years, during which he transformed the place from an open-air detention camp of drunkenness and despair into as modern a town as it could be. For two days the Londons visited with the residents, practiced with them at their rifle range, and interviewed their doctors at length, and on the Fourth of July McVeigh arranged for the native-style celebration of random antics in fright-masks to pass by the Londons’ door so they could take pictures of them and the town’s two brass bands. London visited with an Anglo patient, a former mariner, who enjoined him to describe the place accurately, not the terrifying hellhole that the world’s press made it out to be. They also visited the grave of the remarkable Father Damien and heard his story from nurses who had worked with him.

  The sojourn on Molokai changed London. The journalist in him prized truth above preexisting assumptions, and as Johnson wrote in his memoir of the voyage, “When we were sailing along the windward side of Molokai on the Snark, Jack had pointed to the island, and said it was the pit of hell, the most cursed place on earth. But he never spoke so after his visit. His eyes were opened.”13 Immediately London sat down to write “The Lepers of Molokai” and submitted it to Woman’s Home Companion, the journal that had struck such a blow to alleviate child labor. Although he wrote the piece as a favor to his Hawaiian hosts, the article was also true and just and served a purpose; when Lorrin Thurston read the text he called it “a value to Hawaii that cannot be estimated in gold and silver” and swept the Londons off to vacation with him on Maui. When the article was published in January 1908, it was greeted with equal approbation both in Hawaii and on the mainland. (Thurston’s enthusiasm turned to scorn two years later when he learned of London’s fictional story “Koolau the Leper,” based on the tale Bert Stolz had told him of his father. In it the grotesqueness of the deformities caused by the disease is somberly portrayed, and the pain that the removal policy created among its victims drives the plot. The Londons were long gone, but in his newspaper Thurston raged that London was “a sneak of the first water, a thoroughly untrustworthy man and an ungrateful and untruthful bounder.”14)

  On Maui, the Londons were housed at the 50,000-acre Haleakala Ranch, 2,000 feet up the flank of the volcano. A going business concern since 1888, the ranch had been hugely improved by Louis von Tempsky. The ranch’s manager since 1899, von Tempsky was a polo player who could engage London on his love of horses. He also had tales of family adventure to rival London’s own, being the son of a Silesian nobleman and soldier of fortune who had rented his services all over the world, including the Maori War in New Zealand. During a stay of several days, London and Charmian journeyed up to the lip of the crater, threaded dizzying paths on sure-footed mountain horses beneath roaring waterfalls on the windward side, and later got a close look at ranch operations. Von Tempsky had two daughters, Armine and Gwen, who were imps after London’s own heart, mischievous, pretty, teenage tomboys. On one excursion up the mountain he and the girls engaged in a lusty combat; in lieu of snowballs they flung over-ripe, egg-sized raspberries at each other. When they came down they looked like they had been machine-gunned. Sixteen-year-old Armine accompanied them riding, and upon finding Charmian an expert horsewoman turned over her spirited mount, Bedouin, whom no other female had ever ridden. London himself, she noted dryly, rode like a sailor. She ventured a step too far, however, when she confessed to the famous Jack London that she wanted to be a writer and asked to show him some of her effort. As he did even with his own daughters, he criticized her in the same tone as he would an adult and ran the risk of crushing her adolescent dream. But he was always precisely honest. Most of it, he said, was “clumsy, incoherent tripe.” She preferred to hear his comment that there was “a streak of fire” in it that, with a lot of hard work, could lead her to success.15

  After Maui they reconnected with their new friends before being spirited off to the Big Island, to Holualoa on the Kona Coast. Riding in the highlands, they could see in the distance the Snark being run to Hilo on her new trials by Captain Warren. On September 1 London lectured in Hilo, something that he seldom did on a trip that was meant to gather material for stories, through islands where people were far too content to want to hear about socialist justice. Nor ought he to have expected a sympathe
tic hearing from Hawaii’s American elite, an avaricious business clique who had overthrown the constitutional monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, on the grounds that she was “bad for business.” That he persisted in lecturing at all may evidence a conscience guilty for having abandoned American socialism to make his voyage.16

  Faced with the need to assemble the crew, London had already engaged Captain Warren and Nakata. He promoted Johnson to engineer and hired a Japanese cook, Tsunekichi Wada, and Stolz was replaced with another able youngster named Hermann de Visser. There was time yet, however, for one last purely Hawaiian adventure. Given a tour of a sugar plantation, they learned that the cane was grown in the highlands, and then sent down for processing by being tied in bundles and loaded into flumes to be floated to the mill. There was a local sport of riding bundles of cane at startling speeds down the flumes, across unbelievably spindly aqueducts hundreds of feet above canyons. Once on, there was no getting off; photographs of the Londons and their hosts shooting the flume on a bundle of cane show them all laughing hysterically.

  London left instructions to forward his mail to Tahiti, and newly crewed the Snark hoisted her sails on October 7, 1907, and made for the Marquesas Islands, 2,000 miles more or less southeast. It was a voyage that previous generations of mariners claimed could not be sailed because of contrary trade winds. Once at sea, however, it was a trip that had to be made, because all of the boat’s engines broke down. Judging the breezes carefully, London found the thin boundary of variables between the northeast trades and the doldrums and inched his way forward. It took nearly two months, but on the night of December 6 they anchored at Taiohae Bay. It fulfilled a childhood dream; after reading Melville’s Typee London had longed to meet that race, and when he did it provided another lesson in the awful plasticity of existence. Amid monumental stone foundations that proclaimed a mighty civilization, he found the few hundred remaining Typeans struggling against consumption, leprosy, and elephantiasis.