The Cruise of the Snark

by Jack London

  I went to Australia to go into hospital, where I spent five weeks. I spent five months miserably sick in hotels. The mysterious malady that afflicted my hands was too much for the Australian specialists. It was unknown in the literature of medicine. No case like it had ever been reported. It extended from my hands to my feet so that at times I was as helpless as a child. On occasion my hands were twice their natural size, with seven dead and dying skins peeling off at the same time. There were times when my toe-nails, in twenty-four hours, grew as thick as they were long. After filing them off, inside another twenty-four hours they were as thick as before.

  The Australian specialists agreed that the malady was non-parasitic, and that, therefore, it must be nervous. It did not mend, and it was impossible for me to continue the voyage. The only way I could have continued it would have been by being lashed in my bunk, for in my helpless condition, unable to clutch with my hands, I could not have moved about on a small rolling boat. Also, I said to myself that while there were many boats and many voyages, I had but one pair of hands and one set of toe-nails. Still further, I reasoned that in my own climate of California I had always maintained a stable nervous equilibrium. So back I came.

  Since my return I have completely recovered. And I have found out what was the matter with me. I encountered a book by Lieutenant Colonel Charles E. Woodruff of the United States Army entitled “Effects of Tropical Light on White Men.” Then I knew. Later, I met Colonel Woodruff, and learned that he had been similarly afflicted. Himself an Army surgeon, seventeen Army surgeons sat on his case in the Philippines, and, like the Australian specialists, confessed themselves beaten. In brief, I had a strong predisposition toward the tissue-destructiveness of tropical light. I was being torn to pieces by the ultra-violet rays just as many experimenters with the X-ray have been torn to pieces.

  In passing, I may mention that among the other afflictions that jointly compelled the abandonment of the voyage, was one that is variously called the healthy man’s disease, European Leprosy, and Biblical Leprosy. Unlike, True Leprosy, nothing is known of this mysterious malady. No doctor has ever claimed a cure for a case of it, though spontaneous cures are recorded. It comes, they know not how. It is, they know not what. It goes, they know not why. Without the use of drugs, merely by living in the wholesome California climate, my silvery skin vanished. The only hope that doctors held out to me was a spontaneous cure, and such a cure was mine.

  A last word: the test of the voyage. It is easy enough for me or any man to say that it was enjoyable. But there is a better witness, the one woman who made it from beginning to end. In hospital when I broke the news to Charmian that I must go back to California, the tears welled into her eyes. For two days she was wrecked and broken by the knowledge that the happy, happy voyage was abandoned.

  GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA,

  April 7, 1911.

  Notes on The Cruise of the Snark

  These notes attempt to gloss allusions that were probably familiar to London’s readers. In general, however, I have not attempted to complete London’s business as travel writer in explicating local history or tracking down individuals named in the text.

  CHAPTER I

  7Captain Slocum: Although merchant-seaman-turned-yachtsman Slocum (1844-1924) is nominally the primary influence on JL’s Snark adventure, he probably is most important in three specific ways: building his own yacht, sailing it on a voyage of circumnavigation, and writing to finance the trip. The last may be the most important, although JL surely admired—though he would not emulate—Slocum’s independence.

  7Snark: The name, of course, comes from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark” (1867).

  8With my own hands I did it: A refrain with JL, which he had put into the mouth of Humphrey Van Weyden in Chapter 39 of The Sea-Wolf (1904). This phrase would also inspire Irving Johnson (1905-1991), one of the most notable of JL’s disciples, to pursue a life at sea and several circumnavigations in a series of yachts named Yankee.

  9three-masted schooner: The Sophie [or Sophia] Sutherland. Cf. JL’s “That Dead Men Rise Up Never” for the account of another incident of this voyage.

  11Titans: The precursors to the Greek gods must have been especially attractive to social Darwinists, as evidenced by the name of the famous mail steamer Titanic (her sister ship was the Olympic) and Theodore Dreiser’s 1914 novel The Titan.

  13Nile . . . Danube: Irving Johnson was perhaps inspired by this passage when he extended his own voyaging to include Egypt and Europe—an otherwise odd choice for a sailor-author who had made a livelihood of ocean passages.

  15Cyrus R. Teed: Cyrus Read Teed was a New York doctor turned Florida visionary. He believed the earth was a hollow sphere, on the inner surface of which lived mankind. Such beliefs must have complicated navigation. Slocum met a similar mindset in the person of the South African president Johannes Kruger (1825-1904), a famous proponent of the Flat Earth theory. The relation of the encounter in Sailing Alone around the World may have triggered JL’s mention.

  CHAPTER II

  23April 23, 1907: It took three days after their departure for Charmian to begin her journal entries. And although JL makes it sound as if he were well, Martin wrote “we were all too seasick to care to eat.”

  CHAPTER III

  29steam engine: Rudyard Kipling’s poem “McAndrew’s Hymn” (1894), which praises the steam engine and disparages those who suggest steam has taken the romance out of the sea, probably suggested JL’s quip.

  29Thomas Cook & Son: Thomas Cook (1808-1892) initially devised railroad tours in Great Britain and eventually organized around-the-world tourist trips. He could, perhaps, be called the father of the travel agency.

  29man-stifled towns: The phrase is Kipling’s, from “The Song of the Dead”: “We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town;/We yearned beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down.” Many of JL’s contemporaries, including American outdoor writers Horace Kephart and Theodore Roosevelt, felt that a too exclusively urban life weakened a man in the struggle for existence.

  29Ulysses: Despite the difficulties placed in his way by the gods, Homer’s hero was actually fairly single minded in his attempt to return to Ithaca. But certainly after Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1833, published in 1842), the name had become the archetypal label of wanderlust.

  33Stanford University: Kipling has the young protagonist of Captains Courageous attend Stanford after his initiation at sea. Like the comment in the preceding paragraph, which provided language for the discussion of a sailor’s “unclean” life in Martin Eden, it is hard to tell in this book what has come from fiction and what will become fiction.

  35at the moment of writing this: The crew at this point consisted of JL, Charmian, Martin, Tochigi, Roscoe, Bert. Personnel on the Snark is always confusing, but the changing status of the crew is probably not serious departure from the norm. Slocum, of course, knew something about living conditions at sea when he chose to sail alone.

  35build a big ship: A dream to a certain extent fulfilled by Irving and Electa Johnson and certainly a vision of the development of sail training in the twentieth century.

  CHAPTER IV

  39still small thought: An allusion to the “still small voice” through which God appears to Elijah in 1 Kings 19:12.

  39Go you and do likewise: Another Biblical allusion, this time Jesus’ advice to his disciples after the parable of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10:37.

  42 Kanaka:

  ) was divided into two watches of two hours each.

  CHAPTER V

  45Golden Gate: Of course refers to the three-mile passage into San Francisco Bay, not the as-yet-unbuilt bridge (begun in 1933).

  49lotus-eaters: Homer has Odysseus visit the Lotus-Eaters in Book Nine of The Odyssey, although by JL’s time the phrase referred generically to anyone living a tropically idyllic, narcotic existence. JL’s reference may have more to do with Tennyson’s version in “The Lotus-Eaters”
(1833).

  CHAPTER VI

  52Tristram: Apparently a reference to Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “Tristram of Lyonesse” (1882):

  Up sprang the strength of the dark East, and took

  With its wide wings the waters as they shook,

  And hurled them huddling on aheap, and cast

  The full sea shoreward with a great glad blast

  Blown from the heart of morning: and with joy

  Full-souled and perfect passion, as a boy

  That leaps up light to wrestle with the sea

  For pure heart’s gladness and large ecstasy,

  Up sprang the might of Tristram . . .

  CHAPTER VII

  64yellowwriter: Yellow journalists; i.e., sensationalists

  70antiseptic surgery: Developed in the second half of the nineteenth century by Joseph Lister (1827-1912).

  71Father Damien: Belgian missionary Joseph Van Veuster (1840- 1889) went to minister to the leper colony on Molokai in 1873 and contracted leprosy himself four years before his death.

  CHAPTER VIII

  76Simm’s Hole: John Cleves Symmes (1780-1829) theorized that the earth was a hollow globe, and access to the interior was to be attained at the poles. It is possible that Symmes himself was the author of Symzonia (1820), a novel of discovery based on the theory. Edgar Allan Poe also seems to have toyed with the theory in Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), as may Verne (see note below).

  76Jules Verne: In Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (1864), the explorers enter the earth through the cone of Iceland’s Mount Sneffel and resurface in an eruption of Stromboli.

  77It was a scene: JL may have been recalling Henry David Thoreau’s sketch “Ktaadn” in The Maine Woods (1864):

  The mountain seemed a vast aggregation of loose rocks. . . . They were the raw materials of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry, which the vast chemistry of nature would anon work up, or work down, into the smiling and verdant plains and valleys of the earth. This was an undone extremity of the globe. . . . At length I entered within the skirts of the cloud which seem forever drifting over the summit. . . . I was deep within the hostile ranks of clouds. . . . It was vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends.

  77Joshua: In Joshua 10:11-14, the Biblical prophet and soldier ordered the sun and moon to stand still in order to defeat the Amorites.

  CHAPTER IX

  84sailing directions: Compiled by Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806- 1873) and others to offer advice concerning winds and currents to sailing masters.

  84the Line: i.e., the equator

  94guny: Usually albatross, but perhaps any large seabird to JL.

  94bent: Tied or lashed

  95granes: Barbed, multi-pointed spear

  CHAPTER X

  98Herman Melville’s “Typee”: Although Typee (1846) remained popular and in print during his youth, JL must have been one of Melville’s more appreciative readers.

  99able seaman: A sailor who not only can handle sails and steer, but also can work on rigging and contribute in a more sophisticated way to the upkeep of a vessel. JL’s supervision and management of the Snark would somewhat belie this description of himself.

  101Captain Cook: In three separate voyages of discovery, James Cook (1728-1779) filled in most of the empty spaces on the chart of the Pacific Ocean. During his last voyage he was killed (and possibly eaten) by Hawaiian natives.

  105Captain Porter: David Porter (1780-1843) published different editions of his Journal of a Cruise in 1815 and 1822. But JL may be getting Porter’s story secondhand from Melville.

  106Mendaña . . . Figueroa: Though citing these authorities as if they reflected independent reading, JL almost certainly cribbed these testimonials from Melville’s Typee. For a rarity, Melville himself cites his own source, Circumnavigation of the Globe, an 1840 volume in the Harpers’ Family Library series.

  106the fit: Ironic in light of the subsequent disease that would force JL to abandon his voyage.

  107Omar Khayyam: Probably known to JL through one of the translations of Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), although he may only be referring to the generally famous passage of contentment (in its 1879 version):

  A Book of Verses underneath the Bough

  A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou

  Beside me singing in the Wilderness

  Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

  CHAPTER XI

  110gamins: Street urchins; unsupervised children

  120Drop anchor: It sounds like Darling is expanding on Emerson or Whitman.

  CHAPTER XII

  122Polynesian Researches: William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Eight Years in the Society and Sandwich Islands (New York: Harper, 1833)

  CHAPTER XIV

  146Keeley-Motor: John W. Keely (1837-1898) claimed to have developed a motor that ran on the vibrations of “luminiferous ether.” Keely duped investors for a quarter of a century; only after his death was his machinery examined and proven to have been fraudulent. JL also mentions the Keely Motor in “The Other Animals” (1908), a response to the “Nature Faker” controversy.

  150thin, small voice: See note to p. 39.

  151Bowditch: Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838) published the first version of his New American Practical Navigator in 1802. It had gone through many editions by the time of JL’s reference, and its tables had been published separately.

  152George Francis Train broke Jules Verne’s record: An eccentric reformer and traveler, Train (1829-1904) actually made his eighty-day trip around the world in 1870, three years before Verne published Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873).

  153like a summer sky: From the opening of the second canto of “The Testimony of the Suns” by JL’s friend, Oakland poet George Sterling (1869-1926).

  CHAPTER XV

  156Mauser: Besides the weapons encountered in the South Seas (Snider rifles, p. 159; Lee-Enfield and Winchester, p. 160), Charmian relates that the Londons themselves brought a Colt automatic pistol, a Winchester .22 automatic rifle, a shotgun, a Mauser, a five-shot Smith & Wesson revolver, and 15,000 rounds of ammunition.

  CHAPTER XVI

  173Bêche de Mer: The Holothuria, or sea-cucumber, gathered for export to China as a delicacy.

  174Esperanto: An artificial language invented by Polish doctor Louis L. Zamenhof (1859-1917).

  CHAPTER XVII

  181With my own hands: Cf note to p. 8. Perhaps at this point a parody of his earlier expectations and of The Sea-Wolf.

  181long pull and a strong pull: A sailor command to haul on, for instance, halyards

  184licked Russia: In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905

  188Sailing Directions: See note to page 84.

  BACKWORD

  195Wolf Larsen: Title character from JL’s The Sea-Wolf (1904) who rules his crew with a violence born from his version of Spencerian Darwinism.

  196X-ray: The X ray was discovered and named by Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1923), who won the first Nobel Prize for physics. Mihran Kassabian (1870-1910) a well-known Philadelphia X-ray practitioner, died of radiation-induced cancer shortly before JL sent his Snark book to the press.

  APPENDICES

  MARTIN JOHNSON

  —from Through the South Seas with Jack London (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1913)

  ON THE TRAIL OF ADVENTURE

  Through all my twenty years of life I had been in pursuit of Adventure. But Adventure eluded me. Many and many a time, when I thought that at last the prize was mine, she turned, and by some trickery slipped from my grasp. The twenty years were passed, and still there she was—Adventure!—in the road ahead of me, and I, unwearied by our many skirmishes, still following. The lure was always golden. I could not give it up. Somewhere, sometime, I knew that the advantage would incline my way, and that I should close down my two hands firmly upon her, and hold he
r fast. Adventure would be mine!

  I thought, when I made it across the Atlantic on a cattle-boat, and trod the soil of several alien countries of the Old World, that I had won. But it was not so. It was but the golden reflection of Adventure that I had caught up with, and not the glorious thing itself. She was still there, ahead of me, and I still must needs pursue.

  In my native Independence, Kansas, I sat long hours in my father’s jewellry store, and dreamed as I worked. I ranged in vision over all the broad spaces of a world-chart. In this dream-realm, there were no impediments to my journeying. Through long ice-reaches, across frozen rivers, over snow-piled mountains, I forced my way to the Poles. I skimmed over boundless tracts of ocean. Giant continents beckoned me from coast to coast. Here was an island, rearing its grassy back out of the great Pacific. My fancy invaded it. Or here was a lofty mountain-chain, over whose snow-capped summits I roamed at pleasure, communing with the sky. Then there were the valley-deeps; dropping down the steep descents on my mount, I explored their sheltered wonders with unceasing delight. Nothing was inaccessible. I walked in lands where queer people, in costumes unfamiliar, lived out their lives in ways which puzzled me, yet fascinated; my way led often amid strange trees and grasses and shrubs—their names unguessable. To the farthest limits of East and West I sallied, and North and South, knew no barriers but the Poles. I breathed strange airs; I engaged in remarkable pursuits; by night, unfamiliar stars and constellations glittered in the sky. It is so easy, travelling—on the map. There are no rigid limitations. Probabilities do not bother. Latitude and longitude are things unnoticed.