THE CRUISE OF THE
SNARK
BY
JACK LONDON
AUTHOR OF “VALLEY OF THE MOON,” “JOHN BARLEYCORN”
“MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE,” ETC.
“Yes have heard the beat of the offshore wind,
And the thresh of the deep-sea rain;
You have heard the song—how long! how long!
Pull out on the trail again!”
MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.1
_Copyright in the United States of America_ by The Macmillan Company
To
CHARMIAN
THE MATE OF THE “SNARK”
WHO TOOK THE WHEEL, NIGHT OR DAY,
WHEN ENTERING
OR LEAVING PORT OR RUNNING A PASSAGE,
WHO TOOK THE WHEEL IN EVERY EMERGENCY, AND
WHO WEPT
AFTER TWO YEARS OF SAILING, WHEN THE
VOYAGE WAS DISCONTINUED
Contents
CHAPTER I FOREWORD
CHAPTER II THE INCONCEIVABLE AND MONSTROUS
CHAPTER III ADVENTURE
CHAPTER IV FINDING ONE’S WAY ABOUT
CHAPTER V THE FIRST LANDFALL
CHAPTER VI A ROYAL SPORT
CHAPTER VII THE LEPERS OF MOLOKAI
CHAPTER VIII THE HOUSE OF THE SUN
CHAPTER IX A PACIFIC TRAVERSE
CHAPTER X TYPEE
CHAPTER XI THE NATURE MAN
CHAPTER XII THE HIGH SEAT OF ABUNDANCE
CHAPTER XIII THE STONE-FISHING OF BORA BORA
CHAPTER XIV THE AMATEUR NAVIGATOR
CHAPTER XV CRUISING IN THE SOLOMONS
CHAPTER XVI BÊCHE DE MER ENGLISH
CHAPTER XVII THE AMATEUR M.D.
BACKWORD
FOOTNOTES
CHAPTER I
FOREWORD
It began in the swimming pool at Glen Ellen. Between swims it was our
wont to come out and lie in the sand and let our skins breathe the warm
air and soak in the sunshine. Roscoe was a yachtsman. I had followed
the sea a bit. It was inevitable that we should talk about boats. We
talked about small boats, and the seaworthiness of small boats. We
instanced Captain Slocum and his three years’ voyage around the world
in the _Spray_.
We asserted that we were not afraid to go around the world in a small
boat, say forty feet long. We asserted furthermore that we would like
to do it. We asserted finally that there was nothing in this world we’d
like better than a chance to do it.
“Let us do it,” we said . . . in fun.
Then I asked Charmian privily if she’d really care to do it, and she
said that it was too good to be true.
The next time we breathed our skins in the sand by the swimming pool I
said to Roscoe, “Let us do it.”
I was in earnest, and so was he, for he said:
“When shall we start?”
I had a house to build on the ranch, also an orchard, a vineyard, and
several hedges to plant, and a number of other things to do. We thought
we would start in four or five years. Then the lure of the adventure
began to grip us. Why not start at once? We’d never be younger, any of
us. Let the orchard, vineyard, and hedges be growing up while we were
away. When we came back, they would be ready for us, and we could live
in the barn while we built the house.
So the trip was decided upon, and the building of the _Snark_ began. We
named her the _Snark_ because we could not think of any other name—this
information is given for the benefit of those who otherwise might think
there is something occult in the name.
Our friends cannot understand why we make this voyage. They shudder,
and moan, and raise their hands. No amount of explanation can make them
comprehend that we are moving along the line of least resistance; that
it is easier for us to go down to the sea in a small ship than to
remain on dry land, just as it is easier for them to remain on dry land
than to go down to the sea in the small ship. This state of mind comes
of an undue prominence of the ego. They cannot get away from
themselves. They cannot come out of themselves long enough to see that
their line of least resistance is not necessarily everybody else’s line
of least resistance. They make of their own bundle of desires, likes,
and dislikes a yardstick wherewith to measure the desires, likes, and
dislikes of all creatures. This is unfair. I tell them so. But they
cannot get away from their own miserable egos long enough to hear me.
They think I am crazy. In return, I am sympathetic. It is a state of
mind familiar to me. We are all prone to think there is something wrong
with the mental processes of the man who disagrees with us.
The ultimate word is I LIKE. It lies beneath philosophy, and is twined
about the heart of life. When philosophy has maundered ponderously for
a month, telling the individual what he must do, the individual says,
in an instant, “I LIKE,” and does something else, and philosophy goes
glimmering. It is I LIKE that makes the drunkard drink and the martyr
wear a hair shirt; that makes one man a reveller and another man an
anchorite; that makes one man pursue fame, another gold, another love,
and another God. Philosophy is very often a man’s way of explaining his
own I LIKE.
But to return to the _Snark_, and why I, for one, want to journey in
her around the world. The things I like constitute my set of values.
The thing I like most of all is personal achievement—not achievement
for the world’s applause, but achievement for my own delight. It is the
old “I did it! I did it! With my own hands I did it!” But personal
achievement, with me, must be concrete. I’d rather win a water-fight in
the swimming pool, or remain astride a horse that is trying to get out
from under me, than write the great American novel. Each man to his
liking. Some other fellow would prefer writing the great American novel
to winning the water-fight or mastering the horse.
Possibly the proudest achievement of my life, my moment of highest
living, occurred when I was seventeen. I was in a three-masted schooner
off the coast of Japan. We were in a typhoon. All hands had been on
deck most of the night. I was called from my bunk at seven in the
morning to take the wheel. Not a stitch of canvas was set. We were
running before it 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 that it was impossible to see more than two waves at a
time. The schooner was almost unmanageable, rolling her rail under to
starboard and to port, veering and yawing anywhere between south-east
and 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.
I took the wheel. The sailing-master watched me for a space. He was
afraid of my youth, feared that I lacked the strength and the nerve.
But when he saw me successfully wrestle the schooner through several
bouts, he went below to breakfast. Fore and aft, all hands were below
at breakfast. Had she broached to, not one of them would ever have
reached the deck. For forty minutes I stood there alone at the wheel,
in my grasp the wildly careering schooner and the lives of twenty-two
men. 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! With my own hands I had done my trick at the wheel and guided
a hundred tons of wood and iron through a few million tons of wind and
waves.
My delight was in that I had done it—not in the fact that twenty-two
men knew I had done it. Within the year over half of them were dead and
gone, yet my pride in the thing performed was not diminished by half. I
am willing to confess, however, that I do like a small audience. But it
must be a very small audience, composed of those who love me and whom I
love. When I then accomplish personal achievement, I have a feeling
that I am justifying their love for me. But this is quite apart from
the delight of the achievement itself. This delight is peculiarly my
own and does not depend upon witnesses. When I have done some such
thing, I am exalted. I glow all over. I am aware of a pride in myself
that is mine, and mine alone. It is organic. Every fibre of me is
thrilling with it. It is very natural. It is a mere matter of
satisfaction at adjustment to environment. It is success.
Life that lives is life successful, and success is the breath of its
nostrils. The achievement of a difficult feat is successful adjustment
to a sternly exacting environment. The more difficult the feat, the
greater the satisfaction at its accomplishment. Thus it is with the man
who leaps forward from the springboard, out over the swimming pool, and
with a backward half-revolution of the body, enters the water head
first. Once he leaves the springboard his environment becomes
immediately savage, and savage the penalty it will exact should he fail
and strike the water flat. Of course, the man does not have to run the
risk of the penalty. He could remain on the bank in a sweet and placid
environment of summer air, sunshine, and stability. Only he is not made
that way. In that swift mid-air moment he lives as he could never live
on the bank.
As for myself, I’d rather be that man than the fellows who sit on the
bank and watch him. That is why I am building the _Snark_. I am so
made. I like, that is all. The trip around the world means big moments
of living. Bear with me a moment and look at it. Here am I, a little
animal called a man—a bit of vitalized matter, one hundred and
sixty-five pounds of meat and blood, nerve, sinew, bones, and
brain,—all of it soft and tender, susceptible to hurt, fallible, and
frail. I strike a light back-handed blow on the nose of an obstreperous
horse, and a bone in my hand is broken. I put my head under the water
for five minutes, and I am drowned. I fall twenty feet through the air,
and I am smashed. I am a creature of temperature. A few degrees one
way, and my fingers and ears and toes blacken and drop off. A few
degrees the other way, and my skin blisters and shrivels away from the
raw, quivering flesh. A few additional degrees either way, and the life
and the light in me go out. A drop of poison injected into my body from
a snake, and I cease to move—for ever I cease to move. A splinter of
lead from a rifle enters my head, and I am wrapped around in the
eternal blackness.
Fallible and frail, a bit of pulsating, jelly-like life—it is all I am.
About me are the great natural forces—colossal menaces, Titans of
destruction, unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me than
I have for the grain of sand I crush under my foot. They have no
concern at all for me. They do not know me. They are unconscious,
unmerciful, and unmoral. They are the cyclones and tornadoes, lightning
flashes and cloud-bursts, tide-rips and tidal waves, undertows and
waterspouts, great whirls and sucks and eddies, earthquakes and
volcanoes, surfs that thunder on rock-ribbed coasts and seas that leap
aboard the largest crafts that float, crushing humans to pulp or
licking them off into the sea and to death—and these insensate monsters
do not know that tiny sensitive creature, all nerves and weaknesses,
whom men call Jack London, and who himself thinks he is all right and
quite a superior being.
In the maze and chaos of the conflict of these vast and draughty
Titans, it is for me to thread my precarious way. The bit of life that
is I will exult over them. The bit of life that is I, in so far as it
succeeds in baffling them or in bitting them to its service, will
imagine that it is godlike. It is good to ride the tempest and feel
godlike. I dare to assert that for a finite speck of pulsating jelly to
feel godlike is a far more glorious feeling than for a god to feel
godlike.
Here is the sea, the wind, and the wave. Here are the seas, the winds,
and the waves of all the world. Here is ferocious environment. And here
is difficult adjustment, the achievement of which is delight to the
small quivering vanity that is I. I like. I am so made. It is my own
particular form of vanity, that is all.
There is also another side to the voyage of the _Snark_. Being alive, I
want to see, and all the world is a bigger thing to see than one small
town or valley. We have done little outlining of the voyage. Only one
thing is definite, and that is that our first port of call will be
Honolulu. Beyond a few general ideas, we have no thought of our next
port after Hawaii. We shall make up our minds as we get nearer, in a
general way we know that we shall wander through the South Seas, take
in Samoa, New Zealand, Tasmania, Australia, New Guinea, Borneo, and
Sumatra, and go on up through the Philippines to Japan. Then will come
Korea, China, India, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean. After that the
voyage becomes too vague to describe, though we know a number of things
we shall surely do, and we expect to spend from one to several months
in every country in Europe.
The _Snark_ is to be sailed. There will be a gasolene engine on board,
but it will be used only in case of emergency, such as in bad water
among reefs and shoals, where a sudden calm in a swift current leaves a
sailing-boat helpless. The rig of the _Snark_ is to be what is called
the “ketch.” The ketch rig is a compromise between the yawl and the
schooner. Of late years the yawl rig has proved the best for cruising.
The ketch retains the cruising virtues of the yawl, and in addition
manages to embrace a few of the sailing virtues of the schooner. The
foregoing must be taken with a pinch of salt. It is all theory in my
head. I’ve never sailed a ketch, nor even seen one. The theory commends
itself to me. Wait till I get out on the ocean, then I’ll be able to
tell more about the cruising and sailing qualities of the ketch.
As originally planned, the _Snark_ was to be forty feet long on the
water-line. But we discovered there was no space for a bath-room, and
for that reason we have increased her length to forty-five feet. Her
greatest beam is fifteen feet. She has no house and no hold. There is
six feet of headroom, and the deck is unbroken save for two
companionways and a hatch for’ard. The fact that there is no house to
break the strength of the deck will make us feel safer in case great
seas thunder their tons of water down on board. A large and roomy
cockpit, sunk beneath the deck, with high rail and self-bailing, will
make our rough-weather days and nights more comfortable.
There will be no crew. Or, rather, Charmian, Roscoe, and I are the
crew. We are going to do the thing with our own hands. With our own
hands we’re going to circumnavigate the globe. Sail her or sink her,
with our own hands we’ll do it. Of course there will be a cook and a
cabin-boy. Why should we stew over a stove, wash dishes, and set the
table? We could stay on land if we wanted to do those things. Besides,
we’ve got to stand watch and work the ship. And also, I’ve got to work
at my trade of writing in order to feed us and to get new sails and
tackle and keep the _Snark_ in efficient working order. And then
there’s the ranch; I’ve got to keep the vineyard, orchard, and hedges
growing.
When we increased the length of the _Snark_ in order to get space for a
bath-room, we found that all the space was not required by the
bath-room. Because of this, we increased the size of the engine.
Seventy horse-power our engine is, and since we expect it to drive us
along at a nine-knot clip, we do not know the name of a river with a
current swift enough to defy us.
We expect to do a lot of inland work. The smallness of the _Snark_
makes this possible. When we enter the land, out go the masts and on
goes the engine. There are the canals of China, and the Yang-tse River.
We shall spend months on them if we can get permission from the
government. That will be the one obstacle to our inland
voyaging—governmental permission. But if we can get that permission,
there is scarcely a limit to the inland voyaging we can do.
When we come to the Nile, why we can go up the Nile. We can go up the
Danube to Vienna, up the Thames to London, and we can go up the Seine
to Paris and moor opposite the Latin Quarter with a bow-line out to
Notre Dame and a stern-line fast to the Morgue. We can leave the
Mediterranean and go up the Rhône to Lyons, there enter the Saône,
cross from the Saône to the Maine through the Canal de Bourgogne, and
from the Marne enter the Seine and go out the Seine at Havre. When we
cross the Atlantic to the United States, we can go up the Hudson, pass
through the Erie Canal, cross the Great Lakes, leave Lake Michigan at
Chicago, gain the Mississippi by way of the Illinois River and the
connecting canal, and go down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
And then there are the great rivers of South America. We’ll know
something about geography when we get back to California.
People that build houses are often sore perplexed; but if they enjoy
the strain of it, I’ll advise them to build a boat like the _Snark_.
Just consider, for a moment, the strain of detail. Take the engine.
What is the best kind of engine—the two cycle? three cycle? four cycle?
My lips are mutilated with all kinds of strange jargon, my mind is
mutilated with still stranger ideas and is foot-sore and weary from
travelling in new and rocky realms of thought.—Ignition methods; shall
it be make-and-break or jump-spark? Shall dry cells or storage
batteries be used? A storage battery commends itself, but it requires a
dynamo. How powerful a dynamo? And when we have installed a dynamo and
a storage battery, it is simply ridiculous not to light the boat with
electricity. Then comes the discussion of how many lights and how many
candle-power. It is a splendid idea. But electric lights will demand a
more powerful storage battery, which, in turn, demands a more powerful
dynamo.
And now that we’ve gone in for it, why not have a searchlight? It would
be tremendously useful. But the searchlight needs so much electricity
that when it runs it will put all the other lights out of commission.
Again we travel the weary road in the quest after more power for
storage battery and dynamo. And then, when it is finally solved, some
one asks, “What if the engine breaks down?” And we collapse. There are
the sidelights, the binnacle light, and the anchor light. Our very
lives depend upon them. So we have to fit the boat throughout with oil
lamps as well.
But we are not done with that engine yet. The engine is powerful. We
are two small men and a small woman. It will break our hearts and our
backs to hoist anchor by hand. Let the engine do it. And then comes the
problem of how to convey power for’ard from the engine to the winch.
And by the time all this is settled, we redistribute the allotments of
space to the engine-room, galley, bath-room, state-rooms, and cabin,
and begin all over again. And when we have shifted the engine, I send
off a telegram of gibberish to its makers at New York, something like
this: _Toggle-joint abandoned change thrust-bearing accordingly
distance from forward side of flywheel to face of stern post sixteen
feet six inches_.
Just potter around in quest of the best steering gear, or try to decide
whether you will set up your rigging with old-fashioned lanyards or
with turnbuckles, if you want strain of detail. Shall the binnacle be
located in front of the wheel in the centre of the beam, or shall it be
located to one side in front of the wheel?—there’s room right there for
a library of sea-dog controversy. Then there’s the problem of gasolene,
fifteen hundred gallons of it—what are the safest ways to tank it and
pipe it? and which is the best fire-extinguisher for a gasolene fire?
Then there is the pretty problem of the life-boat and the stowage of
the same. And when that is finished, come the cook and cabin-boy to
confront one with nightmare possibilities. It is a small boat, and
we’ll be packed close together. The servant-girl problem of landsmen
pales to insignificance. We did select one cabin-boy, and by that much
were our troubles eased. And then the cabin-boy fell in love and
resigned.
And in the meanwhile how is a fellow to find time to study
navigation—when he is divided between these problems and the earning of
the money wherewith to settle the problems? Neither Roscoe nor I know
anything about navigation, and the summer is gone, and we are about to
start, and the problems are thicker than ever, and the treasury is
stuffed with emptiness. Well, anyway, it takes years to learn
seamanship, and both of us are seamen. If we don’t find the time, we’ll
lay in the books and instruments and teach ourselves navigation on the
ocean between San Francisco and Hawaii.
There is one unfortunate and perplexing phase of the voyage of the
_Snark_. Roscoe, who is to be my co-navigator, is a follower of one,
Cyrus R. Teed. Now Cyrus R. Teed has a different cosmology from the one
generally accepted, and Roscoe shares his views. Wherefore Roscoe
believes that the surface of the earth is concave and that we live on
the inside of a hollow sphere. Thus, though we shall sail on the one
boat, the _Snark_, Roscoe will journey around the world on the inside,
while I shall journey around on the outside. But of this, more anon. We
threaten to be of the one mind before the voyage is completed. I am
confident that I shall convert him into making the journey on the
outside, while he is equally confident that before we arrive back in
San Francisco I shall be on the inside of the earth. How he is going to
get me through the crust I don’t know, but Roscoe is ay a masterful
man.
P.S.—That engine! While we’ve got it, and the dynamo, and the storage
battery, why not have an ice-machine? Ice in the tropics! It is more
necessary than bread. Here goes for the ice-machine! Now I am plunged
into chemistry, and my lips hurt, and my mind hurts, and how am I ever
to find the time to study navigation?